BY LEONARD COHEN

FICTION

The Favourite Game (1963)

Beautiful Losers (1966)

POETRY

Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956)

The Spice-Box of Earth (1961)

Flowers for Hitler (1964)

Parasites of Heaven (1966)

Selected Poems, 1956–1968 (1968)

The Energy of Slaves (1972)

Death of a Lady’s Man (1978)

Book of Mercy (1984)

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993)

Book of Longing (2006)

ALBUMS

Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)

Songs From a Room (1969)

Songs of Love and Hate (1971)

Live Songs (1972)

New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1973)

The Best of Leonard Cohen (1975)

Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977)

Recent Songs (1979)

Various Positions (1984)

I’m Your Man (1988)

The Future (1992)

Cohen Live (1994)

More Best of (1997)

Field Commander Cohen (2001)

Ten New Songs (2001)

The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002)

Dear Heather (2004)

Live in London (2009)

CONTENTS

The Favourite Game

Beautiful Losers

THE FAVOURITE GAME

To my mother

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill,

So my body leaves no scar

On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawl encounter,

What remains to keep?

So you and I encounter

Then turn, then fall to sleep.

As many nights endure

Without a moon or star,

So will we endure

When one is gone and far.

1

Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.

A bullet broke into the flesh of his father’s arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.

On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.

His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.

2

Breavman’s young mother hunted wrinkles with two hands and a magnifying mirror.

When she found one she consulted a fortress of oils and creams arrayed on a glass tray and she sighed. Without faith the wrinkle was anointed.

“This isn’t my face, not my real face.”

“Where is your real face, Mother?”

“Look at me. Is this what I look like?”

“Where is it, where’s your real face?”

“I don’t know, in Russia, when I was a girl.”

He pulled the huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost.

The maid had to drag him to supper. A lady’s face floated over the silver and the food.

3

His father lived mostly in bed or a tent in the hospital. When he was up and walking he lied.

He took his cane without the silver band and led his son over Mount Royal. Here was the ancient crater. Two iron and stone cannon rested in the gentle grassy scoop which was once a pit of boiling lava. Breavman wanted to dwell on the violence.

“We’ll come back here when I’m better.”

One lie.

Breavman learned to pat the noses of horses tethered beside the Chalet, how to offer them sugar cubes from a flat palm.

“One day we’ll go riding.”

“But you can hardly breathe.”

His father collapsed that evening over his map of flags on which he plotted the war, fumbling for the capsules to break and inhale.

4

Here is a movie filled with the bodies of his family.

His father aims the camera at his uncles, tall and serious, boutonnières in their dark lapels, who walk too close and enter into blurdom.

Their wives look formal and sad. His mother steps back, urging aunts to get into the picture. At the back of the screen her smile and shoulders go limp. She thinks she is out of focus.

Breavman stops the film to study her and her face is eaten by a spreading orange-rimmed stain as the film melts.

His grandmother sits in the shadows of the stone balcony and aunts present her with babies. A silver tea-set glows richly in early Technicolor.

His grandfather reviews a line of children but is stopped in the midst of an approving nod and ravaged by a technical orange flame.

Breavman is mutilating the film in his efforts at history.

Breavman and his cousins fight small gentlemanly battles. The girls curtsy. All the children are invited to leap one at a time across the flagstone path.

A gardener is led shy and grateful into the sunlight to be preserved with his betters.

A battalion of wives is squeezed abreast, is decimated by the edge of the screen. His mother is one of the first to go.

Suddenly the picture is shoes and blurred grass as his father staggers under another attack.

“Help!”

Coils of celluloid are burning around his feet. He dances until he is saved by Nursie and the maid and punished by his mother.

The movie runs night and day. Be careful, blood, be careful.

5

The Breavmans founded and presided over most of the institutions which make the Montreal Jewish community one of the most powerful in the world today.

The joke around the city is: The Jews are the conscience of the world and the Breavmans are the conscience of the Jews. “And I am the conscience of the Breavmans,” adds Lawrence Breavman. “Actually we are the only Jews left; that is, super-Christians, first citizens with cut prongs.”

The feeling today, if anyone troubles himself to articulate it, is that the Breavmans are in a decline. “Be careful,” Lawrence Breavman warns his executive cousins, “or your children will speak with accents.”

Ten years ago Breavman compiled the Code of Breavman:

We are Victorian gentlemen of Hebraic persuasion.

We cannot be positive, but we are fairly certain that any other Jews with money got it on the black market.

We do not wish to join Christian clubs or weaken our blood through inter-marriage. We wish to be regarded as peers, united by class, education, power, differentiated by home rituals.

We refuse to pass the circumcision line.

We were civilized first and drink less, you lousy bunch of bloodthirsty drunks.

6

A rat is more alive than a turtle.

A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn’t count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin.

Krantz kept his in an empty radio. Breavman kept his in a deep honey tin. Krantz went away for the holidays and asked Breavman to take care of his. Breavman dropped it in with his.

Feeding rats is work. You have to go down to the basement. He forgot for a while. Soon he didn’t want to think about the honey tin and avoided the basement stairs.

He went down at last and there was an awful smell coming from the tin. He wished it were still full of honey. He looked inside and one rat had eaten most of the stomach of the other rat. He didn’t care which was his. The alive rat jumped at him and then he knew it was crazy.

He held the tin way in front because of the stink and filled it with water. The dead one floated on top with the hole between its ribs and hind legs showing. The alive one scratched the side.

He was called for lunch which began with marrow. His father tapped it out of a bone. It came from inside an animal.

When he went down again both were floating. He emptied the can in the driveway and covered it with snow. He vomited and covered that with snow.

Krantz was mad. He wanted to have a funeral at least, but they couldn’t find the bodies because of some heavy snowfalls.

When Spring began they attacked islands of dirty snow in the driveway. Nothing. Krantz said that seeing things were as they were Breavman owed him money for a white rat. He’d lent his and got nothing back, not even a skeleton. Breavman said that a hospital doesn’t pay anything when someone dies there. Krantz said that when you lend somebody something and that person loses it he has to pay for it. Breavman said that when it’s alive it isn’t a thing and besides he was doing him a favour when he took care of his. Krantz said that killing a rat was some favour and they fought it out on the wet gravel. Then they went downtown and bought new ones.

Breavman’s escaped and lived in a closet under the stairs. He saw its eyes with a flashlight. For a few mornings he put out Puffed Wheat in front of the door and it was nibbled, but soon he didn’t bother.

When summer came and the shutters and screens were being taken out one of the men discovered a little skeleton. It had patches of hair stuck to it. He dropped it in a garbage can.

Breavman fished it out when the man was gone and ran to Krantz’s. He said it was the skeleton of the first rat and Krantz could have a funeral if he wanted. Krantz said he didn’t need a stinky old skeleton, he had a live one. Breavman said that was fine but he had to admit they were quits. Krantz admitted.

Breavman buried it under the pansies, one of which his father took each morning for his buttonhole. Breavman took new interest in smelling them.

7

Come back, stern Bertha, come back and lure me up the torture tree. Remove me from the bedrooms of easy women. Extract the full due. The girl I had last night betrays the man who pays her rent.

That is how Breavman invoked the spirit of Bertha many mornings of his twenties.

Then his bones return to chicken-width. His nose retreats from impressive Semitic prominence to a childhood Gentile obscurity. Body hair blows away with the years like an ill-fated oasis. He is light enough for handbars and apple branches. The Japs and Germans are wrong.

“Play it now, Bertha?”

He has followed her to precarious parts of the tree.

“Higher!” she demands.

Even the apples are trembling. The sun catches her flute, turns the polished wood to a moment of chrome.

“Now?”

“First you have to say something about God.”

“God is a jerk.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. I won’t play for that.”

The sky is blue and the clouds are moving. There is rotting fruit on the ground some miles below.

“Fug God.”

“Something terribly, horribly dirty, scaredy-cat. The real word.”

“Fuck God!”

He waits for the fiery wind to lift him out of his perch and leave him dismembered on the grass.

“Fuck GOD!”

Breavman sights Krantz who is lying beside a coiled hose and unravelling a baseball.

“Hey, Krantz, listen to this. FUCK GOD!”

Breavman never heard his own voice so pure. The air is a microphone.

Bertha alters her fragile position to strike his cheek with her flute.

“Dirty tongue!”

“It was your idea.”

She strikes again for piety and tears off apples as she crashes past the limbs. Nothing of her voice as she falls.

Krantz and Breavman survey her for one second twisted into a position she could never achieve in gym. Her bland Saxon face is further anesthetized by uncracked steel-rimmed glasses. A sharp bone of the arm has escaped the skin.

After the ambulance Breavman whispered.

“Krantz, there’s something special about my voice.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“There is so. I can make things happen.”

“You’re a nut.”

“Want to hear my resolutions?”

“No.”

“I promise not to speak for a week. I promise to learn how to play it myself. In that way the number of people who know how to play remains the same.”

“What good’s that?”

“It’s obvious, Krantz.”

8

His father decided to rise from his chair.

“I’m speaking to you, Lawrence!”

“Your father’s speaking to you, Lawrence,” his mother interpreted.

Breavman attempted one last desperate pantomime.

“Listen to your father breathing.”

The elder Breavman calculated the expense of energy, accepted the risk, drove the back of his hand across his son’s face.

His lips were not too swollen to practise “Old Black Joe.”

They said she’d live. But he didn’t give it up. He’d be one extra.

9

The Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva. They started the war because of their nature.

Red Cross ships must be bombed, all parachutists machine-gunned. Their uniforms were stiff and decorated with skulls. They kept right on eating and laughed at appeals for mercy.

They did nothing warlike without a close-up of perverted glee.

Best of all, they tortured. To get secrets, to make soap, to set examples to towns of heroes. But mostly they tortured for fun, because of their nature.

Comic books, movies, radio programmes centred their entertainment around the fact of torture. Nothing fascinates a child like a tale of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Calvary to Dachau.

European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.

10

They had Lisa, they had the garage, they needed string, red string for the sake of blood.

They couldn’t enter the deep garage without red string.

Breavman remembered a coil.

The kitchen drawer is a step removed from the garbage can, which is a step removed from the outside garbage can, which is a step removed from the armadillo-hulked automatic garbage trucks, which are a step removed from the mysterious stinking garbage heaps by the edge of the St. Lawrence.

“A nice glass of chocolate milk?”

He wished his mother had some respect for importance.

Oh, it is a most perfect kitchen drawer, even when you are in a desperate hurry.

Besides the tangled string box there are candle-butts from years of Sabbath evenings kept in thrifty anticipation of hurricanes, brass keys to locks which have been changed (it is difficult to throw out anything so precise and crafted as a metal key), straight pens with ink-caked nibs which could be cleaned if anyone took the trouble (his mother instructed the maid), toothpicks they never used (especially for picking teeth), the broken pair of scissors (the new pair was kept in another drawer: ten years later it was still referred to as “the new pair”), exhausted rubber rings from home preserving bottles (pickled tomatoes, green, evil, tight-skinned), knobs, nuts, all the homey debris which avarice protects.

He fingered blindly in the string box because the drawer can never be opened all the way.

“A little cookie, a nice piece of honey cake, there’s a whole box of macaroons?”

Ah! bright red.

The welts dance all over Lisa’s imaginary body.

“Strawberries,” his mother called like a good-bye.

There is a way children enter garages, barns, attics, the same way they enter great halls and family chapels. Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached. They have the dark reverent air of immense kitchen drawers. They are friendly museums.

It was dark inside, smelled of oil and last year’s leaves which splintered as they moved. Bits of metal, the edges of shovels and cans glimmered damply.

“You’re the American,” said Krantz.

“No, I’m not,” said Lisa.

“You’re the American,” said Breavman. “Two against one.”

The ack-ack of Breavman and Krantz was very heavy. Lisa came on a daring manoeuvre across the darkness, arms outstretched.

“Eheheheheheheh,” stuttered her machine guns.

She’s hit.

She went into a spectacular nose dive, bailed out at the last moment. Swaying from one foot to another she floated down the sky, looking below, knowing her number was up.

She’s a perfect dancer, Breavman thought.

Lisa watched the Krauts coming.

“Achtung. Heil Hitler! You are a prisoner of the Third Reich.”

“I swallowed the plans.”

“Vee haf methods.”

She is led to lie face down on the cot.

“Just on the bum.”

Geez, they’re white, they’re solid white.

Her buttocks were whipped painlessly with red string.

“Turn over,” Breavman commanded.

“The rule was: only on the bum,” Lisa protested.

“That was last time,” argued Krantz the legalist.

She had to take off her top, too, and the cot disappeared from under her and she floated in the autumnal gloom of the garage, two feet above the stone floor.

Oh my, my, my.

Breavman didn’t take his turn whipping. There were white flowers growing out of all her pores.

“What’s the matter with him? I’m getting dressed.”

“The Third Reich will not tolerate insubordination,” said Krantz.

“Should we hold her?” said Breavman.

“She’ll make a lot of noise,” said Krantz.

Now outside of the game, she made them turn while she put on her dress. The sunlight she let in while leaving turned the garage into a garage. They sat in silence, the red whip lost.

“Let’s go, Breavman.”

“She’s perfect, isn’t she, Krantz?”

“What’s so perfect about her?”

“You saw her. She’s perfect.”

“So long, Breavman.”

Breavman followed him out of the yard.

“She’s perfect, Krantz, didn’t you see?”

Krantz plugged his ears with his forefingers. They passed Bertha’s Tree. Krantz began to run.

“She was really perfect, you have to admit it, Krantz.”

Krantz was faster.

11

One of Breavman’s early sins was to sneak a look at the gun. His father kept it in a night-table between his and his wife’s bed.

It was a huge .38 in a thick leather case. Name, rank and regiment engraved on the barrel. Lethal, angular, precise, it smouldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.

The sound of the machinery when Breavman pulled the hammer back was the marvellous sound of all murderous scientific achievement. Click! like the smacking of cogwheel lips.

The little blunt bullets took the scratch of a thumbnail.

If there were Germans coming down the street …

When his father married he swore to kill any man who ever made advances towards his wife. His mother told the story as a joke. Breavman believed the words. He had a vision of a corpse-heap of all the men who had ever smiled at her.

His father had an expensive heart doctor named Farley. He was around so much that they might have called him Uncle if they had been that sort of family. While his father was gasping under the oxygen-tent in the Royal Victoria, Doctor Farley kissed his mother in the hallway of their house. It was a gentle kiss to console an unhappy woman, between two people who had known each other through many crises.

Breavman wondered whether or not he’d better get the gun and finish him off.

Then who’d repair his father?

Not long ago Breavman watched his mother read the Star. She put down the paper and a Chekhovian smile of lost orchards softened her face. She had just read Farley’s obituary notice.

“Such a handsome man.” She seemed to be thinking of sad Joan Crawford movies. “He wanted me to marry him.”

“Before or after my father died?”

“Don’t be so foolish.”

His father was a tidy man, upturned his wife’s sewing basket when he thought it was getting messy, raged when his family’s slippers were not carefully lined under respective beds.

He was a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers.

He was so fat and his brothers were tall and thin and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, why should the fat one die, didn’t he have enough being fat and breathless, why not one of the handsome ones?

The gun proved he was once a warrior.

His brother’s pictures were in the papers in connection with the war effort. He gave his son his first book, The Romance of the King’s Army, a thick volume praising British regiments.

K-K-K-Katy, he sang when he could.

What he really loved was machinery. He would go miles to see a machine which cut a pipe this way instead of that. His family thought him a fool. He lent money to his friends and employees without question. He was given poetry books for his bar mitzvah. Breavman has the leather books now and startles at each uncut page.

“And read these, too, Lawrence.”

How To Tell Birds

How To Tell Trees

How To Tell Insects

How To Tell Stones

He looked at his father in the crisp, white bed, always neat, still smelling of Vitalis. There was something sour inside the softening body, some enemy, some limpness of the heart.

He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay.

Breavman roamed his house waiting for a shot to ring out. That would teach them, the great successes, the eloquent speakers, the synagogue builders, all the grand brothers that walked ahead into public glory. He waited for the blast of a .38 which would clean the house and bring a terrible change. The gun was right beside the bed. He waited for his father to execute his heart.

“Get me the medals out of the top drawer.”

Breavman brought them to the bed. The reds and golds of the ribbons ran into each other as in a watercolour. With some effort his father pinned them on Breavman’s sweater.

Breavman stood at attention ready to receive the farewell address.

“Don’t you like them? You’re always looking at them.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Stop stretching yourself like a damn fool. They’re yours.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Well, go out and play with them. Tell your mother I don’t want to see anyone and that includes my famous brothers.”

Breavman went downstairs and unlocked the closet which held his father’s fishing equipment. He spent hours in wonder, putting the great salmon rods together, winding and unwinding the copper wire, handling the dangerous flies and hooks.

How could his father have wielded these beautiful, heavy weapons, that swollen body on the crisp, white bed?

Where was the body in rubber boots that waded up rivers?

12

Many years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself:

“Shell, how many men know of those little scars in your earlobes? How many besides me, the original archaeologist of earlobes?”

“Not as many as you think.”

“I don’t mean the two or three or fifty that kissed them with their everyday lips. But in your fantasies, how many did something impossible with their mouths?”

“Lawrence, please, we’re lying here together. You’re trying to spoil the night somehow.”

“I’d say battalions.”

She did not reply and her silence removed her body from him a little distance.

“Tell me some more about Bertha, Krantz and Lisa.”

“Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.”

“Then let’s be quiet together.”

“I saw Lisa before that time in the garage. We must have been five or six.”

Breavman stared at Shell and described Lisa’s sunny room, dense with expensive toys. Electric hobby-horse which rocked itself. Life-sized walking dolls. Nothing that didn’t squeak or light up when squeezed.

They hid in the shade of under-the-bed, their hands full of secrets and new smells, on the look-out for servants, watching the sun slide along the linoleum with the fairy tales cut in it.

The gigantic shoes of a housemaid paddled close by.

“That’s lovely, Lawrence.”

“But it’s a lie. It happened, but it’s a lie. Bertha’s Tree is a lie although she really fell out of it. That night after I fooled with my father’s fishing rods I sneaked into my parents’ room. They were both sleeping in their separate beds. There was a moon. They were both facing the ceiling and lying in the same position. I knew that if I shouted only one of them would wake up.”

“Was that the night he died?”

“It doesn’t matter how anything happens.”

He began to kiss her shoulders and face and although he was hurting her with his nails and teeth she didn’t protest. “Your body will never be familiar.”

13

After breakfast six men entered the house and set the coffin down in the living-room. It was surprisingly huge, made of dark-grained wood, brass-handled. There was snow on their clothes.

The room was suddenly more formal than Breavman had ever known it. His mother squinted.

They placed it on a stand and began to open the cabinet-like cover.

“Close it, close it, we’re not in Russia!”

Breavman shut his eyes and waited for the click of the cover. But these men who make their living among the bereaved move noiselessly. They were gone when he opened his eyes.

“Why did you make them close it, Mother?”

“It’s enough as it is.”

The mirrors of the house were soaped, as if the glass had become victim to a strange indoor frost corresponding to the wide winter. His mother stayed alone in her room. Breavman sat stiffly on his bed and tried to fight his anger with a softer emotion.

The coffin was parallel to the chesterfield.

Whispering people began to congregate in the hall and on the balcony.

Breavman and his mother descended the stairs. The afternoon winter sun glimmered on his mother’s black stockings and gave to the mourners in the doorway a gold outline. He could see parked cars and dirty snow above their heads.

They stood closest, his uncles behind them. Friends and workers from the family factory thronged the hall, balcony, and path. His uncles, tall and solemn, touched his shoulders with their manicured hands.

But his mother was defeated. The coffin was open.

He was swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer-shawl. His moustache bloomed fierce and black against his white face. He appeared annoyed, as if he were about to awaken, climb out of the offensively ornate box, and resume his sleep on the more comfortable chesterfield.

The cemetery was like an Alpine town, the stones like little sleeping houses. The diggers looked irreverently informal in their working clothes. A mat of artificial grass was spread over the heaps of exhumed frozen mud. The coffin went down in a system of pulleys.

Bagels and hard-boiled eggs, shapes of eternity, were served back at the house. His uncles joked with friends of the family. Breavman hated them. He looked under his great-uncle’s beard and asked him why he didn’t wear a tie.

He was the oldest son of the oldest son.

The family left last. Funerals are so neat. All they left behind were small gold-rimmed plates flecked with crumbs and caraway seeds.

The yards of lace curtain held some of the light of the small winter moon.

“Did you look at him, Mother?”

“Of course.”

“He looked mad, didn’t he?”

“Poor boy.”

“And his moustache really black. As if it was done with an eyebrow pencil.”

“It’s late, Lawrence …”

“It’s late, all right. We’ll never see him again.”

“I forbid you to use that voice to your mother.”

“Why did you make them close it? Why did you? We could have seen him for a whole extra morning.”

“Go to bed!”

“Christ you, christ you, bastardess, witch!” he improvised in a scream.

All night he heard his mother in the kitchen, weeping and eating.

14

Here is a colour photograph, largest picture on a wall of ancestors.

His father wears an English suit and all the English reticence that can be woven into cloth. A wine tie with a tiny, hard knot sprouts like a gargoyle. In his lapel a Canadian Legion pin, duller than jewellery. The double-chinned face glows with Victorian reason and decency, though the hazel eyes are a little too soft and staring, the mouth too full, Semitic, hurt.

The fierce moustache presides over the sensitive lips like a suspicious trustee.

The blood, which he died spitting, is invisible, but forms on the chin as Breavman studies the portrait.

He is one of the princes of Breavman’s private religion, double-natured and arbitrary. He is the persecuted brother, the near poet, the innocent of the machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.

Also he is heaving Authority, armoured with Divine Right, doing merciless violence to all that is weak, taboo, un-Breavmanlike.

As Breavman does him homage he wonders whether his father is just listening or whether he is stamping the seal on decrees.

Now he is settling more passively into his gold frame and his expression has become as distant as those in the older photographs. His clothes begin to appear dated and costume-like. He can rest. Breavman has inherited all his concerns.

The day after the funeral Breavman split open one of his father’s formal bow ties and sewed in a message. He buried it in the garden, under the snow beside the fence where in summer the neighbour’s lilies-of-the-valley infiltrate.

15

Lisa had straight black Cleopatra hair that bounced in sheaves off her shoulders when she ran or jumped. Her legs were long and well-formed, made beautiful by natural exercise. Her eyes were big, heavy-lidded, dreamy.

Breavman thought that perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.

They grew tired of games in the field beside Bertha’s Tree. They did not want to squeeze under someone’s porch for Sardines. They did not want to limp through Hospital Tag. They did not want to draw the magic circle and sign it with a dot. Ildish-chay. Ets-lay o-gay, they whispered. They didn’t care who was It.

Better games of flesh, love, curiosity. They walked away from Run-Sheep-Run over to the park and sat on a bench near the pond where nurses gossip and children aim their toy boats.

He wanted to know everything about her. Was she allowed to listen to The Shadow (“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows, heheheheheheheh”)? Wasn’t Alan Young terrific? Especially the character with the flighty voice, “I’m hyah, I’m hyah, come gather rosebuds from my hair.” Wasn’t the only decent part of the Charlie McCarthy programme when Mortimer Snerd came on? Could she get Gangbusters? Did she want to hear him imitate the Green Hornet’s car, driven by his faithful Filipino valet, Cato, or the Whistler? Wasn’t that a beautiful tune?

Had she ever been called a Dirty Jew?

They fell silent and the nurses and their blond babies reasserted their control of the universe.

And what was it like to have no father?

It made you more grown-up. You carved the chicken, you sat where he sat.

Lisa listened, and Breavman, for the first time, felt himself dignified, or rather, dramatized. His father’s death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell.

The nurses gathered their children and their boats and went away. The surface of the pond became smooth. The hands of the clock on the Chalet wound towards supper-time, but they kept on talking.

They squeezed hands, kissed once when the light was low enough, coming golden through the prickly bushes. Then they walked slowly home, not holding hands, but bumping against each other.

Breavman sat at the table trying to understand why he wasn’t hungry. His mother extolled the lamb chops.

16

Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.

Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.

They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.

Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelled-out words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.

Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.

Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.

“Pay me now?”

“Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.”

17

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees, return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers. Breavman forgot everything he learned from Lisa’s small body.

Oh, how their lives had emptied from the time they crawled out from under the bed and stood up on their hind legs!

Now they longed for knowledge but undressing was a sin. Therefore they were an easy touch for the postcards, pornographic magazines, home-made erotica peddled in school cloakrooms. They became connoisseurs of sculpture and painting. They knew all the books in the library which had the best, most revealing reproductions.

What did bodies look like?

Lisa’s mother presented her with a careful book and they searched it in vain for straight information. There were phrases like “the temple of the human body,” which may be true, but where was it, with its hair and creases? They wanted clear pictures, not a blank page with a dot in the centre and a breathless caption: “Just think! the male sperm is 1,000 times smaller than this.”

So they wore light clothing. He had a pair of green shorts which she loved for their thinness. She had a yellow dress which he preferred. This situation gave birth to Lisa’s great lyric exclamation:

“You wear your green silk pants tomorrow; I’ll wear my yellow dress, so it’ll be better.”

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

He was about to send for a volume advertised in a confession magazine which promised to arrive in a plain, brown wrapper, when, in one of the periodic searches through the maid’s drawers, he found the viewer.

It was made in France and contained a two-foot strip of film. You held it to the light and turned the little round knob and you saw everything.

Let us praise this film, which has disappeared with the maid into the Canadian wilderness.

It was titled in English, with beguiling simplicity, “Thirty Ways to Screw.” The scenes were nothing like the pornographic movies Breavman later witnessed and attacked, of naked, jumpy men and women acting out the contrived, sordid plots.

The actors were handsome humans, happy in their film career. They were not the scrawny, guilty, desperately gay cast-offs who perform for gentlemen’s smokers. There were no lecherous smiles for the camera, no winking and lip-licking, no abuse of the female organ with cigarettes and beer bottles, no ingenious unnatural arrangement of bodies.

Each frame glowed with tenderness and passionate delight.

This tiny strip of celluloid shown widely in Canadian theatres might revitalize the tedious marriages which are reported to abound in our country.

Where are you, working girl with supreme device? The National Film Board hath need of you. Are you growing old in Winnipeg?

The film ended with a demonstration of the grand, democratic, universal practice of physical love. There were Indian couples represented, Chinese, Negro, Arabian, all without their national costumes on.

Come back, maid, strike a blow for World Federalism.

They pointed the viewer to the window and solemnly traded it back and forth.

They knew it would be like this.

The window gave over the slope of Murray Park, across the commercial city, down to the Saint Lawrence, American mountains in the distance. When it wasn’t his turn Breavman took in the prospect. Why was anybody working?

They were two children hugging in a window, breathless with wisdom.

They could not rush to it then and there. They weren’t safe from intrusion. Not only that, children have a highly developed sense of ritual and formality. This was important. They had to decide whether they were in love. Because if there was one thing the pictures showed, you had to be in love. They thought they were but they would give themselves a week just to make sure.

They hugged again in what they thought would be among their last fully clothed embraces.

How can Breavman have regrets? It was Nature herself who intervened.

Three days before Thursday, maid’s day off, they met in their special place, the bench beside the pond in the park. Lisa was shy but determined to be straight and honest, as was her nature.

“I can’t do it with you.”

“Aren’t your parents going away?”

“It’s not that. Last night I got the Curse.”

She touched his hand with pride.

“Oh.”

“Know what I mean?”

“Sure.”

He hadn’t the remotest idea.

“But it would still be O.K., wouldn’t it?”

“But now I can have babies. Mummy told me about everything last night. She had it all ready for me, too, napkins, a belt of my own, everything.”

“No guff?”

What was she talking about? The Curse sounded like a celestial intrusion on his pleasure.

“She told me about all the stuff, just like the camera.”

“Did you tell her about the camera?”

Nothing, the world, nobody could be trusted.

“She promised not to tell anyone.”

“It was a secret.”

“Don’t be sad. We had a long talk. I told her about us, too. You see, I’ve got to act like a lady now. Girls have to act older than boys.”

“Who’s sad?”

She leaned back in the bench and took his hand.

“But aren’t you happy for me?” she laughed, “that I got the Curse? I have it right now!”

18

Soon she was deep in the rites of young womanhood. She came back from camp half a head taller than Breavman, with breasts that disturbed even bulky sweaters.

“Hiya, Lisa.”

“Hello, Lawrence.”

She was meeting her mother downtown, she was flying to New York for clothes. She was dressed with that kind of austerity which can make any thirteen-year-old a poignant beauty. None of the uglifying extravagance to which Westmount Jews and Gentiles are currently devoted.

Good-bye.

He watched her grow away from him, not with sadness but with wonder. At fifteen she was a grand lady who wore traces of lipstick and was allowed an occasional cigarette.

He sat in their old window and saw the older boys call for her in their fathers’ cars. He marvelled that he had ever kissed the mouth that now mastered cigarettes. Seeing her ushered into these long cars by young men with white scarves, seeing her sitting like a duchess in a carriage while they closed the door and walked briskly in front of the machine and climbed importantly into the driver’s seat, he had to convince himself that he had ever had a part in that beauty and grace.

Hey, you forgot one of your little fragrances on my thumb.

19

Fur gloves in the sun-room.

Certain years the sun-room, which was no more than an enclosed balcony attached to the back of the house, was used to store some of the winter clothes.

Breavman, Krantz and Philip came into this room for no particular reason. They looked out of the windows at the park and the tennis players.

There was the regular sound of balls hit back and forth and the hysterical sound of a house fly battering a window pane.

Breavman’s father was dead, Krantz’s was away most of the time, but Philip’s was strict. He did not let Philip wear his hair with a big pompadour in front. He had to slick it down to his scalp with some nineteenth-century hair tonic.

That historic afternoon Philip looked around and what did he spy but a pair of fur gloves.

He pulled on one of them, sat himself down on a pile of blankets.

Breavman and Krantz, who were perceptive children, understood that the fur glove was not an integral part of the practice.

They all agreed it smelt like Javel water. Philip washed it down the sink.

“Catholics think it’s a sin,” he instructed.

20

Breavman and Shell were beside the lake. The evening mist was piling up along the opposite shore like dunes of sand. They lay in a double sleeping bag beside the fire, which was built of driftwood they had gathered that afternoon. He wanted to tell her everything.

“I still do.”

“Me too,” she said.

“I read that Rousseau did right to the end of his life. I guess a certain kind of creative person is like that. He works all day to discipline his imagination so it’s there he’s most at home. No real corporeal woman can give him the pleasure of his own creations. Shell, don’t let me scare you with what I’m saying.”

“But doesn’t it separate us completely?”

They held hands tightly and watched the stars in the dark part of the sky; where the moon was bright they were obliterated. She told him she loved him.

A loon went insane in the middle of the lake.

21

After that distinguished summer of yellow dresses and green pants Lisa and Breavman rarely met. But once, during the following winter, they wrestled in the snow.

That episode has a circumference for Breavman, a kind of black-edged picture frame separating it from what he remembers of her.

It was after Hebrew school. They found themselves starting home together. They cut up through the park. There was almost a full moon and it silvered the snow.

The light seemed to come from under the snow. When they broke the crust with their boots the powdered snow beneath was brighter.

They tried to walk on the crust without breaking it. Both carried their Hebrew books, particular sections of the Torah which they were studying at the time.

Competition in crust-walking led to other trials: snowballing, tests of balance on the icy parts, pushing, and finally personal combat which began jovially but ended in serious struggle.

This was on the slope of the hill, near a line of poplar trees. Breavman recalls it as like a Brueghel: two small bulky-coated figures entwined, their limited battle viewed through icy branches.

At a certain point Breavman discovered he wasn’t going to win. He strained to topple her, he could not. He felt himself slipping. They were still holding their Hebrew books. He dropped his in a last-ditch effort at an offensive but it failed and he went down.

The snow was not cold. Lisa stood above him in strange female triumph. He ate some snow.

“And you have to kiss the Sidur.”

It was mandatory to kiss a holy book which had fallen to the ground.

“Like hell I do!”

He crawled to his books, gathered them contemptuously and stood up.

What Breavman remembers most clearly of that struggle is the cold moonlight and the crisp trees, and the humiliation of a defeat which was not only bitter but unnatural.

22

He read everything he could on hypnosis. He hid the books behind a curtain and studied by flashlight.

Here was the real world.

There was a long section, “How to Hypnotize Animals.” Terri -fying illustration of glassy-eyed roosters.

Breavman pictured himself a militant Saint Francis, commanding the world by means of his loyal herds and flocks. Apes as obedient satraps. Clouds of pigeons ready to commit suicide against enemy planes. Hyena bodyguards. Massed triumphal choruses of nightingales.

Tovarich, named before the Stalin-Hitler pact, slept on the porch in the afternoon sun. Breavman squatted and swung the pendulum he had made out of a drilled silver dollar. The dog opened its eyes, sniffed to assure itself it was not food, returned to sleep.

But was it natural sleep?

The neighbours had a cartoon of a Dachshund named Cognac. Breavman looked for a slave in the gold eyes.

It worked!

Or was it just the lazy, humid afternoon?

He had to climb a fence to get at Lisa’s Fox Terrier which he fixed in a sitting position inches from a bowl of Pard.

You will be highly favoured, dog of Lisa.

After his fifth success the exhilaration of his dark power carried him along the boulevard, running blindly and laughing.

A whole street of dogs frozen! The city lay before him. He would have an agent in every house. All he had to do was whistle.

Maybe Krantz deserved a province.

Whistle, that’s all. But there was no point in threatening a vision with such a crude test. He shoved his hands down his pockets and floated home on the secret of his revolution.

23

In those dark ages, early adolescence, he was almost a head shorter than most of his friends.

But it was his friends who were humiliated when he had to stand on a stool to see over the pulpit when he sang his bar mitzvah. It didn’t matter to him how he faced the congregation: his great-grandfather had built the synagogue.

Short boys were supposed to take out shorter girls. That was the rule. He knew the tall uneasy girls he wanted could easily be calmed by stories and talk.

His friends insisted that his size was a terrible affliction and they convinced him. They convinced him with inches of flesh and bone.

He didn’t know their mystery of how bodies were increased, how air and food worked for them. How did they cajole the universe? Why was the sky holding out on him?

He began to think of himself as The Tiny Conspirator, The Cunning Dwarf.

He worked frantically on a pair of shoes. He had ripped off the heels of an old pair and tried to hammer them on to his own. The rubber didn’t hold the nails very well. He’d have to be careful.

This was in the deep basement of his house, traditional workshop of bomb-throwers and confusers of society.

There he stood, an inch taller, feeling a mixture of shame and craftiness. Nothing like brains, eh? He waltzed round the concrete floor and fell on his face.

He had completely forgotten the desperation of a few minutes before. It came back to him as he sat painfully on the floor, looking up at a naked bulb. The detached heel which had tripped him crouched like a rodent a couple of feet away, nails protruding like sharpened fangs.

The party was fifteen minutes away. And Muffin went around with an older, therefore taller, group.

Rumour had it that Muffin stuffed her bra with Kleenex. He decided to apply the technique. Carefully he laid a Kleenex platform into each shoe. It raised his heels almost to the rims of the leather. He let his trousers ride low.

A few spins around the concrete and he satisfied himself that he could manoeuvre. Panic eased. Science triumphed again.

Fluorescent lights hid in a false moulding lit the ceiling. There was the usual mirrored bar with miniature bottles and glass knick-knacks. An upholstered seat lined one wall, on which was painted a pastel mural of drinkers of different nationalities. The Breavmans did not approve of finished basements.

He danced well for one half hour and then his feet began to ache. The Kleenex had become misshapen under his arches. After two more jitterbug records he could hardly walk. He went into the bathroom and tried to straighten the Kleenex but it was compressed into a hard ball. He thought of removing it altogether but he imagined the surprised and horrified look of the company at his shrunken stature.

He slipped his foot half-way into the shoe, placed the ball between his heel and the inside sole, stepped in hard, and tied the lace. The pain spiked up through his ankles.

The Bunny Hop nearly put him away. In the middle of that line, squashed between the girl whose waist he was holding and the girl who was holding his waist, the music loud and repetitive, everyone chanting one, two, one-two-three, his feet getting out of control because of the pain, he thought: this must be what Hell is like, an eternal Bunny Hop with sore feet, which you can never drop out of.

She with her false tits, me with my false feet, oh you evil Kleenex Company!

One of the fluorescent lights was flickering. There was disease in the walls. Maybe everyone there, every single person in the bobbing line was wearing a Kleenex prop. Maybe some had Kleenex noses and Kleenex ears and Kleenex hands. Depression seized him.

Now it was his favourite song. He wanted to dance close to Muffin, close his eyes against her hair which had just been washed.

… the girl I call my own

will wear cotton and laces and smell of cologne.

But he could barely stand up. He had to keep shifting his weight from foot to foot to dole out the pain in equal shares. Often these shifts did not correspond to the rhythm of the music and imparted to his already imperfect dancing an extra jerky quality. As his hobbling became more pronounced he was obliged to hold Muffin tighter and tighter to keep his balance.

“Not here,” she whispered in his ear. “My parents won’t be home till late.”

Not even this pleasant invitation could assuage his discomfort. He clung to her and manoeuvred into a crowded part of the floor where he could justifiably limit his movements.

“Oh, Larry!”

“Fast worker!”

Even by the sophisticated standards of this older group he was dancing adventurously close. He accepted the cavalier role his pain cast, and bit her ear, having heard that ears were bitten.

“Let’s get rid of the lights,” he snarled to all men of daring.

They started from the party, and the walk was a forced march of Bataan proportions. By walking very close he made his lameness into a display of affection. On the hills the Kleenex slipped back under his arches.

A fog-horn from the city’s river reached Westmount, and the sound shivered him.

“I’ve got to tell you something, Muffin. Then you’ve got to tell me something.”

Muffin didn’t want to sit on the grass because of her dress, but maybe he was going to ask her to go steady. She’d refuse, but what a beautiful party that would make it. The confession he was about to offer shortened his breath, and he confused his fear with love.

He tugged off his shoes, scooped out the balls of Kleenex and laid them like a secret in her lap.

Muffin’s nightmare had just begun.

“Now you take yours out.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded in a voice which surprised her because it sounded so much like her mother’s.

Breavman pointed to her heart.

“Don’t be ashamed. You take yours out.”

He reached for her top button and received his balls of Kleenex in the face.

“Get away!”

Breavman decided to let her run. Her house wasn’t that far away. He wiggled his toes and rubbed his soles. He wasn’t condemned to a Bunny Hop after all, not with those people. He pitched the Kleenex into the gutter and trotted home, shoes in hand.

He detoured to the park and raced over the damp ground until the view stopped him. He set down his shoes like neat lieutenants beside his feet.

He looked in awe at the expanse of night-green foliage, the austere lights of the city, the dull gleam of the St. Lawrence.

A city was a great achievement, bridges were fine things to build. But the street, harbours, spikes of stone were ultimately lost in the wider cradle of mountain and sky.

It ran a chill through his spine to be involved in the mysterious mechanism of city and black hills.

Father, I’m ignorant.

He would master the rules and techniques of the city, why the one-way streets were chosen, how the stock-market worked, what notaries did.

It wasn’t a hellish Bunny Hop if you knew the true names of things. He would study leaves and bark, and visit stone quarries as his father had done.

Good-bye, world of Kleenex.

He gathered his shoes, walked into the bushes, climbed the fence which separated his house from the park.

Black lines, like an ink drawing of a storm, plunged out of the sky to help him over, he could have sworn. The house he entered was important as a museum.

24

Krantz had a reputation for being wild, having been spotted from time to time smoking two cigarettes at once on obscure Westmount streets.

He was small and wiry, his face triangular, with almost Oriental eyes. A portrait in the dining-room of his house, painted, as his mother is fond of informing people, by the artist who “did the Governor General’s,” shows an elfish boy with pointed ears, black, curly hair, butterfly lips as in a Rossetti, and an expression of good-natured superiority, an aloofness (even at that age) which is so calm that it disturbs no one.

They sat one night on someone’s lawn, two Talmudists, delighting in their dialectic, which was a disguise for love. It was furious talk, the talk of a boy discovering how good it was not to be alone.

“Krantz, I know you hate this kind of question, but if you’d care to make an off-hand statement, it would be appreciated. To your knowledge, that is, the extent of your information, is there anyone on this planet who approaches the dullness of the Canadian Prime Minister?”

“Rabbi Swort?”

“Krantz, do you honestly submit that Rabbi Swort, who, as the world knows, is not exactly the Messiah or even a minor messenger of the Redemption, do you seriously suggest that Rabbi Swort challenges the utter and complete boringness of our national leader?”

“I do, Breavman, I do.”

“I suppose you have your reasons, Krantz.”

“I do, Breavman, you know I do.”

There were once giants on the earth.

They swore not to be fooled by long cars, screen love, the Red Menace, or The New Yorker magazine.

Giants in unmarked graves.

All right, it’s fine that people don’t starve, that epidemics are controlled, that the classics are available as comics, but what about the corny old verities, truth and fun?

The fashion model was not their idea of grace, the Bomb not their idea of power, Sabbath Service not their idea of God.

“Krantz, is it true that we are Jewish?”

“So it has been rumoured, Breavman.”

“Do you feel Jewish, Krantz?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Do your teeth feel Jewish?”

“Especially my teeth, to say nothing of my left ball.”

“We really shouldn’t joke, what we were just saying reminds me of pictures from the camps.”

“True.”

Weren’t they supposed to be a holy people consecrated to purity, service, spiritual honesty? Weren’t they a nation set apart?

Why had the idea of a jealously guarded sanctity degenerated into a sly contempt for the goy, empty of self-criticism?

Parents were traitors.

They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the Donor’s Book.

Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfilment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.

If only they could find the right girls. Then they could fight their way out of the swamp. Not Kleenex girls.

Breavman wonders how many miles through Montreal streets he and Krantz have driven and walked, on the look-out for the two girls who had been chosen cosmically to be their companion-mistresses. Hot summer evenings casing the mobs in Lafontaine Park, looking searchingly into young female eyes, they knew that at any moment two beauties would detach themselves from the crowd and take their arms. Krantz at the wheel of his father’s Buick, steering between hedges of snow piled on either side of the narrow back streets in the east end, at a crawling speed because there was a blizzard going on, they knew that two shivering figures would emerge from a doorway, tap timidly on the frosted windows of the car, and it would be they.

If they had the right seats on the loop-the-loop the girls’ hair would blow against their faces. If they went up north for a ski weekend and stayed at the right hotel they would hear the beautiful sound of girls undressing in the room next door. And if they walked twelve miles along St. Catherine Street, there was no telling whom they’d meet.

“I can get the Lincoln tonight, Breavman.”

“Great. It’ll be packed downtown.”

“Great. We’ll drive around.”

So they would drive, like American tourists on the make, almost lost in the front seat of one of the huge Krantzstone automobiles, until everyone had gone home and the streets were empty. Still they continued their prowl because the girls they wanted might prefer deserted streets. Then when it was clear that they weren’t coming that particular night they’d head out to the lake shore, and circle the black water of Lac St. Louis.

“What do you think it’s like to drown, Krantz?”

“You’re supposed to black out after you take in a fairly small amount of water.”

“How much, Krantz?”

“You’re supposed to be able to drown in a bathtub.”

“In a glass of water, Krantz.”

“In a damp rag, Breavman.”

“In a moist Kleenex. Hey, Krantz, that would be a great way to kill a guy, with water. You get the guy and use an eyedropper on him, a squirt at a time. They find him drowned in his study. Big mystery.”

“Wouldn’t work, Breavman. How would you hold him still? There’d be bruise marks or rope marks on him.”

“But if it could work. They find the guy slumped over his desk and nobody knows how he died. Coroner’s inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn’t been to the sea-shore in ten years.”

“Germans used a lot of water in their tortures. They’d shove a hose up a guy’s arse-hole to make him talk.”

“Great, Krantz. Japs had something like that. They’d make a guy eat a lot of uncooked rice then he’d have to drink a gallon of water. The rice would swell and —”

“Yeah, I heard that one.”

“But, Krantz, want to hear the worst one? And it was the Americans who did it. Listen, they catch a Jap on the battlefield and make him swallow five or six rifle cartridges. Then they’d make him run and jump. The cartridges’d rip his stomach apart. He’d die of internal haemorrhage. American soldiers.”

“How about tossing babies in the air for bayonet practice?”

“Who did that?”

“Both sides.”

“That’s nothing, Krantz, they did that in the Bible. ‘Happy will they be who dash their little ones against the rock.’”

Ten thousand conversations. Breavman remembers about eight thousand of them. Peculiarities, horrors, wonders. They are still having them. As they grow older, the horrors become mental, the peculiarities sexual, the wonders religious.

And while they talked the car shot over the broken country roads and the All Night Record Man spun the disks of longing, and one by one the couples drove away from the Edgewater, the Maple Leaf, the El Paso. The dangerous currents of Lac St. Louis curled over the weekend’s toll of drowned amateur sailors from the yacht clubs, the Montreal pioneer commuters breathed the cool fresh air they had bought into, and the prospect of waiting parents loomed and made the minutes of talk sweeter. Paradoxes, bafflements, problems dissolved in the fascinating dialectic.

Whoosh, there was nothing that couldn’t be done.

25

Suspended from the centre of the ceiling a revolving mirrored sphere cast a rage of pockmarks from wall to wall of the huge Palais D’Or on lower Stanley Street.

Each wall looked like an enormous decayed Swiss cheese on the march.

On the raised platform a band of shiny-haired musicians sat behind heavy red and white music stands and blew the standard arrangements.

There’s but one place for me

Near you.

It’s like heaven to be

Near you

echoed coldly over the sparse dancers. Breavman and Krantz had got there too early. There was not much hope for magic.

“Wrong dance hall, Breavman.”

By ten o’clock the floor was jammed with sharply dressed couples, and, seen from the upstairs balcony, their swaying and jolting seemed to be nourished directly by the pulsing music, and they muffled it like shock absorbers. The bass and piano and steady brush-drum passed almost silently into their bodies where it was preserved as motion.

Only the tilt-backed trumpeter, arching away from the mike and pointing his horn at the revolving mirrored sphere, could put a lingering sharp cry in the smoky air, coiling like a rope of rescue above the bobbing figures. It disappeared as the chorus renewed itself.

“Right dance hall, Krantz.”

They scorned many public demonstrations in those prowling days but they didn’t scorn the Palais D’Or. It was too big. There was nothing superficial about a thousand people deeply engaged in the courting ritual, the swinging fragments of reflected light sweeping across their immobile eye-closed faces, amber, green, violet. They couldn’t help being impressed, fascinated by the channelled violence and the voluntary organization.

Why are they dancing to the music, Breavman wondered from the balcony, submitting to its dictation?

At the beginning of a tune they arranged themselves on the floor, obeyed the tempo, fast or slow. and when the tune was done they disintegrated into disorder again, like a battalion scattered by a land mine.

“What makes them listen, Krantz? Why don’t they rip the platform to pieces?”

“Let’s go down and get some women.”

“Soon.”

“What are you staring at?”

“I’m planning a catastrophe.”

They watched the dancers silently and they heard their parents talking.

The dancers were Catholics, French-Canadian, anti-Semitic, anti-Anglais, belligerent. They told the priest everything, they were scared by the Church, they knelt in wax-smelling musty shrines hung with abandoned dirty crutches and braces. Everyone of them worked for a Jewish manufacturer whom he hated and waited for revenge. They had bad teeth because they lived on Pepsi-Cola and Mae West chocolate cakes. The girls were either maids or factory help. Their dresses were too bright and you could see bra straps through the flimsy material. Frizzy hair and cheap perfume. They screwed like jack rabbits and at confession the priest forgave them. They were the mob. Give them a chance and they’d burn down the synagogue. Pepsies. Frogs. Fransoyzen.

Breavman and Krantz knew their parents were bigots so they attempted to reverse all their opinions. They did not quite succeed. They wanted to participate in the vitality but they felt there was something vaguely unclean in their fun, the pawing of girls, the guffaws, the goosing.

The girls might be beautiful but they all had false teeth.

“Krantz, I believe we’re the only two Jews in the place.”

“No, I saw some BTOS on the make a couple of minutes ago.”

“Well, we’re the only Westmount Jews around.”

“Bernie’s here.”

“O.K. Krantz. I’m the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue. Do something with that.”

“O.K. Breavman, you’re the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue at the Palais D’Or.”

“Distinctions are important.”

“Let’s get some women.”

At one of the doors in the main hall there was a knot of young people. They argued jovially in French, pushing one another, slapping back-sides, squirting Coke bottles.

The hunters approached the group and instantly modified its hilarity. The French boys stepped back slightly and Krantz and Breavman invited the girls they’d chosen. They spoke in French, fooling no one. The girls exchanged glances with each other and members of the party. One of the French boys magnanimously put his arm around the shoulder of the girl Breavman had asked and swept her to him, clapping Breavman on the back at the same time.

They danced stiffly. Her mouth was full of fillings. He knew he’d be able to smell her all night.

“Do you come here often, Yvette?”

“You know, once in a while, for fun.”

“Me too. Moi aussi.”

He told her he was in high school, that he didn’t work.

“You are Italian?”

“No.”

“English?”

“I’m Jewish.”

He didn’t tell her he was the only one from Wellgreen Avenue.

“My brothers work for Jew people.”

“Oh?”

“They are good to work for.”

The dance was unsatisfying. She was not attractive, but her racial mystery challenged investigation. He returned her to her friends. Krantz had finished his dance, too.

“What was she like, Krantz?”

“Don’t know. She couldn’t speak English.”

They hung around for a little while longer, drinking Orange Crush, leaning on the balcony rail to comment on the swaying mob below. The air was dense with smoke now. The band played either frantic jitterbug or slow fox trot, nothing between. After each dance the crowd hovered impatiently for the next one to begin.

It was late now. The wallflowers and the stag-line expected no miracles any more. They were lined along three walls watching the packed charged dancers with indifferent fixed stares. Some of the girls were collecting their coats and going home.

“Their new blouses were useless, Krantz.”

Seen from above, the movement on the floor had taken on a frantic quality. Soon the trumpeter would aim his horn into the smoke and give the last of Hoagy Carmichael and it would be all over. Every throb of the band had to be hoarded now against the end of the evening and the silence. Soak it through pressed cheeks and closed eyes in the dreamy tunes. In the boogie-woogie gather the nourishment like manna and knead it between the bodies drawing away and towards each other.

“Let’s get one more dance in, Breavman?”

“Same girls?”

“Might as well.”

Breavman leaned over the rail one more second and wished he were delivering a hysterical speech to the thick mob below.

… and you must listen, friends, strangers, I am binding the generations one to another, o, little people of numberless streets, bark, bark, hoot, blood, your long stairways are curling around my heart like a vine …

They went downstairs and found the girls with the same group. It was a mistake, they knew instantly. Yvette stepped forward as if to tell Breavman something but one of the boys pulled her back.

“You like the girls, eh?” he said, the swaggerer of the party. His smile was triumphant rather than friendly.

“Sure we like them. Anything wrong with that?”

“Where you live, you?”

Breavman and Krantz knew what they wanted to hear. Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.

“Westmount,” they said with one voice.

“You have not the girls at Westmount, you?”

They had no chance to answer him. In the very last second before they fell backwards over the kneeling accomplices stationed behind them they detected a signalling of eyes. The ring-leader and a buddy stepped forward and shoved them. Breavman lost his balance and as he fell the stoolie behind him raised himself up to turn the fall into a flip. Breavman landed hard in a belly-flop, a couple of girls that he had crashed into squealing above him. He looked up to see Krantz on his feet, his left fist in someone’s face and his right cocked back ready to fly. He was about to get up when a fat boy decided he shouldn’t and dived at him.

“Reste là, maudit juif!”

Breavman struggled under the blankets of flesh, not trying to defeat the fat boy but merely to get out from under him so he could do battle from a more honourable upright position. He managed to squeeze away. Where was Krantz?

There must have been twenty people fighting. Here and there he could see girls on their tiptoes as though in fear of mice, while boys wrestled on the floor between them.

He wheeled around, expecting an attack. The fat boy was smothering someone else. He threw his fist at a stranger. He was a drop in the wave of history, anonymous, exhilarated, free.

“O, little friends, hoot, blooey, dark fighters, shazam, bloop!” he shouted in his happiness.

Racing down the stairs were three bouncers of the management’s and what they feared most began to happen. The fighting spread to the dance floor. The band was blowing a loud dreamy tune but a disorganized noise could already be heard in opposition to the music.

Breavman waved his fist at everyone, hitting very few. The bouncers were in his immediate area, breaking up individual fights. At the far side of the hall the couples still danced closely and peacefully, but on Breavman’s side their rhythm was disintegrating into flailing arms, blind punches, lunges, and female squeals.

The bouncers pursued the disruption like compulsive housekeepers after an enormous spreading stain, jerking fighters apart by their collars and sweeping them aside as they followed the struggle deeper into the dance floor.

A man rushed onto the bandstand and shouted something to the bandleader, who looked around and shrugged his shoulders. The bright lights went on and the curious coloured walls disappeared. The music stopped.

Everyone woke up. A noise like a wail of national mourning rose up and at the same time fighting swept over the hall like released entropic molecules. To see the mass of dancers change to mass of fighters was like watching a huge highly organized animal succumb to muscular convulsions.

Krantz grabbed Breavman.

“Mr. Breavman?”

“Krantzstone, I presume.”

They headed for the front exit, which was already jammed with refugees. No one cared about his coat.

“Don’t say it, Breavman.”

“O.K. I won’t say it, Krantz.”

They got out just as the police arrived, about twenty of them in cars and the Black Maria. They entered with miraculous ease.

The boys waited in the front seat of the Lincoln. Krantz’s jacket was missing a lapel. The Palais D’Or began to empty of its victims.

“Pity the guys in there, Breavman – and don’t say it,” he added quickly when he saw Breavman put on his mystical face.

“I won’t say it, Krantz, I won’t even whisper that I planned the whole thing from the balcony and executed it by the simple means of mass-hypnosis.”

“You had to say it, eh?”

“We were mocked, Krantz. We seized the pillars and brought down the temple of the Philistines.”

Krantz shifted into second with exaggerated weariness.

“Go on, Breavman. You have to say it.”

26

He would love to have heard Hitler or Mussolini bellow from his marble balcony, to have seen partisans hang him upside down; to see the hockey crowds lynch the sports commissioner; to see the black or yellow hordes get even with the small outposts of their colonial enemies; to see the weeping country folk acclaim the strong-jawed road-builders; to see football fans rip down goalposts; to have seen the panicking movie-viewers stampede Montreal children in the famous fire; to see five hundred thousand snap into any salute at all; to see a countless array of Arabian behinds pointing west; to see the chalices on any altar tremble with the congregational Amen.

And this is where he would like to be:

in the marble balcony

the press-box

the projection-room

the reviewing stand

the minaret

the Holy of Holies

And in each case he wants to be surrounded by the best armed, squint-eyed, ruthless, loyal, tallest, leather-jacketed, technical brain-washed heavy police guard that money can buy.

27

Is there anything more beautiful than a girl with a lute?

It wasn’t a lute. Heather, the Breavmans’ maid, attempted the ukulele. She came from Alberta, spoke with a twang, was always singing laments and trying to yodel.

The chords were too hard. Breavman held her hand and agreed that the strings were tearing her fingers to pieces. She knew all the cowboy stars and traded their autographs.

She was a husky, good-looking girl of twenty with high-coloured cheeks like a porcelain doll. Breavman chose her for his first victim of sleep.

A veritable Canadian peasant.

He tried to make the offer attractive.

“You’ll feel wonderful when you wake up.”

Sure, she winked and settled herself on the couch in the crammed basement store-room. If only it would work.

He moved his yellow pencil like a slow pendulum before her eyes.

“Your eyelids will feel heavy as lead on your cheeks….”

He swung the pencil for ten minutes. Her large eyelids thickened and slowed down. She followed the pencil with difficulty.

“And your breathing heavy and regular….”

Soon she let out a sigh, took in a deep breath, and breathed like a drunkard, laboured and exhausted.

Now the eyelashes barely flickered. He couldn’t believe that he had ordered the changes in her. Maybe she was joking.

“You’re falling backwards, you’re a tiny body falling backwards, getting smaller and smaller, and you can hear nothing but my voice….”

Her breath was soft and he knew it would smell like wind.

He felt as though he had got his hands under her sweater, under her skin and ribs, and was manipulating her lungs, and they felt like balloons of silk.

“You are asleep,” he commanded in a whisper.

He touched her face in disbelief.

Was he really a master? She must be joking.

“Are you asleep?”

The yes came out the length of an exhalation, husky, unformed.

“You can feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you understand?”

The same yes.

He drove a needle through the lobe of her ear. He was dizzy with his new power. All her energy at his disposal.

He wanted to run through the streets with a bell and summon the whole cynical city. There was a new magician in the world.

He had no interest in ears pierced by needles.

Breavman had studied the books. A subject cannot be compelled to anything which he would consider indecent while awake. But there were ways. For instance, a modest woman can be induced to remove her clothes before an audience of men if the operator can suggest a situation in which such an act can be performed quite naturally, such as taking a bath in the privacy of her own home, or a naked rest under the sun in some humid deserted place.

“It’s hot, you’ve never been so hot. Your sweater weighs a ton. You’re sweating like a pig….”

As she undressed Breavman kept thinking of the illustrations in the pulp-paper Hypnotism for You manuals he knew by heart. Line drawings of fierce men leaning over smiling, sleeping women. Zigzags of electricity emanate from under the heavy eyebrows or from the tips of their piano-poised fingers.

Oh, she was, she really was, she was so lovely.

He had never seen a woman so naked. He ran his hand all over her body. He was astonished, happy, and frightened before all the spiritual authorities of the universe. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that he was performing a Black Mass. Her breasts were strangely flat because she was lying on her back. The mound of her delta was a surprise and he cupped it in wonder. He covered her body with two trembling hands like mine-detectors. Then he sat back to stare, like Cortez over his new ocean. This was what he had waited for so long to see. He wasn’t disappointed and never has been. The tungsten light was the same as the moon.

He unbuttoned his fly and told her she was holding a stick. His heart pounded.

He was intoxicated with relief, achievement, guilt, experience. There was semen on his clothes. He told Heather that the alarm clock had just rung. It was morning, she had to get up. He handed her her clothes and slowly she got dressed. He told her that she would remember nothing. Hurriedly he took her out of the sleep. He wanted to be alone and contemplate his triumph.

Three hours later he heard laughter from the basement and thought that Heather must be entertaining friends down there. Then he listened more carefully to the laughter and realized that it wasn’t social.

He raced down the stairs. Thank God his mother was out. Heather was standing in the centre of the floor, legs apart, convulsed with frightened, hysterical laughter. Her eyes were rolled up in her head and shone white. Her head was thrown back and she looked as if she was about to fall over. He shook her. No response. Her laughter became a terrible fit of coughing.

I’ve driven her insane.

He wondered what the criminal penalty was. He was being punished for his illegal orgasm and his dark powers. Should he call a doctor, make his sin public right away? Would anyone know how to cure her?

He was close to panic as he led her to the couch and sat her down. Perhaps he should hide her in a closet. Lock her in a trunk and forget about everything. Those big steamers with his father’s initials stencilled in white paint.

He slapped her face twice, once with each side of his hand, like a Gestapo investigator. She caught her breath, her cheeks reddened and faded like a blush, and she spluttered again into cough-laughing. There was saliva on her chin.

“Be quiet, Heather!”

To his absolute surprise she stifled her cough.

It was then he realized that she was still hypnotized. He commanded her to lie down and close her eyes. He re-established contact with her. She was deep asleep. He had tried to bring her out too quickly and it hadn’t taken. Slowly he worked her back to full wakefulness. She would be refreshed and gay. She would remember nothing.

This time she came round correctly. He chatted with her a while just to make sure. She stood up with a puzzled look and patted her hips.

“Hey! My pants!”

Wedged between the couch and wall were her pink elastic-bottomed panties. He had forgotten to hand them to her when she was dressing.

Skilfully and modestly she slipped into them.

He waited for the unnatural punishment, the humiliation of the master, the collapse of his proud house.

“What have you been doing?” she said slyly, chucking him under the chin. “What went on while I was asleep? Eh? Eh?”

“What do you remember?”

She put her hands on her hips and smiled broadly at him.

“I’d never of thought it could be done. Never of thought.”

“Nothing happened, Heather, I swear.”

“And what would your mother say? Be looking for a job, I would.”

She surveyed the couch and looked up at him with genuine admiration.

“Jewish people,” she sighed. “Education.”

Soon after his imaginary assault she ran off with a deserting soldier. He came alone for her clothes and Breavman watched with envy as he carried off her cardboard suitcase and unused ukulele. A week later Military Police visited Mrs. Breavman but she didn’t know anything.

Where are you, Heather, why didn’t you stay to introduce me into the warm important rites? I might have gone straight. Poem -less, a baron of industry, I might have been spared the soft-cover books on rejection-level stabilization by wealthy New York analysts. Didn’t you feel good when I brought you out?

Sometimes Breavman likes to think that she is somewhere in the world, not fully awake, sleeping under his power. And a man in a tattered uniform asks:

“Where are you, Heather?”

1

Breavman loves the pictures of Henri Rousseau, the way he stops time.

Always is the word that must be used. The lion will always be sniffing the robes of the sleeping gypsy, there will be no attack, no guts on the sand: the total encounter is expressed. The moon, even though it is doomed to travel, will never go down on this scene. The abandoned lute does not cry for fingers. It is swollen with all the music it needs.

In the middle of the forest the leopard topples the human victim, who falls more slowly than the Tower of Pisa. He’ll never reach the ground while you watch him, or even if you turn away. He is comfortable in his imbalance. The intricate leaves and limbs nourish the figures, not malignly or benignly, but naturally, as blossoms or fruits. But because the function is natural does not diminish its mystery. How have the animal flesh and the vegetable flesh become connected?

In another place the roots sponsor a wedding-couple or a family portrait. You are the photographer but you can never emerge from under the black hood or squeeze the rubber bulb or lose the image on the frosted glass. There is violence and immobility: the humans are involved, at home in each. It is not their forest, their clothes are city clothes, but the forest would be barren without them.

Wherever the violence or stillness happens, it is the centre of the picture, no matter how tiny or hidden. Cover it with your thumb and all the foliage dies.

2

In his first year of college, at a drinking place called the Shrine, Breavman rose up with this toast:

“Jewish girls are not any more passionate than Gentile girls of any given economic area. Jewish girls have very bad legs. Of course, this is a generalization. In fact, the new American Jewess is being bred with long, beautiful legs.

“Negro girls are as screwed up as anyone else. They are no better than white girls, except, of course, the Anglo-Saxon girls from Upper Westmount, but even drugged sheep are better than they are. Their tongues are not rougher, nor is there any special quality in the lubricated areas. The second-to-best blow job in the world is a Negro girl I happen to know. She has a forty-seven-thousand-dollar mouth.

“The best blow job in the world (technically) is a French-Canadian whore by the name of Yvette. Her telephone number is Chateau 2033. She has a ninety-thousand-dollar mouth.”

He raised high his cloudy glass.

“I am happy to give her the publicity here.”

He sat down among the cheers of his comrades, suddenly tired of his voice. He had been expected for dinner but he hadn’t phoned his mother. Obediently the new shot of Pernod turned white.

Krantz leaned over and whispered, “That was quite a speech for a sixteen-year-old virgin cherry to deliver upon us.”

“Why didn’t you pull me down?”

“They loved it.”

“Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Go stop you, Breavman.”

“Let’s get out of here, Krantz.”

“Can you walk, Breavman?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Let’s go.”

They supported each other through their favourite streets and alleys. They kept dropping their books and clip boards. They screamed hysterically at taxis that cruised too close. They tore up an economics text-book and burnt it as a sacrifice on the steps of a Sherbrooke Street bank. They prostrated themselves on the pavement. Krantz stood up first.

“Why aren’t you praying, Krantz?”

“Car coming.”

“Scream at it.”

“Police car.”

They ran down a narrow alley. A delicious smell stopped them, bestowed by the kitchen-ventilating fan of an expensive restaurant. They relieved themselves among the garbage cans.

“Breavman, you won’t believe what I almost peed on.”

“A corpse? A blonde wig? A full meeting of the Elders of Zion? An abandoned satchel of limp a-holes!”

“Shh. C’mere. Carefully.”

Krantz lit a match and the brass eyes of a bull-frog gleamed from the debris. All three of them jumped at the same time. Krantz carried it in a knotted handkerchief.

“Must have escaped from a garlic sauce.”

“Let’s go back and liberate them all. Let the streets swarm with free frogs. Hey, Krantz, I’ve got my dissecting kit!”

They decided on a solemn ceremony at the foot of the War Memorial.

Breavman spread loose-leaf sheets on his Zoology text. He grasped the frog by the green hind legs. Krantz intervened, “You know, this is going to ruin the night. It’s been a very fine night but this is going to ruin it.”

“You’re right, Krantz.”

They stood there in silence. The night was immense. The headlights streamed along Dorchester Street. They wished they weren’t there, they wished they were at a party with a thousand people. The frog was as tempting to gut as an old alarm clock.

“Should I proceed, Krantz?”

“Proceed.”

“We’re in charge of torture tonight. The regular torturers are relieved.”

Breavman swung the head smartly against the inscribed stone. The smack of living tissue was louder than all the traffic.

“At least that stuns it.”

He laid the frog on the white sheets and secured it to the book with pins through its extremities. He pierced the light-coloured abdomen with the scalpel. He withdrew the scissors from his kit and made a long vertical incision in first the upper and then the lower layer of skin.

“We could stop now, Krantz. We could get thread and repair the thing.”

“We could.” Krantz said dreamily.

Breavman pinned back the stretchy skin. They pressed in over the deep insides, smelling each other’s alcoholic breath.

“This is the heart.”

He lifted the organ with the small edge of the scalpel.

“So that’s the heart.”

The milky-grey sack heaved up and down and they stared in wonder. The legs of the frog were like a lady’s.

“I suppose I should get on with it.”

He removed the organs one by one, the lungs, the kidneys. A pebble and an undigested beetle were discovered in the stomach. He exposed the muscles in the delicate thighs.

Both of them, the operator and the spectator, hovered in a trance. And finally he removed the heart, which already looked weary and ancient, the colour of old man’s saliva, first heart of the world.

“If you put it in salt water it’ll keep on beating for a while.”

Krantz woke up.

“Will it? Let’s do it. Hurry!”

Breavman tossed his text-book together with the emptied frog in a wire trash-basket as he ran. He cupped the heart in his hand, afraid of squeezing. The restaurant was only a minute away.

Don’t die.

“Hurry! For Christ’s sake!”

Everything had a second chance if they could save it.

They took a faraway booth in the bright restaurant. Where was the damn waitress?

“Look. It’s still going.”

Breavman placed it in a dish of warm salt water. It heaved its soft weight eleven more times. They counted each time and then said nothing for a while, their faces close to the table, immobile.

“It doesn’t look like anything now,” Breavman said.

“What’s a dead frog’s heart supposed to look like?”

“I suppose that’s the way everything evil happens, like tonight.”

Krantz grabbed his shoulder, his face suddenly bright.

“That’s brilliant, what you just said is brilliant!”

He slapped his friend’s back resoundingly. “You’re a genius, Breavman!”

Breavman was puzzled at Krantz’s tangent from depression. He silently reconstructed his remark.

“You’re right! Krantz, you’re right! And so are you – for noticing it!”

They seized each other’s shoulders and pounded each other’s backs over the Arborite table, bellowing compliments and congratulations.

“You genius!”

“You genius!”

They spilled the salt water, not that it mattered. They turned over the table. They were geniuses! They knew how it happens.

The manager wanted to know if they’d like to get out.

3

The heavy gold frame of his father’s picture was the first thing he noticed. It seemed like another window.

“You’re wasting your life in bed, you’re turning night into day,” his mother shouted outside the door.

“Will you leave me alone? I just got up.”

He stared for a long while at his bookshelf, watching the sun move from the leather Chaucer to the leather Wordsworth. Good sun, in harmony with history. Comforting thought for early morning. Except that it is the middle of the afternoon.

“How can you waste your life in bed? How can you do this to me?”

“I’m on a different cycle. I go to bed late. Please go away.”

“The beautiful sun. You’re ruining your health.”

“I still sleep my seven hours, it’s just that I sleep them at a different time than you sleep yours.”

“The beautiful sun,” she wailed, “the park, you could be walking.”

What am I doing arguing with her?

“But mother, I walked in the park last night. It was still the park then, in the night.”

“You turn night into day, you’re using up your time, your beautiful health.”

“Leave me alone!”

She’s in bad shape, she just wants to talk, she’ll use any maternal duty as an occasion for lengthy debate.

He rested his elbows on the window sill and let the landscape develop in his thought. Park. Lilacs. Nurses in white talking together beside the green branches or pushing dark carriages. Children launching their white sailboats from the concrete shore of the blue pool, praying for wind, safe journeys or spectacular wrecks.

“What do you want for your brunch? Eggs, scrambled, salmon, there’s a lovely piece of steak, I’ll tell her to make you a salad, what do you want in it, Russian dressing, how do you want your eggs, there’s coffee-cake, fresh, the refrigerator is full, in this house there is always something to eat, nobody goes hungry, thank God, there are oranges imported from California, do you want juice?”

He opened the door and spoke carefully.

“I’m aware how fortunate we are. I’ll take some juice when I feel like it. Don’t disturb the maid or anybody.”

But she was already at the banister, shouting, “Mary, Mary, prepare Mr. Lawrence some orange juice, squeeze three oranges. How do you want your eggs, Lawrence?”

She slipped the last question to him like a trick.

“Will you stop shoving food down my throat? You can make a person sick with your damn food!”

He slammed his door.

“He slams a door at a mother,” she reported bitterly from the hall.

What a mess! His clothes were everywhere. His desk was a confusion of manuscripts, books, underwear, fragments of Eskimo sculpture. He tried to shove a half-finished sestina into the drawer but it was jammed with accumulated scraps, boarded envelopes, abandoned diaries.

What this room needs is a good, clean fire. He couldn’t find his kimono so he covered himself with The New York Times and ran across the hall into the bathroom.

“Very pretty. He wears a newspaper.”

He managed to creep downstairs, but his mother ambushed him in the kitchen.

“Is that all you’re having, orange juice, with the house filled with food, half the world fighting for leftovers?”

“Don’t start, Mother.”

She threw open the door of the refrigerator.

“Look,” she challenged. “Look at all this, eggs that you didn’t want, look at the size of them, cheese, Gruyère, Oka, Danish, Camembert, some cheese and crackers, and who’s going to drink all the wine, that’s a shame, Lawrence, look at them, feel the weight of this grapefruit, we’re so lucky, and meat, three kinds, I’ll make it myself, feel the weight….”

Try and see the poem, Breavman, the beautiful catalogue.

“– here, feel the weight….”

He heaved the raw slab of steak at her feet, splitting the wax-paper on the linoleum.

“Haven’t you got anything better to do with your life than stuff food down my face? I’m not starving.”

“This is the way a son talks to his mother,” she informed the world.

“Will you leave me alone now?”

“This is a son talking, your father should see you, he should be here to see you throwing down meat, meat on the floor, what tyrant does that, only someone rotten, to do this to a mother….”

He followed her out of the kitchen.

“I just asked to be left alone, to wake up by myself.”

“Rotten, a rat wouldn’t treat a mother, rotten as if you were a stranger, would anybody throw meat and my ankles are swollen, beat you, your father would beat you, a rotten son….”

He followed her up the stairs.

“You can make someone sick with your screaming.”

She slammed her closet door. He stood beside it and listened to her opening and shutting the big drawers.

“Get away! A son talks to a mother, a son can kill a mother, I knew everything, what I have to hear, a traitor not a son, to talk to me, nobody who remembers me to talk …”

He heard her slide open the dress compartment. First she tore the sleeves from some old housecoats. She tripped over a tangle of hangers. Then she began on an expensive black one she had bought in New York.

“What good are they, what good are they, when a son is killing a mother….”

He heard every sound, his cheek pressed against the wood.

4

At night the park was his domain.

He covered all the playing fields and hills like a paranoiac squire hunting for poachers. The flower-beds, the terraces of grass had an aspect of formality they did not have by daylight. The trees were taller and older. The high-fenced tennis court looked like a cage for huge wingless creatures which had somehow got away. The ponds were calm and deadly black. Lamps floated in them like multiple moons.

Walking past the Chalet he remembered the masculine smell of hockey equipment and underwear, the thud of skates on wooden planks.

The empty baseball diamond was blurred with spectacular sliding ghosts. He could hear the absence of cheers. With no bikes leaning against them the chestnut tree and wire backstop seemed strangely isolated.

How many leaves have to scrape together to record the rustle of the wind? He tried to distinguish the sound of acacia from the sound of maple.

Just beyond the green rose the large stone houses of Westmount Avenue. In them the baseball players were growing their bodies with sleep, resting their voices. He imagined that he could see them dimly through the walls of the upper storeys, or rather the sheets they were wrapped in, floating row upon row over the street, like a colony of cocoons in a moonlit tree. The young men of his age, Christian and blond, dreaming of Jewish sex and bank careers.

The park nourished all the sleepers in the surrounding houses. It was the green heart. It gave the children dangerous bushes and heroic landscapes so they could imagine bravery. It gave the nurses and maids winding walks so they could imagine beauty. It gave the young merchant-princes leaf-hid necking benches, views of factories so they could imagine power. It gave the retired brokers vignettes of Scottish lanes where loving couples walked, so they could lean on their canes and imagine poetry. It was the best part of everyone’s life. Nobody comes into a park for mean purposes except perhaps a sex maniac and who is to say that he isn’t thinking of eternal roses as he unzips before the skipping-rope Beatrice?

He visited the Japanese pond to ensure the safety of the goldfish. He climbed through the prickly bushes and over the wall to inspect the miniature waterfall. Lisa was not there. He somersaulted down the hill to see if it was still steep enough. Wouldn’t it be funny if Lisa of all people should be waiting at the bottom? He sifted a handful in the sand-box to guard against polio. He did a test run on the slide, surprised that it squeezed him. He looked gravely from the lookout to guarantee the view.

“My city, my river, my bridges, shit on you, no I didn’t mean it.”

The bases had to be run, the upper ponds examined for sail-boat wrecks or abandoned babies or raped white nurses. Touch the tree trunks to encourage them.

He had his duty to the community, to the nation.

At any moment a girl is going to step out of one of the flowerbeds. She will look as though she has just been swimming and she’ll know all about my dedication.

He lay under the lilacs. The flowers were almost gone, they looked like molecular diagrams. Sky was immense. Cover me with black fire. Uncles, why do you look so confident when you pray? Is it because you know the words? When the curtains of the Holy Ark are drawn apart and gold-crowned Torah scrolls revealed, and all the men of the altar wear white clothes, why don’t your eyes let go of the ritual, why don’t you succumb to raving epilepsy? Why are your confessions so easy?

He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren’t going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire.

There were lights on the St. Lawrence the size of stars, and an impatient stillness in the air. Trees as fragile as the legs of listening deer. At any minute the sun would come crashing out of the roofs like a clenched fist, driving out determined workers and one-way cars to jam the streets. He hoped he wouldn’t have to see the herds of traffic on Westmount Avenue. Turning night into day.

“Hello there.”

A stout man of thirty in an Air Force uniform stood above him. He had been the centre of attention in the park a few days before. Several nurses complained that he had been too enthusiastic in the fondling of their male children. A policeman had escorted him to the street and invited him to move along.

“I thought you weren’t allowed in here.”

“Nobody’s around. I just felt like talking.”

His uniform was sharply pressed. Really, he was too clean for that time of the morning or night or whatever it was. Breavman isolated the smell of shaving lotion from the lilac-laden air. He stood up.

“Talk. You have my permission. I’m going home.”

“I just thought …”

Breavman looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “Talk! Why aren’t you talking? It’s all yours – the park’s empty!”

There were gardeners in faded clothes on his street. They called to one another as they swept, all Italian names. Breavman studied their brooms made out of wire-bound branches. It must be nice to use something that real.

5

“Will you stop shouting, Breavman, or stand further back, I can’t hear a damn thing you’re saying.”

“Bertha, I said! I just saw Bertha! She’s in town!”

“Bertha who?”

“Oh, you wicked and careless fool. Bertha of our childhood, of The Tree, who mangled herself under our noses.”

“How does she look?”

“Her face is perfect, really Krantz, she was beautiful.”

“Where did you see her?”

“In a bus window.”

“Good-bye, Breavman.”

“Don’t hang up, Krantz. I swear it was really her. I won’t say she was smiling. It was an open, blonde face with no family lines, so you could make anything you want of it.”

“You go follow the bus, Breavman.”

“Oh, no, she saw me. I’ll just wait here till it comes round again. She moved her lips.”

“Good-bye, Breavman.”

“Krantz, this is a most pleasant telephone booth I’m living in today. Sherbrooke Street is a parade of everyone I ever knew. I’m going to loiter immoderately. They’ll all be delivered to me today, Bertha, Lisa. Nobody, not one name, not one limb will be taken away in the dustload.”

“Where did you dig up those old names?”

“I’m the keeper. I’m the sentimental dirty old man in front of a classroom of children.”

“Good-bye, Breavman, for real.”

It was a beautiful telephone box. It smelled of new spring paint and fresh nails. You could feel the sun through the wire-embedded glass. He was the guard, he was the sentry.

Bertha, who had fallen out of a tree for his sake! Bertha, who played “Greensleeves” sweeter than he ever could! Bertha, who fell with apples and twisted her limbs!

He dropped in another nickel and waited for the music.

“Krantz, she just came round again….”

6

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Everything took so long.

The mountain released the moon like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain.

That summer Breavman had a queer sense of time slowing down.

He was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.

Eight years later he told Shell about it, but not everything, because he didn’t want Shell to think that he saw her in the same way he saw the girl he was telling about, as if she were a moon-lit body in a slow Swedish movie, and from far away.

What was her name? he demanded of himself.

I forget. It was a sweet, Jewish last name which meant mother-of-pearl or rose-forest.

How dare you forget?

Norma.

What did she look like?

It doesn’t matter what she looked like every day. It only matters what she looked like for that important second. That I remember and will tell you.

What did she look like every day?

As a matter of fact, her face was squashed, her nose spread too wide. One of her grandmothers must have been carried away by the Tartars. She always seemed to be astride something, a railing or a diving-board, waving her brown arms, eyes lost in her laugh, galloping to a feast or a massacre. Her flesh was loose.

Why was she a Communist?

Because she played the guitar. Because the copper bosses shot Joe Hill. Because notenemos ni aviones ni cañones, and all her friends had died at Jarama. Because General MacArthur was a criminal and ruled Japan as a personal kingdom. Because the Wobblies sang into tear gas. Because Sacco loved Vanzetti. Because Hiroshima hurt her eyes and she was collecting names on a Ban the Bomb petition and was often told to go back to Russia.

Did she limp?

When she was very tired you noticed it. She usually wore a long Mexican skirt.

And the Mexican ring?

Yes, she was engaged to a chartered accountant. She assured me that he was progressive. But how could someone who was waiting for a revolution be a chartered accountant? I wanted to know. And how could she, with her ideas of freedom, commit herself to conventional marriage?

“We have to be effective in society. Communists aren’t bohemians. That’s a luxury of Westmount.”

Did you love her?

I loved to kiss her breasts, the few times she let me.

How many times, how many times?

Twice. And I was allowed to touch. Arms, stomach, pubic hair, I almost made the jewel of my list but her jeans were too tight. She was four years older than me.

She was engaged?

But I was young. She kept telling me I was a baby. So nothing we did was really important. She phoned him long distance every night. I stood beside her as she spoke. They talked about apartments and wedding plans. It was the prosaic adult world, the museum of failure, and I had nothing to do with it.

What about her face when she talked to him?

I believe I could read guilt on it.

Liar.

We both felt terribly guilty, I guess. So we worked hard to collect more signatures. But we loved to lie together beside the fire. Our tiny circle of light seemed so far from everything. I told her stories. She made up a blues called “My Golden Bourgeois Baby Sold His House For Me.” No, that’s a lie.

What did you do during the day?

We hitch-hiked all over the Laurentians. We’d go down to a beach crowded with sun-bathers and we’d start singing. We were brown, we had good harmonies, people liked to listen to us even if they didn’t open their eyes. Then I’d talk.

“I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m not even talking about politics. I’m talking about your bodies, the ones stretched out on this beach, the ones you’ve just smeared with sun-tan oil. Some of you are over-weight and some of you are too thin, and some of you are very proud. You all know your bodies. You’ve looked at them in mirrors, you’ve waited to hear them complimented, or touched with love. Do you want what you kiss to turn to cancer? Do you want to take handfuls of hair from your child’s scalp? You see, I’m not talking about Russia or America. I’m talking about bodies, which are all we have, and no government can restore one finger, one tooth, one inch of normal skin that is lost because of the poison in the air….”

Did they listen?

They listened and most of them signed. I knew I could be Prime Minister because of the way their eyes listened. It didn’t matter what was said as long as the old words were used and the old chanting rhythm, I could have led them into a drowning ritual….

Stop this fantasy right now. What were the bodies like on the beach?

Ugly and white and ruined by offices.

What did you do at night?

She helped me to her bare breasts and the clothed outline of her body.

Be more specific, will you?

The mountain released the moon, like a bubble it could no longer contain, with reluctance and pain. I was in a film and the machine was whirring into slower and slower motion.

A bat swooped over the fire and thudded into the pines. Norma closed her eyes and pressed the guitar closer. She sent a minor chord through his spine and into the forest.

America was lost, the scabs ruled everything, the skyscrapers of chrome would never budge, but Canada was here, infant dream, the stars high and sharp and cold, and the enemies were brittle and easy and English.

The firelight grazed over her, calling out a cheek, a hand, then waving it back to the darkness.

The camera takes them from faraway, moves through the forest, catches the glint of a raccoon’s eyes, examines the water, reeds, closed water-flowers, involves itself with mist and rocks.

“Lie beside me,” Norma’s voice, maybe Breavman’s.

Sudden close-up of her body part by part, lingering over the mounds of her thighs, which are presented immense and shadowed, the blue denim tight on the flesh. The fan of creases between her thighs. Camera searches her jacket for the shape of breasts. She exhumes a pack of cigarettes. Activity is studied closely. Her fingers move like tentacles. Manipulation of cigarette skilled and suggestive. Fingers are slow, violent, capable of holding anything.

He flicks his sight like a dry fly and whips back the shape he’s caught. She makes an O of her mouth and pushes out a smoke ring with her tongue.

“Let’s go swimming.”

They stand, they walk, they collide in a loud rush of clothing. Face each other with eyes closed. Camera holds each face, one after the other. They kiss blindly, missing mouths, finding them wet. They fall into a noise of crickets and breathing.

“No, this is too serious now.”

Camera records them lying in silence.

There are distances between each word.

“Then let’s go swimming.”

Camera follows them to the shore. They go through the woods with difficulty, the audience has forgotten where they are going, it takes so long the branches will not let them by.

“Oh, let me see you.”

“I’m not so pretty underneath. You stand over there.”

She moves to the other side of an orchard of reeds and now they cross every picture like lines of rain. The moon is a shore-stone someone lucky has found.

So she emerges wet, her skin tightened by gooseflesh, and the whole bright screen enfolds him, lenses and machinery.

“No, don’t touch me. It’s not so bad then. Don’t move. I’ve never done this to anyone.”

Her hair was wet on his stomach. His mind broke into postcards.

Dear Krantz

What she did what she did what she did

Dear Bertha

You must limp like her or maybe even look like I knew nothing was lost

Dear Hitler

Take away the torches I’m not guilty I had to have this

“Will you walk me down to the village? I promised I’d telephone and it must be late.”

“You’re not going to phone him now?”

“I said I would.”

“But after this?”

She touched his cheek. “You know that I have to.”

“I’ll wait at the fire.”

When she was gone he folded his sleeping bag. He couldn’t find his right moccasin but that didn’t matter. Sticking out of her kit-bag he noticed a packet of Ban the Bomb petition forms. He crouched beside the fire and scribbled signatures.

I. G. Farben

Mister Universe

Joe Hill

Wolfgang Amadeus Jolson

Ethel Rosenberg

Uncle Tom

Little Boy Blue

Rabbi Sigmund Freud.

He shoved the forms down her sleeping bag and headed for the highway, which was streaked with headlights. Nothing could help the air.

What did she look like that important second?

She stands in my mind alone, unconnected to the petty narrative. The colour of the skin was startling, like the white of a young branch when the green is thumb-nailed away. Nipples the colour of bare lips. Wet hair a battalion of glistening spears laid on her shoulders.

She was made of flesh and eyelashes.

But you said she was lame, perhaps like Bertha would be from the fall?

I don’t know.

Why can’t you tell Shell?

My voice would depress her.

Shell touched Breavman’s cheek.

“Tell me the rest of the story.”

7

Tamara had long legs, God knows how long they were. Some -times at the meetings she used up three chairs. Her hair was tangled and black. Breavman tried to select one coil and follow where it fell and weaved. It made his eyes feel as though he had walked into a closet of dustless cobwebs.

Breavman and Krantz wore special costumes for hunting Communist women. Dark suits, vests which buttoned high on their shirts, gloves and umbrellas.

They attended every meeting of the Communist Club. They sat imperially among the open-collared members who were munching their sandwich lunches out of paper bags.

During a dull speech on American germ-warfare Krantz whispered: “Breavman, why are paper bags full of white bread so ugly?”

“I’m glad you asked, Krantz. They are advertisements for the frailty of the body. If a junkie wore his hypodermic needle pinned to his lapel you’d feel exactly the same disgust. A bag bulging with food is a kind of visible bowel. Trust the Bolsheviks to wear their digestive systems on their sleeves!”

“Sufficient, Breavman. I thought you’d know.”

“Look at her, Krantz!”

Tamara appropriated another chair for her mysterious limbs. At the same moment the chairman interrupted the speaker and waved his gavel at Krantz and Breavman.

“If you two jokers don’t shut up you’re getting right out of here.”

They stood up to make a formal apology.

“Siddown, siddown, just keep quiet.”

Korea had swarmed with Yankee insects. They had bombs filled with contagious mosquitoes.

“Now I have some questions for you, Krantz. What goes on under those peasant blouses and skirts she always wears? How high do her legs go up? What happens after her wrists plunge into her sleeves? Where do her breasts begin?”

“That’s why you’re here, Breavman.”

Tamara had gone to his high-school but he didn’t notice her then because she was fat. They took the same route to school, but he never noticed her. Lust was training his eyes to exclude everything he could not kiss.

But now she was slender and tall. Her ripe lower lip curved over its own little shadow. She moved heavily, though, as if her limbs were still bound with the mass of flesh she remembered with bitterness.

“Do you know one of the main reasons why I want her?”

“I know the main reason.”

“You’re wrong, Krantz. It’s because she lives one street away from me. She belongs to me for the same reason the park does.”

“You’re a very sick boy.”

A minute later Krantz said: “These people are half right about you, Breavman. You’re an emotional imperialist.”

“You thought about that for a long time, didn’t you?”

“A while.”

“It’s good.”

They shook hands solemnly. They exchanged umbrellas. They tightened each other’s ties. Breavman kissed Krantz on each cheek in the manner of a French general awarding medals.

The chairman hammered his gavel to preserve the meeting.

“Out! We’re not interested in a vaudeville show. Go perform on the mountain!”

The mountain meant Westmount. They decided to accept his advice. They practised a soft-shoe routine at the Lookout, delighting in their own absurdity. Breavman never could master the steps, but he liked swinging the umbrella.

“Do you know why I love Communist women?”

“I do, Breavman.”

“You’re wrong again. It’s because they don’t believe in the world.”

They sat on the stone wall, their backs to the river and city.

“Very soon, Krantz, very soon I’m going to be in a room with her. We’re going to be in a room. There’s going to be a room around us.”

“So long, Breavman, I’ve got to study.”

Krantz’s house wasn’t far. He meant it, he really went. It was the first time Krantz had –

“Hey!” Breavman called. “You broke the dialogue.”

He was out of hearing.

8

“Don’t you see it, Tamara, don’t you see that both sides, both sides of every fight, they’re both always using germ-warfare?”

He was walking with her in the park behind his house, telling the secret of conflict and the habits of nocturnal goldfish and why poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Then he was in a room undressing her. He couldn’t believe his hands. The kind of surprise when the silver paper comes off the triangle of Gruyère in one piece.

Then she said no and bundled her clothes against her breasts.

He felt like an archaeologist watching the sand blow back. She was putting on her bra. He helped her with the clasp just to show that he wasn’t a maniac.

Then he asked why four times.

Then he stood at the window.

Tell her you love her, Breavman. That’s what she wants to hear. He came back and rubbed her back.

Now he was working in the small of her back.

Say I love you. Say it. One-two-three, now.

He was getting an occasional finger under the elastic.

She crossed her ankles and seemed to squeeze her thighs together in some kind of private pleasure. This gesture shivered his spine.

Then he dived at her thighs, which were floating and damp. The flesh splashed up. He used his teeth. He didn’t know whether the wetness was blood or spit or lubricating perfume.

Then there were the strange strained voices which had turned into whispers, rushed and breathless, as though time were against them, bringing police and parents to the keyhole.

“I better put something on.”

“I’m afraid I’m tight.”

“It’s beautiful that you’re tight.”

Who was she, who owned her body?

“You see, I’m tight.”

“Oh yes.”

Congratulations, like slow-falling confetti, covered his mind with sleep, but someone said: “Tell me a poem.”

“Let me look at you first.”

“Let me look at you too.”

Then he walked her home. It was his personal time of the morning. The sun was threatening in the east. The newsboys were limping with their grey bags. The sidewalks looked new.

Then he took her hands in his hands and spoke with serious appreciation:

“Thank you, Tamara.”

Then she slapped his face with the hand that was holding the key.

“It sounds so horrible. As if I let you take something. As if you got something out of me.”

She cried for the seconds it took until a line of blood appeared on his cheek.

Then they hugged to repair everything.

When she was inside she put her mouth to the window of the door and they kissed through the glass. He wanted her to go first and she wanted him to go first. He hoped his back looked good.

C’mon, everybody! He exulted as he marched home, newest member of the adult community. Why weren’t all the sleepers hanging out of their windows cheering? Didn’t they admire his ritual of love and deceit? He visited his park, stood on the nursery hill and looked over the city to the grey river. He was finally involved with the sleepers, the men who went to work, the buildings, the commerce.

Then he threw stones at Krantz’s window because he didn’t want to go to bed.

“Steal a car, Krantz. Chinese soup time.”

Breavman told everything in three minutes and then they drove in silence. He leaned his head against the window glass expecting it to be cool, but it wasn’t.

“I know why you’re depressed. Because you told me.”

“Yes. I dishonoured it twice.”

It was worse than that. He wished he loved her, it must be so nice to love her, and to tell her, not once or five times, but over and over, because he knew he was going to be with her in rooms for a long time.

Then what about rooms, wasn’t every room the same, hadn’t he known what it would be like, weren’t all the rooms they passed exactly the same, wherever a woman was stretched out, even a forest was a glass room, wasn’t it like with Lisa, under the bed and when they played the Soldier and the Whore, wasn’t it the same, even to the listening for enemy sounds?

He told the story again, six years later, to Shell, but he didn’t dishonour it that time. Once, when he went away from Shell for a little while, he wrote her this:

“I think that if Elijah’s chariot, or Apollo’s, or any mythical boat of the sky, should pull up at my doorstep, I would know exactly where to sit, and as we flew I’d recall with delicious familiarity all the clouds and mysteries we passed.”

9

Tamara and Breavman rented a room in the east end of the city. They told their families they were visiting out-of-town friends.

“I’m used to being alone,” his mother said.

On the last morning they leaned out of the small high window, squashing shoulders, looking at the street below.

Alarms went off through the boarding house. Bulging ash-cans sentried the dirty sidewalk. Cats cruised between them.

“You won’t believe this, Tamara, but there was a time I could have frozen one of those cats to the sidewalk.”

“That’s very useful, frozen cat.”

“I can’t make things happen so easily these days, alas. Things happen to me. I couldn’t even hypnotize you last night.”

“You’re a failure, Larry, but I’m still crazy about your balls. Yummy.”

“My lips are sore from kissing.”

“So are mine.”

They kissed softly and then she touched his lips with her hand. She was often very tender and it always surprised him because he hadn’t commanded it.

They had hardly been out of bed for the past five days. Even with the window wide open, the air in the room smelt like the bed. The early-morning buildings filled him with nostalgia and he couldn’t understand it until he realized that they were exactly the colour of old tennis shoes.

She rubbed her shoulder against his chin to feel the bristle. He looked at her face. She had closed her eyes to savour the morning breeze against her eyelids.

“Cold?”

“Not if you stay.”

“Hungry?”

“I couldn’t face another anchovy and that’s all we have.”

“We shouldn’t have bought such expensive stuff. It doesn’t quite go with the room, does it?”

“Neither do we,” she said. “Everybody in the house seems to be getting up for work.”

“And here we are: refugees from Westmount. You’ve betrayed your new socialist heritage.”

“You can talk all you want if you let me smell you.”

The cigarettes were crushed. He straightened one out and lit it for her. She blew a mouthful of smoke into the morning.

“Smoking with nothing on is so – so luxurious.”

She shivered over the word. He kissed the nape of her neck and they resumed their idle watch in the window.

“Cold?”

“I’d like to stay for a year,” she said.

“That’s called marriage.”

“Now don’t get all frightened and prickly.”

A very important thing happened.

They caught sight of an old man in an oversize raincoat standing in a doorway across the street, pressed against the door as if he were hiding.

They decided to watch him, just to see what he did.

He leaned forward, looked up and down the street, and satisfied that it was empty, gathered the folds of his raincoat around him like a cape and stepped out on the sidewalk.

Tamara flicked a roll of ashes out the window. It fell like a feather and then disintegrated in the rising wind. Breavman watched the small gesture.

“I can’t stand how beautiful your body is.”

She smiled and leaned her head against his shoulder.

The old man in the swaddling coat kneeled and peered under a parked car. He got up, brushed his knees, and looked around.

The wind moved in her hair, detaching and floating a wisp. She squeezed her arm between them and flicked the butt. He flicked his out too. They fell like tiny doomed parachutists.

Then, as if the butts were a signal, everything began to happen faster.

The sun jelled suddenly between two buildings, intensely darkening the charade of chimneys.

A citizen climbed into his car and drove away.

A cat appeared a few feet from where the old man was standing and crossed in front of him, proud, starved, and muscular. With a flurry of folds the old man leaped after the animal. Effortlessly, the cat changed its direction and softly padded down stone stairs to a cellar entrance. The man coughed and followed, stooped, baffled, and climbed back to the street empty-handed.

They had watched him idly, as people watch water, but now they looked hard.

“You’ve got gooseflesh, Tamara.”

She refastened a wisp of floating hair. He studied her fingers in the exercise. He remembered them on various parts of his body.

He thought he would be content if he were condemned to live that moment over and over for the rest of his life. Tamara naked and young, her fingers weaving a lock of hair. The sun tangled in TV aerials and chimneys. The morning breeze whipping the mist from the mountain. A mysterious old man whose mystery he didn’t care to learn. Why should he go looking for better visions?

He couldn’t make things happen.

In the street the old man was lying on his stomach under the bumper of a car, grasping after a cat he had managed to corner between the kerb and the wheel. He kicked his feet in excitement, trying to get the cat by the hind legs, getting scratched and nipped. He finally succeeded. He extracted the cat from the shadows and held it above his head.

The cat wriggled and convulsed like a pennant in a violent wind.

“My God,” said Tamara. “What’s he doing with it?”

They forgot each other and leaned out the window.

The old man staggered under the struggle of the big cat, his face buried in his chest away from the threshing claws. He regained his footing. Wielding the cat as if it were an axe, his feet spread wide, he brought it down hard against the sidewalk. They could hear the head smash from their window. It convulsed like a landed fish.

Tamara turned her head away.

“What’s he doing now?” she wanted to be told.

“He’s putting it in a bag.”

The old man, kneeling beside the twitching cat, had produced a paper bag from out of his huge coat. He attempted to stuff the cat into it.

“I’m sick,” said Tamara. She was hiding her face against his chest. “Can’t you do something?”

It hadn’t occurred to Breavman that he could intrude into the action.

“Hey you!”

The old man looked up suddenly.

“Oui! Toi!”

The old man stopped short. He looked down at his cat. His hands vibrated in indecision. He fled down the street coughing and empty-handed.

Tamara gurgled. “I’m going to be sick.” She broke for the sink and vomited.

Breavman helped her to the bed.

“Anchovies,” she said.

“You’re shivering. I’ll close the window.”

“Just lie beside me.”

Her body was limp as though it had succumbed to some defeat. It frightened him.

“Maybe we shouldn’t have frightened him off,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was probably starving.”

“He was going to eat it?”

“Well, we protected our fragile tastes.”

She held him tightly. It was not the kind of embrace he wanted. There was nothing of flesh in it, only hurt.

“We didn’t sleep very much. Try to sleep now.”

“Will you sleep too?”

“Yes. We’re both tired.”

The morning world had been removed from them, the jagged sounds of traffic were beyond the closed window, distant as history. They were two people in a room and there was nothing to watch.

With his hand he soothed her hair and closed her eyelids. He remembered the miniature work of the wind unfastening and floating wisps of hair. A week is a long time.

Her lips trembled.

“Lawrence?”

I know what you’re going to say and I know what I’m going to say and I know what you’re going to say….

“Don’t be mad.”

“No.”

“I love you,” she said simply.

I’ll wait here.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Will you kiss me?”

He kissed her mouth lightly.

“Are you angry with me?”

“What do you mean?” he lied.

“For what I said. I know it hurts you in some way.”

“No, Tamara, it makes me feel close to you.”

“I’m happy I told you.”

She adjusted her position and moved closer to him, not for sensation but for warmth and protection. He held her tightly, not as mistress, but bereaved child. The room was hot. Sweat on his palms.

Now she was asleep. He made sure she was asleep. Carefully he disengaged himself from her hold. If only she weren’t so beautiful in sleep. How could he run from that body?

He dressed like a thief.

A round sun burned above the sooty buildings. All the parked cars had driven away. A few old men, brooms in hand, stood blinking among the garbage cans. One of them tried to balance the cat’s carcass on a broom handle because he didn’t want to touch it.

Run, Westmount, run.

He needed to put distance between himself and the hot room where he couldn’t make things happen. Why did she have to speak? Couldn’t she have left it alone? The smell of her flesh was trapped in his clothes.

Her body was with him and he let a vision of it argue against his flight.

I am running through a snowfall which is her thighs, he dramatized in purple. Her thighs are filling up the street. Wide as a snowfall, heavy as huge falling Zeppelins, her damp thighs are settling on the sharp roofs and wooden balconies. Weather-vanes press the shape of roosters and sail-boats into the skin. The faces of famous statues are preserved like intaglios….

Then he was thinking of a special pair of thighs in a special room. Commitment was oppressive but the thought of flesh-loneliness was worse.

Tamara was awake when he opened the door. He undressed in a hurry and renewed what he had nearly lost.

“Aren’t you glad you came back?”

For three years Tamara was his mistress, until he was twenty.

10

In the third year of college Breavman left his house. He and Krantz took a couple of rooms downtown on Stanley Street.

When Breavman informed his mother that he intended to spend several nights a week downtown she seemed to accept the fact calmly.

“You can use a toaster, can’t you. We have an extra toaster.”

“Thank you, Mother.”

“And cutlery, you’ll need cutlery.”

“Not really, we’re not going to do any serious cooking….”

“You’ll need plenty of cutlery, Lawrence.”

She went from drawer to drawer in the kitchen selecting items and heaping them on the table before him.

“Mother, I don’t need an egg-beater.”

“How do you know?”

She emptied a drawer of silver fish forks on the table. She struggled with the string drawer but she couldn’t get it out. “Mother, this is ridiculous.”

“Take everything.”

He followed her into the living-room. Now she was above him, tottering in a soft chair, trying to keep her balance, while at the same time unhooking some heavy embroidered curtains.

“What are you doing?”

“What do I need in an empty house? Take everything!”

She kicked the fallen curtains towards him and tripped in the folds. Breavman ran to help her. She seemed so heavy.

“Get away, what do I need, take everything!”

“Stop this, Mother, please.”

On the way up the stairs she tore a Persian miniature mounted on velvet from its hook and thrust it at him.

“You have walls down there, don’t you?”

“Please go to bed, Mother.”

She began to empty the linen closet, heaving piles of sheets and blankets at his feet. Standing on tip-toe she tugged at a stack of tablecloths. One unfolded as she pulled and fell about her like a ghost’s costume. She thrashed inside it. He tried to help her but she fought him from under the linen.

He stepped back and watched her struggle, a numbness invading his whole body.

When she had freed herself she carefully spread the tablecloth on the floor and crawled from corner to corner folding it. Her hair was disarrayed and she couldn’t catch her breath.

He followed each of her movements with intense dual concentration. He folded it ten times in his mind before she kneeled in triumph beside the immaculate white rectangle.

11

The house had been built at the beginning of the century. There were still some coloured panes in the window. The city had installed modern fluorescent street-lamps on Stanley, which cast a ghostly yellow light. Shining through the blue and green Victorian glass the result was intense artificial moonlight and the flesh of any woman looked fresh and out-of-doors.

His guitar was always handy. The cedar wood was cool against his stomach. The inside of the guitar smelled like the cigar boxes his father used to have. The tone was excellent in the middle of the night. In those late hours the purity of the music surprised and almost convinced him that he was creating a sacramental relationship with the girl, the outside city, and himself.

Breavman and Tamara were cruel to each other. They used infidelity as a weapon for pain and an incentive for passion. And they kept returning to the bed on Stanley Street and the strange light which seemed to repair the innocence of their bodies. There they would lie for hours, unable to touch or speak. Sometimes he would be able to comfort her and sometimes she him. They used their bodies but that became more and more difficult. They were living off each other, had tubes to each other’s guts. The reasons were too deep and original for him to discover.

He remembers terrible silences and crying he couldn’t come close to. There was nothing he could do, least of all get dressed and leave. He hated himself for hurting her and he hated her for smothering him.

He should have kept running that bright morning.

She made him helpless. They made each other helpless.

Breavman let Tamara see some notes of a long story he was writing. The characters in it were named Tamara and Lawrence and it took place in a room.

“How ardent you are!” Tamara said theatrically. “Tonight you are my ardent lover. Tonight we are sentry and animals, birds and lizards, slime and marble. Tonight we are glorious and degraded, knighted and crushed, beautiful and disgusting. Sweat is perfume. Gasps are bells. I wouldn’t trade this for the ravages of the loveliest swan. This is why I must have come to you in the first place. This is why I must have left the others, the hundreds who tried to stay my ankle with crippled hands as I sped to you.”

“Horseshit,” I said.

She eased herself out of my arms’ clasp and stood on the bed. I thought of the thighs of stone colossi but I didn’t say anything.

She stretched out her arms shoulder high.

“Christ of the Andes,” she proclaimed.

I kneeled below her and nuzzled her delta.

“Heal me, heal me.” I mimicked a prayer.

“Heal me yourself.” She laughed and collapsed over me, her face finally resting on my belly.

When we were quiet I said, “Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.”

She swung her legs on to the floor, danced over to the table and lit the candle in my tin Mexican candelabra. Holding the light over her head like a religious banner she danced back to the bedside and took my hand.

“Come with me, my beast, my swan,” she canted. “The mirror, eunuchs, the mirror!”

We stood before the mirror.

“Who shall say we are not beautiful?” she challenged.

“Yeah.”

For a minute or two we inspected our bodies. She put the candelabra down. We embraced.

“Life has not passed us by,” she said with imitation nostalgia.

“Ah. Alas. Sorrow. Moon. Love.”

I tried to be funny. I hoped that our sentimental hoaxing would not lead her to reflect in earnest. That was a process I couldn’t take.

I sat on a chair in front of the window and she sat on my lap.

“We are lovers,” she began, as if she were stating geometry axioms before attempting the proposition. “If one of those people down there were to look up, someone with very good eyes, he would see a naked woman held by a naked man. That person would be immediately aroused, wouldn’t he? The way we become aroused when we read a provoking sexual description in a novel.”

I winced at the word sexual. There is no word more inappropriate to lovers.

“And that is the way,” she went on, “most lovers try to look at one another, even after they have been intimate for a long time.”

Intimate. That was another of those words.

“It’s a great mistake,” she said. “The thrill of the forbidden, the thrill of the naughty is quickly expended and lovers are soon bored with one another. Their sexual identities become more and more vague until they are lost altogether.”

“What’s the alternative?” She was beginning to get me.

“It’s to make that which is permitted, thrilling. The lover must totally familiarize himself with his beloved. He must know her every movement: the motion of her buttocks when she walks, the direction of every tiny earthquake when she heaves her chest, the way her thighs spread like lava when she sits down. He must know the sudden coil her stomach makes just before the brink of climax, each orchard of hair, blonde and black, the path of pores on the nose, the chart of vessels in her eyes. He must know her so completely that she becomes, in effect, his own creation. He has moulded the shape of her limbs, distilled her smell. This is the only successful kind of sexual love: the love of the creator for his creation. In other words, the love of the creator for himself. This love can never change.”

Her voice became more and more charged as she spoke. She delivered the last words in a kind of frenzy. I had ceased to caress her. Her clinical terms nearly sickened me.

“What is the matter?” she said. “Why have you stopped holding me?”

“Why must you always do this? I’ve just made love to you. Isn’t that enough? Do you have to begin an operation, an autopsy? Sexual, intimate, distil – Jesus Christ! I don’t want to memorize everything. I want to be surprised every once in a while. Where are you going?”

She stood before me. The candlelight sketched her mouth hardened with anger.

“Surprised! You’re a fool. Like a dozen other men I’ve had. Who wanted to make love in the dark, in silence, eyes bound, ears stuffed. Men who tired of me and I of them. And you fly off because I want something different for us. You don’t know the difference between creation and masturbation. And there is a difference. You didn’t understand a thing I said.”

“Double-talk,” I shouted, “double-talk, touble-dock.”

I spluttered and covered my face. How had I come to be in this room?

“We don’t know what we’re saying,” she said, the anger gone.

“Why couldn’t you just lie in my arms?”

“Oh, you’re hopeless!” she snapped. “Where are my things?”

I watched her dress, my mind a blank, numb. She dressed, covering her flesh one area after the other, and the numbness grew and got my throat like a wind of ether. It seemed to dissolve my skin and blur me with the air of the room.

She walked to the door. I waited for the noise of the latch. She paused, her hand on the knob.

“Stay. Please.”

She ran to me and we hugged. The texture of her clothes felt funny against my skin. She wet my neck and cheek with tears.

“We haven’t the time to hurt each other,” she whispered.

“Don’t cry.”

“We can’t tire of one another.”

During her grief I got hold of myself again. I’ve noted many times during my life that only when faced with extremes of emotion in others can I confirm my own stability. Her grief restored me, made me manly and compassionate.

I led her to the bed.

“You are beautiful,” I said. “You always will be.”

Soon she fell asleep in my arms. Her body was heavier than it had been. She seemed laden and swollen with sorrow. I dreamed of a huge cloak thrown on my shoulders from a weeping man in a flying cart.

In the morning she had left, as usual, before I awakened. Tamara read it carefully.

“But I don’t talk that way,” she said softly.

“Neither do I,” said Breavman.

The act of writing had been completed when he handed her the manuscript. He no longer felt ownership.

“But you do, Larry. You talk like both characters.”

“All right, I talk like both characters.”

“Please don’t get angry. I’m trying to understand why you wrote it.”

They were lying in the eternal room on Stanley Street. The fluorescent lights across the street provided moonlight.

“I don’t care why I wrote it. I just wrote it, that’s all.”

“And gave it to me.”

“Yes.”

“Why? You knew it would hurt me.”

“You’re supposed to be interested in my work.”

“Oh, Larry, you know that I am.”

“Well, that’s why I gave it to you.”

“We don’t seem to be able to talk.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Nothing.”

The silence began. The bed became like a prison surrounded by electric wires. He couldn’t get off it or even move. He was gnawed by the notion that this was where he belonged, right on this bed, bandaged with silence. It was what he deserved, all he was fit for.

He told himself that he should just open his mouth and speak. Simple. Just say words. Break up the silence with any remark. Talk about the story. If only he could assault the silence. Then they could make warm and friendly love and talk like strangers right up to morning.

“Was it to tell me that you want to end it between us?”

She’s made a brave attempt. Now I must try to answer her. I’ll tell her I wanted to challenge her love with a display of venom. She’ll say, Oh that’s what I wanted to hear, and she’ll hug me to prove that the venom failed.

All I have to do is force open my teeth, operate the hinges of my jaw, vibrate vocal chords. One word will do it. One word will wedge into the silence and split it open.

“Just try to say something, Larry. I know it’s hard.”

Any noise, Breavman, any noise, any noise, any noise.

Using his brain like a derrick, he lifted his twenty-ton hand and lowered it on her breast. He sent his fingers through buttonholes. Her skin made the tips of his fingers warm. He loved her for being warm.

“Oh, come here,” she said.

They undressed as if they were being chased. He tried to make up for his silence with his tongue and teeth. She had to put his face gently away from her nipple. He praised her loins with a conversation of moans.

“Please say something this time.”

He knew if he touched her face he would feel tears. He lay still. He didn’t think he ever wanted to move again. He was ready to stay that way for days, catatonic.

She moved to touch him and her motion released him like a spring. This time she didn’t stop him. She resigned herself to his numbness. He said everything he could with his body.

They lay quietly.

“Do you feel O.K.?” he said, and suddenly he was talking his head off.

He rehearsed all his plans for obscure glory and they laughed. He told her poems and they decided he was going to be great. She pitied him for his courage as he described the demons on his shoulders.

“Get away, you dirty old things.” She kissed his neck.

“Some on my stomach, too.”

After a while Tamara fell asleep. That was what he had been talking against. Her sleeping seemed like a desertion. It always happened when he felt most awake. He was ready to make immortal declarations.

Her hand rested on his arm like snow on a leaf, ready to slip off when he moved.

He lay beside her, an insomniac with visions of vastness. He thought of desert stretches so huge no Chosen People could cross them. He counted grains of sand like sheep and he knew his job would last forever. He thought of aeroplane views of wheatlands so high he couldn’t see which way the wind was bending the stalks. Arctic territories and sled-track distances.

Miles he would never cover because he could never abandon this bed.

12

Still Breavman and Krantz often used to drive through the whole night. They’d listen to pop tunes on the local stations or classics from the United States. They’d head north to the Laurentians or east to the Townships.

Breavman imagined the car they were in as seen from above. A small black pellet hurtling across the face of the earth. Free as a meteor and maybe as doomed.

They fled past fields of blue snow. The icy crust kept a stroke of moonlight the way rippled water does. The heater was going full blast. They had nowhere to be in the morning, only lectures and that didn’t count. Everything above the snow was black – trees, shacks, whole villages.

Moving at that speed they were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. They knew the land was old, the mountains the most ancient on earth. They covered it all at eighty miles an hour.

There was something disdainful in their speed, disdainful of the eons it took the mountains to smooth out, of the generations of muscle which had cleared the fields, of the labour which had gone into the modern road they rolled on. They were aware of the disdain. The barbarians must have ridden Roman highways with the same feeling. We have the power now. Who cares what went before?

And there was something frightened in their speed. Back in the city their families were growing like vines. Mistresses were teaching a sadness no longer lyrical but claustrophobic. The adult community was insisting that they choose an ugly particular from the range of beautiful generalities. They were flying from their majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine.

They spoke gently to the French girls in the diners where they stopped. They were so pathetic, false-toothed and frail. They’d forget them in the next twenty miles. What were they doing behind the Arborite counters? Dreaming of Montreal neon?

The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever. It elated Breavman. He’d say, “Krantz, all they’ll ever find of us is a streak of oil on the garage floor without even rainbows in it.” Lately Krantz had been very silent, but Breavman was certain he was thinking the same things. Everyone they knew or who loved them was sleeping miles behind the exhaust. If the radio music was rock-and-roll, they understood the longing of it; if it was Handel, they understood the majesty.

At some point in these rides Breavman would proposition himself like this: Breavman, you’re eligible for many diverse experiences in this best of all possible worlds. There are many beautiful poems which you will write and be praised for, many desolate days when you won’t be able to lay pen to paper. There will be many lovely cunts to lie in, different colours of skin to kiss, various orgasms to encounter, and many nights you will walk out your lust, bitter and alone. There will be many heights of emotion, intense sunsets, exalting insights, creative pain, and many murderous plateaux of indifference where you won’t even own your personal despair. There will be many good hands of power you can play with ruthlessness or benevolence, many vast skies to lie under and congratulate yourself on humility, many galley rides of suffocating slavery. This is what waits for you. Now, Breavman, here is the proposition. Let us suppose that you could spend the rest of your life exactly as you are at this very minute, in this car hurtling towards brush country, at this precise stop on the road beside a row of white guide posts, always going past these posts at eighty, this juke-box song of rejection pumping, this particular sky of clouds and stars, your mind including this immediate cross-section of memory – which would you choose? Fifty-more years of this car ride, or fifty more of achievement and failure?

And Breavman never hesitated in his choice.

Let it go on as it is right now. Let the speed never diminish. Let the snow remain. Let me never be removed from this partnership with my friend. Let us never find different things to do. Let us never evaluate one another. Let the moon stay on one side of the road. Let the girls be a gold blur in my mind, like the haze of the moon, or the neon glow above the city. Let the compounded electric guitar keep throbbing under the declaration:

When I lost my baby

I almost lost my mind.

Let the edges of the hills be just about to brighten. Let the trees never fuzz with leaves. Let the black towns sleep in one long night like Lesbia’s lover. Let the monks in the half-built monasteries remain on their knees in the 4 a.m. Latin prayer. Let Pat Boone stand on the highest rung of the Hit Parade and tell all the factory night shifts:

I went to see the gypsy

To have my fortune read.

Let snow always dignify the auto graveyards on the road to Ayer’s Cliff. Let the nailed shacks of apple vendors never show polished apples and hints of cider.

But let me remember what I remember of orchards. Let me keep my tenth of a second’s worth of fantasy and recollection, showing all the layers like a geologist’s sample. Let the Caddie or the VW run like a charm, let it go like a bomb, let it blast. Let the tune make the commercial wait forever.

I can tell you, people,

The news was not so good.

The news is great. The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad. Pat is doing all my poems for me. He’s got lines to a million people. It’s all I wanted to say. He’s distilled the sorrow, glorified it in an echo chamber. I don’t need my typewriter. It’s not the piece of luggage I suddenly remembered I forgot. No pencils, ball-pens, pad. I don’t even want to draw in the mist on the windshield. I can make up sagas in my head all the way to Baffin Island but I don’t have to write them down. Pat, you’ve snitched my job, but you’re such a good guy, old-time American success, naïve big winner, that it’s okay. The pr men have convinced me that you are a humble kid. I can’t resent you. My only criticism is: be more desperate, try and sound more agonized or we’ll have to get a Negro to replace you:

She said my baby’s left me

And she’s gone for good.

Don’t let the guitars slow down like locomotive wheels. Don’t let the man at CKVL tell me what I’ve just been listening to. Sweet sounds, reject me not. Let the words go on like the landscape we’re never driving out of.

gone for good

O.K., let the last syllable endure. This is the tenth of a second I’ve traded all the presidencies for. The telephone poles are playing intricate games of Cat’s Cradle with the rushing wires. The snow is piled like the Red Sea on either side of our fenders. We’re not expected and we’re not missed. We put all our money in the gas tank, we’re fat as camels in the Sahara. The hurtling car, the trees, the moon and its light on the fields of snow, the resigned grinding chords of the tune – everything is poised in perfection for the quick freeze, the eternal case in the astral museum.

good

So long, mister, mistress, rabbi, doctor. ’Bye. Don’t forget your salesman’s bag of adventure samples. My friend and I, we’ll stay right here – on our side of the speed limit. Won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz, won’t we, Krantz?

“Want to stop for a hamburger?” says Krantz as though he were musing on an abstract theory.

“Now or one of these days?”

13

Breavman and Tamara were white. Everybody else on the beach had a long summer tan. Krantz was positively bronze.

“I feel extra naked,” said Tamara, “as if I had taken off a layer of skin with my clothes. I wish they’d take off theirs.”

They relaxed on the hot sand while Krantz supervised the General Swim. He sat on a white-painted wooden tower, megaphone in one hand, whistle in the other.

The water was silver with thrashing bodies. His whistle pierced the cries and laughter and suddenly the waterfront was silent. At his command the campers paired off, lifting their joined hands out of the water at their turns.

Then, in succession, the counsellors posted along the docks snapped, “Check!” A hundred and fifty children kept still. The safety check over, Krantz blew his whistle again and the general din was resumed.

Krantz in the role of disciplinarian surprised Breavman. He knew Krantz had worked many summers at a children’s camp, but he always thought of him (now that he examined it) as one of the children, or let’s say, the best child, devising grand nocturnal tricks, first figure of a follow-the-leader game through the woods.

But here he was, master of the beach, bronze and squint-eyed, absolute. Children and water obeyed him. Stopping and starting the noise and laughter and splashing with the whistle blast, Krantz seemed to be cutting into the natural progression of time like a movie frozen into a single image and then released to run again. Breavman had never suspected him of that command.

Breavman and Tamara were city-white, and it separated them from the brown bodies as if they were second-rate harmless lepers.

Breavman was surprised to discover on Tamara’s thigh a squall of tiny gold hairs. Her black hair was loose and the intense sun picked out metallic highlights.

It wasn’t just that they were white – they were white together, and their whiteness seemed to advertise some daily unclean indoor ritual which they shared.

“When the Negroes take over,” Breavman said, “this is the way we’re going to feel all the time.”

“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”

They both stared at him, as if for the first time.

Perhaps it was this curious fracturing of time of Krantz’s whistle that removed Breavman into the slow-motion movie which was always running somewhere in his mind.

He is watching himself from a long way off. The whistle has silenced the water-play. Even the swallows seem motionless, poised, pinned at the top of ladders of air.

This part of the film is overexposed. It hurts his eyes to remember but he loves to stare.

Overexposed and double-exposed. The Laurentian summer sun is behind every image, turning one to silhouette, another to shining jelly transparency.

The diver is Krantz. Here he is folded in a jackknife in the air above the water, half silver, half black. The splash rises slowly around the disappearing feet like feathers out of a black crater.

A cheer goes up from the children as he climbs up on the dock. All his movements have an intensity, the smallest gesture a quality of power, close-up size. The children surround him and try to touch his wet shoulders.

“But isn’t Krantz marvellous?”

Now Krantz is running toward his friends, sand sticking to his soles. He is smiling a welcome.

Now Tamara is not touching Breavman, she had been lying close to him, but now nothing of her is touching.

She stands automatically and Krantz’s eyes and her eyes, they invade the screen and change from welcome to surprise to question to desire – here the picture is stopped dead and pockmarked by suns – and now they annihilate all the bodies on the sand, for an enduring fraction they are rushing only to each other.

The swallows fall naturally and the ordinary chaos returns as Krantz laughs.

“It’s about time you people paid me a visit.”

The three of them hugged and talked wildly.

14

Tamara and Breavman graduated from college. There was no longer any framework around their battered union, so down it came. They were lucky the parting was not bitter. They were both fed up with pain. Each had slept with about a dozen people and they had used every name as a weapon. It was a torture-list of friends and enemies.

They parted over a table in a coffee-shop. You could get wine in teacups if you knew the proprietress and asked in French.

All along he had known that he never knew her and never would. Adoration of thighs is not enough. He never cared who Tamara was, only what she represented. He confessed this to her and they talked for three hours.

“I’m sorry, Tamara. I want to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave my brand, make them beautiful. I want to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to any more.”

She loved the way he talked.

They returned to the room on Stanley, unofficially, from time to time. A twenty-year-old can be very tender to an ancient mistress.

“I know I never saw you. I blur everyone in my personal vision. I never get their own music….”

After a while her psychiatrist thought it would be better if she didn’t see him again.

15

Breavman won a scholarship to do graduate work in English at Columbia but he decided not to take it.

“Oh no, Krantz, nothing smells more like a slaughterhouse than a graduate seminar. People sitting around tables in small classrooms, their hands bloody with commas. They get older and the ages of the poets remain the same, twenty-three, twenty-five, nineteen.”

“That gives you four years at the outside, Breavman.”

His book of Montreal sketches appeared and was well received. He started seeing it on the bookshelves of his friends and relatives and he resented their having it. It was none of their business how Tamara’s breasts looked in the artificial moonlight of Stanley Street.

Canadians are desperate for a Keats. Literary meetings are the manner in which Anglophiles express passion. He read his sketches for small societies, large college groups, enlightened church meetings. He slept with as many pretty chairwomen as he could. He gave up conversation. He merely quoted himself. He could maintain an oppressive silence at a dinner-table to make the lovely daughter of the house believe he was brooding over her soul.

The only person he could joke with was Krantz.

The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.

He walked with pale blonde girls along Westmount Boulevard. He told them he saw the stone houses as ruins. He hinted that they could fulfil themselves through him. He could lean against a fireplace with all the ambiguous tragedy of a blind Samson against the temple pillars.

Among certain commercial Jews he was considered a mild traitor who could not be condemned outright. They were dismayed by the possibility that he might make a financial success out of what he was doing. This their ulcers resented. His name was in the newspapers. He might not be an ideal member of the community but neither was Disraeli or Mendelssohn, whose apostasies the Jewish regard for attainment has always overlooked. Also, writing is an essential part of the Jewish tradition and even the degraded contemporary situation cannot suppress it. A respect for books and artistry will persist for another generation or two. It can’t go on forever without being reconsecrated.

Among certain Gentiles he was suspect for other reasons. His Semitic barbarity hidden under the cloak of Art, he was intruding on their cocktail rituals. They were pledged to Culture (like all good Canadians) but he was threatening the blood purity of their daughters. They made him feel as vital as a Negro. He engaged stockbrokers in long conversations about over-breeding and the loss of creative vitality. He punctuated his speech with Yiddish expressions which he never thought of using anywhere else. In their living-rooms, for no reason at all, he often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.

He incorporated Sherbrooke Street into his general domain. He believed he understood its elegant sadness better than anyone else in the city. Whenever he went into one of the stores he always remembered that he was standing in what was once the drawing-room of a smart town house. He breathed a historical sigh for the mansions become brewery and insurance head offices. He sat on the steps of the museum and watched the chic women float into dress shops or walk their rich dogs in front of the Ritz. He watched people line up for buses, board, and zoom away. He always found that a mystery. He walked into lavatory-like new banks and wondered what everyone was doing there. He stared at pediments of carved grapevines. Gargoyles on the brown stone church. Intricate wooden balconies just east of Park. The rose window of another church spiked to prevent pigeons from roosting. All the old iron, glass, rock.

He had no plans for the future.

Early one morning he and Krantz (they hadn’t gone to bed the night before) sat on a low stone wall at the corner of Mackay and Sherbrooke and admonished the eight-thirty working-day crowds.

“The jig is up,” Breavman shouted. “It’s all over. Go back to your homes. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to your homes. Return to bed. Can’t you see it’s all done with?”

“Consummatum est,” Krantz said.

Later Breavman said, “You don’t really believe it, do you, Krantz?”

“Not as thoroughly as you.”

No plans for the future.

He could lay his hand on a low-cut gown and nobody minded. He was a kind of mild Dylan Thomas, talent and behaviour modified for Canadian tastes.

He felt as though he had masturbated on television. He was bereft of privacy, restraint, discretion.

“Do you know what I am, Krantz?”

“Yes, and don’t recite the catalogue.”

“A stud for unhappy women. A twilight peeper of Victorian ruins. A middle-class connoisseur of doomed union songs. A race-haunted exhibitionist forever waving my circumcision. A lap-dog who laps.”

Therefore, according to the traditions of his class, he did penance through manual labour.

On one of his walks around the Montreal waterfront he passed a brass foundry, a small firm which manufactured bathroom fixtures. A window was open and he looked inside.

The air was smoke-filled. Loud incessant noise of machinery. Against the wall were hills of mud-coloured sand. At the far end of the foundry stone crucibles glowed in sunken furnaces. The men were covered with grime. They heaved heavy sand moulds. Through the smoke they looked like figures in one of those old engravings of Purgatorio.

Then a red-hot crucible was raised out of the furnace by a pulley system and swung towards the row of moulds. It was lowered to the ground and the slag scooped off the surface.

Now a huge man wearing an asbestos apron and goggles took over. He guided the crucible over to the moulds. With a lever device he tilted the stone pot and poured the molten brass into the lead-holes of the moulds.

Breavman gasped at the brightness of the liquid metal. It was the colour gold should be. It was as beautiful as flesh. It was the colour of gold he thought of when he read the word in prayers or poems. It was yellow, alive and screaming. It poured out in an arch with smoke and white sparks. He watched the man move up and down the rows, dispensing this glory. He looked like a monolithic idol. No, he was a true priest.

That was the job he wanted but that wasn’t what he got. He became a core-wire puller. Unskilled. Pay was seventy-five cents an hour. The hours were seven-thirty to five-thirty, half-hour for lunch.

The size of the core determines the size of the hole running through the faucets. It is made of baked sand packed along a length of wire. It is placed between the two halves of the mould, and the brass flows around it, creating the hole. When the moulds are broken up and the rough-cast faucets extracted they still contain the wire on which the cores were suspended.

His job was to pull these wires out. He sat on a box not far from the long, low roller tables on which the moulds were placed for filling. Beside him was a heap of hot faucets with these core-wires sticking out from the ends. He seized one with his left gloved hand and yanked out the twisted wire with a pair of pliers.

He pulled several thousand wires a week. The only time he stopped was to watch the pouring of the brass. It turned out that the moulder was a Negro. It was impossible to tell with the grime on everybody’s face. Now there’s a heroic proletarian tale if he ever heard one.

Pull your wire, Breavman.

The beauty of the brass never diminished.

He took his place in the fire and smoke and sand. The foundry was not air-conditioned, thank heaven. His hands grew callouses which were ordinary to working girls but they were stroked like medals by others.

He sat on his box and looked around. He had come to the right place. Chopping machines and the roar of furnaces were exactly the right music to purge. Sweat and mud on a man’s pimpled back was a picture to give perspective to flesh. The air was foul: the intake of breath after a nostalgic sigh coated your throat with scum. The view of old men and young men condemned to their sandpiles added an excellent dimension to his vision of lambs, beasts, and little children. The roof windows let in shafts of dirty sunlight which were eventually lost in the general fumes. They laboured in a gloom tinted red by the fires. He had become an integrated figure in the inferno engraving which he had glimpsed a few weeks before.

The firm was not unionized. He thought about contacting the appropriate union and helping to organize the place. But that wasn’t why he had come. He’d come for boredom and penance. He introduced an Irish immigrant to Walt Whitman and talked him into going to a night school. That was the extent of his social work.

The boredom was killing. Manual labour did not free his mind to wander at will. It numbed his mind, but the anaesthesia was not sufficiently potent to deliver it from awareness. It could still recognize its bondage. He would suddenly realize that he had been chanting the same tune over and over for the last hour. Each wire represented a small crisis and each extraction a small triumph. He could not overlook this absurdity.

The more bored he became the more inhuman was the beauty of the brass. It was too bright to look at. You needed goggles. It was too hot to stand close to. You needed an apron. Many times a day he watched the metal being poured, feeling the heat even where he sat. The arch of liquid came to represent an intensity he would never achieve.

He punched the clock every morning for a year.

16

His friend was leaving Montreal to study in England.

“But, Krantz, it’s Montreal you’re leaving, Montreal on the very threshold of greatness, like Athens, like New Orleans.”

“The Frogs are vicious,” he said, “the Jews are vicious, the English are absurd.”

“That’s why we’re great, Krantz. The cross-fertilization.”

“Okay, Breavman, you stay here to chronicle the Renaissance.”

It was an early summer evening on Stanley Street. Breavman had been in the foundry for a month. The strolling girls had their bare arms on.

“Krantz, the arms, the bosoms, the buttocks, O lovely catalogue!”

“They’ve certainly come out.”

“Krantz, do you know why Sherbrooke Street is so bloody beautiful?”

“Because you want to get laid.”

Breavman thought for a second.

“You’re right, Krantz.”

It was great to be back in the dialogue with Krantz; he hadn’t seen him very much in the past few weeks.

But he knew the street was beautiful for other reasons. Because you’ve stores and people living in the same buildings. When you’ve got only stores, especially modern-fronted ones, there is a terrible stink of cold money-grabbing. When you’ve got only houses, or rather when the houses get too far from the stores, they exude some poisonous secret, like a plantation or an abattoir.

But what Krantz said was true. No, not laid. Beauty at close quarters.

A half-block up, a girl turned down to Sherbrooke. She was strolling alone.

“Remember, Krantz, three years ago we would have followed her with all kinds of fleshly dreams.”

“And fled if she ever looked back.”

The girl ahead of them walked under a lamplight, the light sliding down the folds of her hair. Breavman began to whistle “Lili Marlene.”

“Krantz, we’re walking into a European movie. You and me are old officers walking along to something important. Sherbrooke is a ruin. Why does it feel like a war just ended?”

“Because you want to get laid.”

“C’mon, Krantz, give me a chance.”

“Breavman, if I gave you a chance, you’d weep through every summer night.”

“Do you know what I’m going to do, Krantz? I’m going to walk up to that girl and be very gentle and polite and ask her to join us for a small walk over the world.”

“You do that, Breavman.”

He quickened his pace and moved beside her. This would be it. All the compassion of strangers. She turned her face and looked at him.

“Excuse me,” he said and stopped. “Mistake.”

She walked away and he waited for Krantz to catch up.

“She was a beast, Krantz. We couldn’t have toasted her. She wasn’t all that is beautiful in women.”

“It’s not our night.”

“There’s lots of night left.”

“I’ve got to get up early for the boat.”

But they did not go right back to Stanley. They walked slowly up the streets towards home: University, Metcalfe, Peel, MacTavish. Named for the distinguished from the British Isles. They passed by the stone houses and the black iron fences. Many of the houses had been taken over by the university or turned into boarding-houses, but here and there a colonel or a lady still lived, manicured the lawns and bushes, still climbed the stone steps as if all the neighbours were peers. They wandered through the campus of the university. Night, like time, gave all the buildings a deep dignity. There was the library with its crushing cargo of words, dark and stone.

“Krantz, let’s get out of here. The buildings are starting to claim me.”

“I know what you mean, Breavman.”

As they walked back to Stanley, Breavman was no longer in a movie. All he wanted to do was turn to Krantz and wish him luck, all the luck in the world. There was nothing else to say to a person.

The taxis were beginning to pile up in front of the tourist houses. Half a block down you could get whisky in coffee cups at a blind pig disguised as a bridge club. They watched the taximen making U-turns in the one-way street: friends of the police. They knew all the landladies and store owners and waitresses. They were citizens of downtown. And Krantz was taking off like a big bird.

“You know, Breavman, you’re not Montreal’s suffering servant.”

“Of course I am. Can’t you see me, crucified on a maple tree at the top of Mount Royal? The miracles are just beginning to happen. I have just enough breath to tell them, ‘I told you so, you cruel bastards.’”

“Breavman, you’re a schmuck.”

And soon their dialogue would be broken. They stood on the balcony in silence, watching the night-doings get into gear.

“Krantz, do I have anything to do with you leaving?”

“A little.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We’ve got to stop interpreting the world for one another.”

“Yes … yes.”

The buildings were so familiar and the street so well known. Even Gautama wept when he lost a friend. Nothing would be the same tomorrow. He could hardly bear to understand that. Krantz wouldn’t be there. That would be like a bulldozer turned loose in the heart of the city. They weren’t the kind of people that wrote letters to each other.

Krantz took a long glance around him. “Yup,” he said, like an old farmer in a rocking chair.

“Yup,” Breavman agreed over nothing.

“Just about time,” said Krantz.

“Good night, Krantz.”

“Good night, old Breavman.”

He smiled and clasped his friend’s hand.

“Good night, old Krantz,” and they joined four hands and then went into their separate rooms.

17

Montreal was madly buying records of Leadbelly and the Weavers and rushing down to Gesu Hall in mink coats to hear Pete Seeger sing socialist songs. Breavman was at the party by virtue of his reputation as a folk singer and minor celebrity. The hostess had subtly suggested on the phone that he bring his guitar, but he didn’t. He hadn’t touched it for months.

“Larry! It’s so good to see you; it’s been years!”

“You look beautiful, Lisa.”

With his first glance of appreciation he claimed her, because of the street they had lived on, because he knew the whiteness of her, because her skipping body was bound to his by red string. She lowered her eyes.

“Thank you, Larry. And you’ve managed to become famous.”

“Hardly famous, but it’s a good word.”

“We saw you interviewed on TV last week.”

“In this country writers are interviewed on TV for one reason only: to give the rest of the nation a good laugh.”

“Everybody says you’re very clever.”

“Everybody is a vicious gossip.”

He brought her a drink and they talked. She told him about her children, two boys, and they exchanged information about their families. Her husband was on a business trip. He and her father were opening automatic bowling alleys right across the country. Knowing she was alone launched Breavman’s fantasies. Of course she was alone, of course he had met her that specific night, she would be delivered to him.

“Lisa, now that you have children, do you ever think about your own childhood?”

“I always used to promise myself that when I grew up I’d remember exactly how it was, and treat my children from that viewpoint.”

“And do you?”

“It’s very hard. You’d be surprised how much you forget and how little time there is to remember. Usually you act right on the spot and hope your decision is the best one.”

“Do you remember Bertha?” was the first of the questions he meant to ask.

“Yes, but didn’t she –”

“Do you remember me?”

“Of course.”

“What was I like?”

“I suppose you’d be annoyed if I said you were like any other ten-year-old boy. I don’t know, Larry. You were a nice boy.”

“Do you remember the Soldier and the Whore?”

“What?”

“Do you remember my green pants?”

“You’re getting silly….”

“I wish you remembered everything.”

“Why? If we remembered everything we’d never be able to do anything.”

“If you remembered what I remember you’d be in bed with me right now,” he said blindly.

Lisa was kind, wise, or interested enough not to make a joke of what he said.

“No, I wouldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t. I’m too selfish or scared or prudish, or whatever it is, to risk what I’ve got. I want to keep everything I have.”

“So do I. I don’t want to forget anyone I was ever connected with.”

“You don’t have to. Especially me. I’m glad I met you tonight. You have to come over and meet Carl and the children. Carl reads a lot, I’m sure you’d enjoy talking to him.”

“The last thing I intend to do is talk books with anybody, even Carl. I want to sleep with you. It’s very simple.”

He had intended by his recklessness to reach her quickly and disarm her, but he succeeded only in making the conversation fashionable.

“It’s not simple for me. I’m not trying to be funny. Why do you want to sleep with me?”

“Because we once held hands.”

“And that’s a reason?”

“Humans are lucky to be connected in any way at all, even by the table between them.”

“But you can’t be connected to everyone. It wouldn’t mean anything then.”

“It would to me.”

“But is going to bed the only way a man and woman can be connected?”

Breavman replied in terms of the flirtation, not out of his real experience.

“What else is there? Conversation? I’m in the business and I have no faith in words whatever. Friendship? A friendship between a man and a woman which is not based on sex is either hypocrisy or masochism. When I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Any thing else is fiction. That’s the vocabulary we speak in today. It’s the only language left.”

“Then it’s a language which nobody understands. It’s just become a babble.”

“Better than silence. Lisa, let’s get out of here. Any moment now someone’s going to ask why I didn’t bring my guitar, and I’m liable to smash him in the mouth. Let’s talk over coffee, somewhere.”

She shook her head gently. “No.”

It was the best no he ever heard because it had in it dignity, appreciation, and firm denial. It claimed him and ended the game. He was content now to talk, watch her, and wonder just as he had when the young men in white scarves had taken her away in their long cars.

“I’ve never heard that word spoken better.”

“I thought it was what you wanted to hear.”

“How did you get so damn wise?”

“Look out, Larry.”

“Look what we found.” The hostess beamed. Several guests had followed her over.

“I’ve never heard you play,” Lisa said. “I’d like to.”

He took the unfamiliar guitar and tuned it. The record-player was turned off and everyone drew chairs around or sat on the thick carpet.

It was a good Spanish instrument, very light wood, resonant bass strings. He hadn’t held a guitar for months but as soon as he struck the first chord (A minor) he was happy he’d agreed to play.

The first chord is always crucial for him. Sometimes it sounds tinny, bland, and the best thing he can do is put the instrument away, because the tone never improves and all his inventions jingle like commercials. This happens when he approaches the instrument without the proper respect or affection. It rebukes him like a complying frigid woman.

But there are those good times when the tone is deep and lingering, and he cannot believe it is himself who is strumming the strings. He watches the intricate blur of his right hand and the ballet-fingers of his left hand stepping between the frets, and he wonders what connection there is between all that movement and the music in the air, which seems to come from the wood itself.

It was like that when he played and sang only for Lisa. He sang the Spanish Civil War songs, not as a partisan, but as a Tiresian historian. He sang the minor songs of absence, thinking of Donne’s beautiful opening,

Sweetest love! I do not go

For weariness of thee,

which is the essence of any love song. He hardly sang the words, he spoke them. He rediscovered the poetry which had overwhelmed him years before, the easy line that gave itself carelessly away and then, before it was over, struck home.

I’d rather be in some dark valley

Where the sun don’t never shine,

Than to see my true love love another

When I know that she should be mine.

He played for an hour, aiming all the melody at Lisa. While he sang he wanted to untie the red string and let her free. That was the best gift he could give her.

When it was over and he had put the guitar away carefully, as though it contained the finer part of him, Lisa said, “That made me feel more connected to you than anything you said. Please come to our house soon.”

“Thank you.”

Soon he slipped out of the party for a walk on the mountain. He watched the moon and it didn’t move for a long time.

18

Four days later the phone rang at one-thirty in the morning. Breavman bolted for it, happy to break his working schedule. He knew everything she was going to say.

“I didn’t think you’d be asleep,” Lisa said.

“I’m not. But you should be.”

“I’d like to see you.”

“I’d like to see you too, but I’ve got a better idea: put down the telephone and visit each of your children’s rooms and then go to bed.”

“I did that. Twice.”

It was a free country. The old taboos were in disrepute. They were grown up and wouldn’t be called in for supper. She was twenty-odd, wealthy, white, with a fast car and an out-of-town husband, classic commercial widow. He was alone with his insomnia and bad manuscripts.

Breavman, thou false lech, your room hideously empty as your charity smile. I knew she’d be delivered, Krantz.

She broke the silence. “Do you want me to come down?”

“Yes.”

He jammed all his laundry in the closet and hid an egg-caked plate in a stack of clean ones. He sat at his desk and slowly bound up his manuscript, taking an unfamiliar pleasure in the act, as if he now had some special right to condemn the papers.

She was wearing slacks, her black hair was loose, but freshly combed. She brought a clean Laurentian fragrance into the room.

“You smell like you just descended a ski slope.”

He poured her a glass of sherry. In a few minutes he had the whole story. Her husband wasn’t on a trans-Canada trip, opening bowling alleys. He was in Toronto living with some woman, an employee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

“My father has the complete detective report. I didn’t want details.”

“These things happen,” Breavman said, its triteness crushing his last word into a mumble.

Lisa talked and sipped her drink calmly, far from losing the coolness she had carried in. He felt that, along with all her precious things, she had left her emotions at home. She knew that these things happen, she knew that everything happens, and so what?

“He’ll come back.”

Lisa told him with her eyes that her husband didn’t need Breavman’s defence.

“And you love him, Lisa, and your children, and your home. That’s the most obvious thing about you.”

She lowered her eyes and studied the wine glass. He thought she must be remembering the rows of crystal in her own house, comparing the disarray of his room with her own household order. But she had come for revenge, and the more distasteful the conditions, the sweeter. Perhaps she was not lonely, perhaps she was offended.

“I don’t feel like discussing Carl here.”

“I’m glad you came. You made me feel very good the night of the party, the way you listened. I didn’t think I’d ever see you alone again, and I wanted to.”

“The strange thing is that I decided you were the only one I could see.”

Perhaps she could express her revenge with him because he was secret, not part of her life, but not exactly a stranger – like meeting someone from your own town in a foreign place.

So they could sit together, perhaps he could hold her hand, and talk about the curious way things turn out. They could walk along Sherbrooke arm in arm, the end of the summer was coming. He could offer her his company and friendship as solace. Or they could find the bed immediately; there was no in-between.

Wasn’t there only one inevitability, and a weary one at that? He walked to her and kissed her mouth. She stood up and they embraced. They both sensed in that moment the mutual need to annihilate thought and speech. She was tired of the offence. He was tired of wondering why he wanted her body, or any body.

They performed the act of love, as he had many times before, a protest against luck and circumstances. He praised her beauty and the ski slopes that had made her legs so fine.

But he did not sleep with Lisa the child. He did not return to the park where nurses watched the sailor children. He did not build a mysterious garage above her naked form. He made love to a woman. Not Lisa. He knew this as they lay together and talked, finally, about their childhood and city. That contract, interrupted by the Curse, would never be fulfilled. This was a woman with whom he was beginning an affair, perhaps. The child that grew away from him into breasts and long cars and adult cigarettes was not the peaceful woman beside him. That child would evade him and cause him to wonder at her always.

The sun had already risen when she dressed to go.

“Get some rest,” she said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. You’d better not call the house. Never call the house.”

He went to the window to watch her drive away. She rolled down her car window and waved at him, and suddenly they were waving harder and longer than people ever do. She was crying and pressing her palm up at him, back and forth in urgent semaphore, as if to erase out of the morning air, please, all contracts, vows, agreements, old or new. He leaned out of the window and with his signalling hand agreed to let the night go, to let her go free, because he had all he needed of her fixed in an afternoon.

19

Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

This past is not preserved in the buildings or monuments, which fall easily to profit, but in the minds of her citizens. The clothes they wear, the jobs they perform are only the disguises of fashion. Each man speaks with his father’s tongue.

Just as there are no Canadians, there are no Montrealers. Ask a man who he is and he names a race.

So the streets change swiftly, the skyscrapers climb into silhouettes against the St. Lawrence, but it is somehow unreal and no one believes it, because in Montreal there is no present tense, there is only the past claiming victories.

Breavman fled the city.

His mother was phoning him daily. She was alone, did he know what that meant? Her back was sore, her legs were swollen. People asked about her son and she had to tell them he was a factory worker.

Breavman laid the phone on the bed and let her talk. He had no strength or skill to comfort her. He sat beside the receiver, unable to speak or think, aware only of the monotonous rasp of her voice.

“I looked in the mirror today, I didn’t recognize myself, wrinkles from aggravation, from nights thinking about my son, do I deserve this, fifteen years with a sick man, a son who doesn’t care whether his mother lies like a stone, like a dog, a mother, an only mother should lie like a stone, a prostitute wouldn’t stand from her son what I stand, do I have so much, do I eat chocolate all day, have I got diamonds for all that I gave away, fifteen years, did I ever ask anything for myself, two broken legs from Russia, swollen ankles that the doctor was surprised, but my son is too busy to hear the truth, night after night I lie in front of the TV, does anybody care what I do, I was such a happy person, I was a beauty, now I’m ugly, people on the street don’t recognize me, I gave my life for what, I was so good to everyone, a mother, once in a lifetime you have a mother, do we live forever, a mother is a fragile thing, your best friend, in the whole world does anyone else care what happens to you, you can fall down on the street and people pass you by, and I lie like a stone, all over the world people are running to see their mothers, but to my son it doesn’t matter, he can get another mother, one life we have, everything is a dream, it’s luck …”

And when she was through he said, “I hope you’re feeling better, Mother,” and good-bye.

She was seeing a psychiatrist now. He didn’t seem to be helping her. Was she taking the pills he prescribed? Her voice sounded more hysterical.

He fled his mother and his family.

He had thought that his tall uncles in their dark clothes were princes of an élite brotherhood. He had thought the synagogue was their house of purification. He had thought their businesses were realms of feudal benevolence. But he had grown to understand that none of them even pretended to these things. They were proud of their financial and communal success. They liked to be first, to be respected, to sit close to the altar, to be called up to lift the scrolls. They weren’t pledged to any other idea. They did not believe their blood was consecrated. Where had he got the notion that they did?

When he saw the rabbi and cantor move in their white robes, the light on the brocaded letters of their prayer shawls, when he stood among his uncles and bowed with them and joined his voice to theirs in the responses; when he followed in the prayer book the catalogue of magnificence —

No, his uncles were not grave enough. They were strict, not grave. They did not seem to realize how fragile the ceremony was. They participated in it blindly, as if it would last forever. They did not seem to realize how important they were, not self-important, but important to the incantation, the altar, the ritual. They were ignorant of the craft of devotion. They were merely devoted. They never thought how close the ceremony was to chaos. Their nobility was insecure because it rested on inheritance and not moment-to-moment creation in the face of annihilation.

In the most solemn or joyous part of the ritual Breavman knew the whole procedure could revert in a second to desolation. The cantor, the rabbi, the chosen laymen stood before the open Ark, cradling the Torah scrolls, which looked like stiff-necked royal children, and returned them one by one to their golden stall. The beautiful melody soared, which proclaimed that the Law was a tree of life and a path of peace. Couldn’t they see how it had to be nourished? And all these men who bowed, who performed the customary motions, they were unaware that other men had written the sacred tune, other men had developed the seemingly eternal gestures out of clumsy confusion. They took for granted what was dying in their hands.

But why should he care? He wasn’t Isaiah, and the people claimed nothing. He didn’t even like the people or the god of their cult. He had no rights in the matter.

He didn’t want to blame anyone. Why should he feel that they had bred him to a disappointment? He was bitter because he couldn’t inherit the glory they unwittingly advertised. He couldn’t be part of their brotherhood but he wanted to be among them. A nostalgia for solidarity. Why was his father’s pain involved?

He turned away from the city. He had abused the streets with praise. He had expected too much from certain cast-iron fences, special absurd turrets, staircases to the mountain, early-morning views of bridges on the St. Lawrence. He was tired of the mystery he had tried to impute to public squares and gardens. He was tired of the atmosphere in which he tried to involve Peel Street and boarding-house mansions. The city refused to rest quietly under the gauze of melancholy he had draped over the buildings. It reasserted its indifference.

He stood very still.

New York City. He lived in the tower of World Student House. His window overlooked the Hudson River. He was relieved that it wasn’t his city and he didn’t have to record its ugly magnificence. He walked on whatever streets he wanted and he didn’t have to put their names in stories. New York had already been sung. And by great voices. This freed him to stare and taste at will. Everybody spoke a kind of English, no resentment, he could talk to people everywhere. He wandered in the early-morning markets. He asked the names of the fish, stiff and silver in boxes of ice. He attended more of his seminars.

He saw the most beautiful person and pursued her. Shell.

1

Her middle name was Marshell, after her mother’s people, but they called her Shell.

Her ancestors crossed the ocean early enough to insure her mother membership in the DAR. The family produced two undistinguished senators and a number of very good traders. For the past seventy-five years all the males (excepting the utterly stupid) have attended Williams. Shell was the second youngest in a family of four. Her older brother was one of the unfortunates who did not make Williams. To compound his shame he ran off with a Baptist and made his father bitterly happy when he quarrelled with his wife over their children’s education.

Shell grew up in a large white house on the outskirts of Hartford, where her maternal great-grandfather had founded a successful bank. There were a stone fountain in the garden, many acres of land, and a stream which her father stocked with trout. After the younger son made a reasonable marriage and moved to Pittsburgh, Shell and her sister were bought two horses. A stable was built, a miniature reproduction of the house itself. Her father was fond of building miniatures of his house. Scattered through the trees there were a chicken coop, a rabbit hutch, a doll’s house, and a bird roost, all copies of the original one, which (they reminded their weekend guests) was for humans.

The affairs of the house were conducted with much ritual and decorum. Both the mother and father, deep readers of American history and collectors of colonial furniture, took some pride in never having been tempted to visit Europe.

Every spring Shell was in charge of floating cut flowers in the stone fountain. She took the business of being a girl very seriously. She thought her sister was too rough, wondered why her mother raised her voice, was hurt when she contradicted her husband. Not only did she believe in fairy tales, she experimented with peas under her mattress.

She hated her hair, which was black, thick, and long. After a washing it could not be managed and she was called “Zulu.” But she would not cut it, thinking perhaps of ladders let down from tower windows. She didn’t like her body. It was not a princess’s body, she was sure. It wasn’t growing in the right places. She envied her younger sister’s breasts, her straight auburn hair. She attacked hers with a brush and did not begin to count until she had done at least two hundred strokes. She was appalled when one of her sister’s boyfriends tried to kiss her.

“Why?” she demanded.

The boy didn’t know why. He had expected to be accepted or refused, not examined.

“Because you’re pretty….”

He said it like a question. Shell turned and ran. The grass seemed suddenly white, the trees white. She dropped the flowers meant for the fountain because they were white and dirty as bones. She was a spider on a field of ash.

“Primavera,” said Breavman when he heard the story. “Not Botticelli – Giacometti.”

“You won’t let me keep anything ugly, will you?”

“No.”

Besides, Breavman could not resist adding to his memory the picture of a delicate American girl running through the woods, scattering wild flowers.

Shell loved the early morning. She asked for the room with the big east window which had been the nursery. She was allowed to choose her own wallpaper. The sun crept over the calico bedspread. It was her miracle.

Apparently life was not all Robert Frost and Little Women.

One Sunday morning she was in her mother’s bed. They were listening to a children’s programme. Gobs of snow, the size of seeded dandelions, were drifting diagonally across the many-paned windows. Shell’s hair, gathered by a black ribbon, lay tame and smooth over her chest. Her mother was fingering it.

On the air a child was singing a simplified aria.

“Daddy’s so silly. He says you’re all growing up so fast that the house will be too big.”

“He’ll never leave his fish and chickens.”

Her mother’s fingers had been leisurely twining and intertwining but now only the thumb and forefinger were at work, a few strands of hair between them. The movement was that with which the bargain hunter tests the fabric of a lapel, but more rhythmical and prolonged.

She was smiling faintly and looking straight into Shell’s face but Shell could not make contact with her eyes. The movement made the hair impersonal. It didn’t belong to Shell. The blanket was moving. With the other hand her mother was doing something beneath it. The same rhythm.

There is a kind of silence with which we respond to the vices, addictions, self-indulgence of people close to us. It has nothing to do with disapproval. Shell lay very still, watched the snow. She was between the snow and her mother, unconnected to either.

The announcer invited all the boys and girls out there to join the Caravan next week, when they would take a trip to the far-off land of Greece.

“Well, aren’t we the lazy things? Up you get, Miss Dainty….”

Shell took a long time getting dressed. The house felt very ancient, haunted by the ghosts of old sanitary napkins, exhausted garters, used razor blades. She had encountered adult weakness with none of the ruthlessness of a child.

When her father, coming in red and jolly from walking in the woods, kissed her mother, Shell watched very closely. She was sorry for her father’s failure, which she understood was as much a part of him as his passion for miniature houses, his gentle interest in animals.

It was not too many years before her mother began to exercise the inalienable rights of menopause. She took to wearing a fur coat and sun-glasses in the house at all times. She hinted, then claimed that she had sacrificed a career as a concert pianist. When asked on whose behalf, she refused to reply and turned the thermostat lower.

Her husband kept her eccentricities on the level of a joke, even though her attacks on her young daughters were occasionally vicious. He allowed her to become the baby of the house, kissing her as usual before and after every meal.

Shell loved him for the way he treated her mother, believed herself lucky to grow up in this atmosphere of married affection. His patience, his kisses were tiny instalments on a debt she knew he could never cover.

A damaging consequence of this neurotic interlude was a rivalry between Shell and her sister. Their mother developed and encouraged it with that faultless instinct which people who live under one roof have for one another’s pain.

“I can’t remember which of you hurt most,” she reflected. “Good thing you weren’t twins.”

Shell’s father drove her to school every morning. It was his idea that the girls go to different schools. This was a wonderful part of the day for both of them.

She watched the forest go by. She knew how happy he was that she had inherited his love of trees. This was more important than her own delight, and it ushered her into a woman’s life.

He drove very carefully. He must have been unwilling to turn his head to look at her, he had such a precious cargo. He mustn’t have quite believed he had anything to do with her, she was so lovely, and he must have wondered why she believed the things he told her. When she was sixteen he gave her a car of her own, a second-hand Austin.

The school was a continuation of the house. There were many trees and trimmed bushes, many weathered buildings or buildings constructed to appear weathered. The enrolment represented an impressive concentration of old money, so no one could accuse the authorities of pretensions when they disguised the new junior residence with an Early American façade.

Its curriculum was not designed to produce artists, revolutionaries, or ceramicists. A Wall Street version of the little red school-house, it trained girls to ornament society rather than question or subvert it.

Shell was formal. She sat on the grass with a book in front of the library and arranged her dress over her knees.

Let us say the dress was white and the book one of the interminable dialogues of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and let us say that this time her hair was bound in braids

If she wished to think about something she laid the book down carefully and leaned on one arm; perhaps with one finger she absently turned a page.

She knew she represented something immortal, she was sure. She was the girl in front of the building. Her age in the foreground, her fifteen-year-old body, her hair in the intermittent wind, were instruments to praise the weather and the old stones. She knew this, so she composed her face.

She must be still so that the unknown elderly man crossing the other side of the quadrangle, if he happened to glance towards where she was sitting, would see the perfect thing, the quiet thing, the girl before the preserved doorway, the scene the heart demanded. It was her responsibility. Therefore she was serious, and the world was crumbling into plastic.

She loved the horizontal afternoon light. It seemed to come right out of the shrubbery, and, for precious minutes, right out of the ground itself.

She must find a way to sit in that light.

2

Breavman was furious. He didn’t want to move the bed. He wanted to climb into it, hold her, and go to sleep.

They had driven all day. He didn’t know where they were, probably Virginia, and he didn’t know the name of the tourist house.

The woodwork was brown and perhaps the loose circus wall -paper hid sinister bugs. He was too tired to care. The last hundred miles her head had slept on his shoulder and he vaguely resented her defection from the ordeal of the road.

“What does it matter where the damn bed is? We’ll be out of here by eight in the morning.”

“I’ll move it myself.”

“Don’t be silly, Shell.”

“We’ll be able to see the trees when we wake up.”

“I don’t want to see the trees when we wake up. I want to look at the dirty ceiling and get pieces of dirty plaster grape-vine in my eye.”

The ugly brass bed resisted her. For generations of sleepers it had not changed its position. He imagined a grey froth of dust on the underside. With a sigh he presented himself at the other end.

“I offered to drive,” she said to excuse her energy.

But he couldn’t bear to be conducted through the night, helpless by the side of the speeding driver. If he had to find himself hurtling down a highway, neon motels and hamburgers arresting him absurdly like those uncertain images that were always flashing in his mind, he himself wanted to be in charge of the chaos.

“Besides, there’s something irreverent about moving this stuff around.”

She pushed hard, knuckles white on the brass bars.

It struck Breavman that they were the hands of a nun, bleached, reddened by convent chores; he had always thought them so delicate. Her body was like that. At first she might be mistaken for a Vogue mannequin, tall, small-breasted, angular, and fragile. But then her full thighs and broad shoulders modified the impression and in love he learned that he rode on a great softness. The nostrils of her face over-widened just far enough to destroy the first impression of exquisite harmony and allow for lust.

Her remarkable grace was composed of something very durable, disciplined and athletic, which is often the case with women who do not believe they are beautiful.

Yes, Breavman thought, she would have moved it with or with -out me. She is the Carry Nation of Evil Chintzy Rooms and I am the greasy drunkard smirking over my stack of Niagara Falls souvenirs. She learned to wield her axe three hundred years ago, clearing a New England field for planting.

Now the bed was beneath the window. He sat down and called for her with two open hands. They held each other softly and with a kind of patience as if they were both waiting for the demons developed in the silence of the long trip to evaporate.

At last she stood up, a little too soon, he thought.

“I’ve got to make the bed.”

“Make the bed? The bed is perfectly well made.”

“I mean at the other end. We won’t be able to see anything.”

“Are you doing this deliberately?”

He was surprised at the hatred in his voice. Nothing had evaporated.

She turned her eyes to him, trying to get through. I must read what she wants to say to me, I love them so much, he thought in a flash, but his anger overwhelmed him. He looked at the baggage to threaten her.

“Lawrence, this is where we are. This is our room for tonight. Just give me five minutes.”

She worked quickly, a kind of side-to-side harvest dance, and the sheets flew as if they were part of her own dress. He knew that only she could change the chore into a ritual.

She puffed the pillows where their heads would lie. She removed one of the blankets and draped it over a hideous armchair, reshaping it with a few tucks and folds. Into the closet she lifted a small drum table complete with doilies, vase, and a broken trick box from which a scissor-beaked bird was meant to dispense cigarettes. She opened the wicker basket he had bought her and withdrew their books, which she placed carelessly on the large table beside the door.

“What are you going to do about the sink? There are cracks in the porcelain. Why don’t you pry up a couple of floorboards and hide it under the carpet?”

“If you’ll help me.”

He would have liked to rip it from the wall and cause it to disappear with a magician’s flourish, a white cigarette gone, a gift for Shell. And he would have liked to wrench it from its grimy roots and swing it like a jawbone, completely demolish the room which she had begun to ruin.

Shell put out his shaving kit and her own secret case of cosmetics which smelled of lemon. She opened the window with a little touch of triumph, and Breavman could hear leaves moving in the spring night.

She had changed the room. They could lay their bodies in it. It was theirs, good enough for love and talk. It was not that she had arranged a stage on which they might sleep hand in hand, but she had made the room answer to what she believed their love asked. Breavman knew it was not his answer. He wished he could honour her home-making and hated his will to hurt her for it.

But didn’t she understand that he didn’t want to disturb an ashtray, move a curtain?

One small light was burning. She stood in the shadows and undressed and then slipped quickly under the covers, pulling them up to her chin.

It’s a better room for her, Breavman thought. Anyone else would have thanked her. She deserved a goose-feather bed with the sheets turned down so bravely-O. Which I cannot give her because I do not want the castle to cover it, with my crest carved above the hearth.

“Come.”

“Should I close the light?”

“Yes.”

“Now it’s the same room for the both of us.”

He got into the bed, careful not to avoid touching her. He knew his mood had to be attacked. Like the chronic migraine sufferer who doubtfully submits himself to the masseur who always cures him, he lay stiffly beside her.

She had known his body like this before. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three days and when he came back his body would be like that, armoured, distant.

Sometimes a poem would catapult him away from her, but she learned how to approach him, equipped with what he had taught her about her body and her beauty.

It was a refusal to be where he was, to accept the walls, the clock, the number on the door which he knew, the familiar limited human being in the familiar limited chair.

“You would have preferred it even dirtier,” she said softly. “Maybe even roaches in the sink.”

“You never see them if you keep the light on.”

“And when the light is off you can’t see them anyway.”

“But it’s the time between,” Breavman said with developing interest. “You come home at night and you switch on the kitchen light and the sink is swarming black. They disappear in seconds, you do not follow too closely exactly where they go, and they leave the porcelain brighter than you ever imagined white could be.”

“Like that haiku about strawberries on the white plate.”

“Whiter. And without music.”

“The way you talk you’d think we had fought our way out of the deepest slum.”

“We have, but don’t ask me to explain or it will sound like the cheapest nonsense from an over-privileged bourgeois.”

“I know what you mean and I know that you’re thinking I can’t possibly know.”

She would reach him, he was certain. She would uncover him so he could begin to love her.

“The mansion is as much a part of the slum as your horrible sink. You want to live in a world where the light has just been switched on and everything has just jumped out of the black. That’s all right, Lawrence, and it may even be courageous, but you can’t live there all the time. I want to make the place you come back to and rest in.”

“You do a wonderful job of dignifying a spoiled child.”

It was not that things decay, that the works of men are ephemeral, he believed he saw deeper than that. The things themselves were decay, the works themselves were corruption, the monuments were made of worms. Perhaps she was his comrade in the vision, in the knowledge of strangerhood.

“You didn’t want to touch a thing when we came in here. You just wanted to clear a small corner to sleep in.”

“Love in,” Breavman corrected.

“And you hated me for remaking the bed and putting us where we could see the trees and hiding the ugly old table because all of that meant that we couldn’t simply endure the filth, we had to come to terms with it.”

“Yes.”

He found her hand.

“And you really hated me because I was dragging you into it and you would have been free if you’d been alone, with morning a few hours away and the car parked outside….”

God, he thought as he turned to her and closed her eyes over all he remembered of her, she knows everything.

3

Miss McTavish was a tall, mannish Bryn Mawr graduate, ’21, who secretly believed that she was the only one in America who really understood the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

She also believed that the academic world was not worthy of the true Hopkins and was therefore reluctant to discuss her theories. The same superiority kept her out of the universities. She did not wish to participate in the donnish conspiracy against Life and Art.

The same superiority plus a grotesque nose kept her out of marriage. She knew that the man sufficiently intense, wild, and joyous for communion with her would be unavailable for domestic life, having in all probability already consecrated himself to the monastery or mountain climbing.

She saved her passion for the poems she read in class. Even the most cynical students knew that something very important was happening in those moments when she seemed to forget them most. Shell listened like a disciple, knowing that the poems were all the more beautiful because Miss McTavish had such a funny nose.

Miss McTavish liked to think of the Neo-Gothic library as her private home. On the way to the card index she floated over the bent heads, like a hostess presiding at a feast.

One evening, standing underneath the tall stained-glass windows, she said something very strange to Shell. The glass images could not be seen, only the bumpy lead separators. If mahogany wood could be made translucent and used as a filter, that was the colour of the light in the large quiet room. It was winter and Shell had the impression that snow was falling, she wasn’t sure, not having stepped out since late afternoon.

“I’ve been watching you, Shell. You’re the only aristocrat I have ever met.” Then her voice choked. “I love you because I wanted to be like you, that’s all I ever wanted.”

Shell reached out her hand as if she had just seen someone wounded in front of her. Miss McTavish recovered instantly from her state of exposure and seized Shell’s extended hand and shook it formally, as though they had just been introduced. Both of them bowed slightly several times, and it appeared to an observer that they might be just about to begin a minuet. The image they made occurred to both of them and they laughed in relief.

It was snowing. Without speaking they agreed on a walk. The pine trees beyond the Quadrangle were dark, lofty, and narrow as the windows in the library, shelves of snow on the limbs separating them from the night into rows of upright fish skeletons.

Shell felt that she was in a museum of bones. She had no sense of the outdoors at all, but imagined herself in a sinister extension of the library. And she was already summoning the resources of pity on which she knew she would have to draw.

Miss McTavish whistled a part from a quartet.

The quartet ended in a gasp.

“I’ve never done this before.”

Shell stood still as she was kissed on the mouth, and caught the man’s smell of alcohol on her teacher’s breath. She tried to think through the present, reach the real forest she drove through with her father, but she couldn’t.

“Ha ha,” cried Miss McTavish, flinging herself backwards in the snow. “I’m brave. I’m very brave.”

Shell believed her. She was a human tossed in the snow, humiliating herself. She must be brave, as nuns with whips are brave, and drunk sailors in a storm. People who walk into desolation, beggars, saints, call to those they leave behind, and these cries are nobler than the victory shouts of generals. She knew this from books and her house.

Not too far away there was a second-class road. The headlights of a single car sawed through the woods, disappeared, and left the woman and the girl with a renewed sense of the outside, regulating world, which Shell already knew was engineered against the remarkable.

Miss McTavish had succeeded in immersing herself almost entirely in a drift of snow. Shell helped her out of it. They faced each other as they had in the library. Shell knew that her teacher would have preferred to be standing back there now, the declaration and kiss undone.

“You’re old enough for me to say nothing.”

Breavman was surprised to learn that Shell still corresponded with her.

“Once or twice a year,” said Shell.

“Why?”

“I spent the rest of my time at school trying to convince her that she hadn’t destroyed herself in my eyes and was still my ordinary and well-beloved English teacher.”

“I know that kind of tyranny.”

“Will you let me send your book to her?”

“If your idea of charity is to bore a Hopkins expert.”

“This isn’t for her.”

“You’ll wind up your debt –”

“Yes.”

“– by becoming what she wanted you to be.”

“In a way. I have a king.”

“Ummm.”

He was not convinced.

4

When Shell was nineteen she married Gordon Ritchie Sims. As the announcement in The New York Times specified, he was in the graduating class at Amherst and she was in her freshman year at Smith.

The best man was Gordon’s room-mate, a devout Episcopalian whose banking family was of Jewish origin. He was half in love with Shell himself and dreamed of just such a wife to guarantee and cement his assimilation.

Gordon wanted to be a writer and most of his courting was literary. He enjoyed the fat letters he sent her from Amherst. Every night, after he had done a respectable amount of work on his thesis, he filled his personalized writing sheets with promises, love, and expectation, the passion tempered by an imitation of the style of Henry James.

Mail became a part of Shell’s heart. She carefully chose the places to read these lengthy communications, which were far more exciting than the chapters of a novel because she was the major character in them.

Gordon summoned a world of honour and order and cultivation, and the return to a simpler, more exalting way of life which Americans had once experienced, and which he, by virtue of his name and love, intended to resurrect with her.

Shell loved his seriousness.

At the football weekends she practised being quiet beside him, indulging herself in the pleasures of responsible devotion.

He was tall and white-skinned. Horn-rimmed spectacles turned to pensive a face which without them would have been merely dreamy.

At dances their quiet behaviour and head-bending interest in just about everything gave the impression that they were chaperons rather than participants in the celebration. One almost expected them to say, “We like to spend some time with young people, it’s so easy to lose contact.”

With him Shell passed from the startling colt-like beauty of her adolescence directly into that kind of gracious senility typified by Queen Mothers and the widows of American presidents.

They announced their betrothal in the summer, after a session of mutual masturbation on the screened porch of the Sims house at Lake George.

They married and after his graduation he immediately began his military service. It occurred to her as she drove him to the railway station that he had never really seen her completely naked, there were places he hadn’t touched her. She attempted to conceive of this as a compliment.

She did not see very much of him in the next two years, weekends here and there, and generally he was exhausted. But his letters were regular and tireless, not to say disturbing. They seemed to threaten the serenity of a temporary widowhood she had been quite willing to assume.

She loved her clothes, which were dark and simple. She enjoyed the frequent extended visits at the houses of his family and hers. And she felt her place in the world: her lover was a soldier.

She would almost have preferred not to cut the envelopes. Intact, thick, lying on her dresser, they were part of the mirror in which she was brushing her long hair, part of the austere battered colonial furniture they had begun to collect.

Opened, they were not what he promised. They had become intricate invitations to physical love, filled with props, cold cream, lipstick, mirrors, feathers, games where the button is found in private places.

But on those weekends when he managed to get back to their small apartment, he was too tired to do anything but sleep and talk and go to small restaurants.

The letters were not mentioned.

5

Shell believed her breasts were stuffed with cancer.

The doctor told her to put her blouse back on.

“You’re a healthy woman. And lovely.” He allowed that he was old enough to say that.

“I feel so foolish. I don’t know where the bumps have gone.”

Meanwhile, back at the Montreal poem factory, Breavman is interning, training to become her Compleat Physician.

6

After Gordon got out of the service they decided to move to New York and took a fairly expensive apartment on Perry Street in the Village. He had a job with Newsweek, in the books section, and he also sold some pieces to the Saturday Review. Shell was Girl Friday to one of the editors of Harper’s Bazaar. She took some pleasure in refusing the many invitations to model.

According to their friends they had a cunning apartment. There was a tall handless clock with wooden works and roses painted on the face. There was a massive corner cabinet with many square glass windows in which they kept liqueurs and long-stemmed glasses. They had worked hard to remove the paint and stain it.

A child in severe clothes on a black background, painted by a journeyman portraitist, hung over a refectory table and insured the dignity of their frequent small dinner parties.

They were all good children eating up their frozen cream of shrimp soup, and they were about to assume control of the banks, the periodicals, the State Department, the Free World.

At one of these occasions, Roger, Gordon’s old room-mate, managed to have a few private words with Shell. He had been liberated by six cognacs.

“If this ever stops working,” – the gesture of his hand took in the accumulated triumph of antique shops – “come to me, Shell.”

“Why?”

“I love you.”

“I know you love me, Roger.” She smiled. “And Gordon and I love you. I mean why should it ever stop working?”

Shell was holding an empty silver tray and he could see her face in it through the crumbs.

“I don’t love you gently, friendly, I don’t love you auld lang syne, I don’t love you sweetheart of Sigma Chi.” He had made it humorous enough; now he said seriously, “I want you.”

“I know.”

“Of course you do.”

“No,” she said, grateful for the tray she was holding. “Not the best friend.”

“You can’t be happy.”

“Oh?”

There was something wrong with his suit, the pants hung badly, he would kill his tailor, the kitchen was too small, he wasn’t elegant.

“He never touches you.”

“How can you say this to me?”

“He told me.”

“What?”

“It was the same all through school. He can’t.”

“Why? Tell me why!”

Now information was the most important thing. Apparently Roger thought she would kiss him for it, having been trained in trade. He found himself with his nose against the bottom of the silver platter.

“He can’t, that’s all. He can’t. He never could. All you people are a laugh,” he added, speaking from his authentic background.

7

How can anybody take the skyscrapers seriously? Breavman wonders. And what if they lasted ten thousand years, and what if the world spoke American? Where was the comfort for today? And each day the father’s gift grows heavier – history, bricks, monuments, the names of streets – tomorrow was already crushed!

Where was the comfort? Where was the war to make him here and hero? Where was his legion? He had met people with numbers branded on their wrists, some of them wrecked, some shrewd and very quiet. Where was his ordeal?

Eat junk, join the enemies of the police, volunteer for crime? Correct America with violence? Suffer in the Village? But the concentration camps were vast, unthinkable. They seemed to descend on man from a great height. And America was so small, man-made.

In his room in the World Student House, Breavman leans elbows on the window-sill and watches the sun ignite the Hudson. It is no longer the garbage river, catch-all for safes, excrement, industrial poison, the route of strings of ponderous barges.

Can something do that to his body?

There must be something written on the fiery water. An affidavit from God. A detailed destiny chart. The address of his perfect wife. A message choosing him for glory or martyrdom.

His room is in the tower, beside the elevator shaft, and he listens to the heavy mechanism of cables and weights. The mechanism of his pumping hand is just as ponderous. The glare off the Hudson is monotonous. There is a pigeon on Grant’s Tomb. It’s cold with the window open.

8

Gordon and Shell talked. Gordon welcomed the talk because again it was a literary treatment of the problem. And because they had labelled their absent bodies a problem, defined the boundaries of their trouble, they were able to bandage their union for a little longer.

As Gordon put it, they had a good solid house, why demolish it because one of the rooms could not be entered? They were intelligent people who loved each other; certainly a key could be found. And while they worked sanely for a solution they must not neglect the appointments of the other rooms.

So the well-ordered existence continued, really it flourished. Shell changed her dressmaker, Gordon moved his politics farther to the right. They bought a piece of land in Connecticut which had on it a sheep fold which they intended to preserve. Architects were consulted.

Shell was genuinely fond of him. She had to resort to that expression when she examined her feelings. That sickened her because she did not wish to dedicate her life to a fondness. This was not the kind of quiet she wanted. The elegance of a dancing couple was remarkable only because the grace evolved from a sweet struggle of flesh. Otherwise it was puppetry, hideous. She began to understand peace as an aftermath.

Now it seemed she was as tired as he was. The dinner parties were ordeals to be faced. The house was a huge project. They had to be in the country every other weekend and the traffic out of the city was impossible. And it was better to buy now because next year the prices would be even higher. The big things they stored but the apartment was crammed with cookie moulds, candle moulds, shoemaker benches, wooden buckets, and a spinning wheel which was too fragile for them to let out of their sight.

Shell grew to believe, in the terms of Gordon’s metaphor, that they were living in a ruin already and that the locked door was the sole entrance to sanity and rest. But Gordon had taken pains to package the problem neatly not so much in order to examine it as to drop it into the sea. He was not one of those hairy passion chaps, it was not his nature, he almost believed, except, like all of us, he dreamed. In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love. Shell studied herself in the mirror, which had an eighteenth-century frame.

She was ugly. Her body had betrayed her. Her breasts were fried eggs. It didn’t matter what she knew about Gordon, the extent of his responsibility in the failure. It was the burden of flesh and bone and hair which she could not command perfectly. She was the woman, the bad flower, how could he be blamed?

Look at the size of her thighs, they spread frighteningly when she sat. Gordon was tall, thin, white, her legs must weigh more than his legs. The appendix scar was an appalling gash ruining her belly. Damn the butcher doctor. And Gordon must be forgiven for not coming close to a dried wound.

Desire made her close her eyes, not for Gordon, not for a prince, but for the human man who would return her to her envelope of skin and sit beside her in the afternoon light.

Her friends had their problems too. Someone dedicated her seventh martini to the extinct American male. Shell did not raise her glass; besides, she didn’t like hen parties. The toast-mistress regretted the death of American peasants, gamekeepers, and mourned the dependable cab-drivers, stable-boys, milkmen lost to analysts and psychological Westerns. Shell was not heartened by the general masculine failure.

What were the dressmakers doing? Why were all these massaged limbs bound in expensive cloth? A massage is not a caress. The intricate styles of hair, sleeves slit to show the arm, the children’s eyes redeemed in pencil, what for? Whom to delight? Dead under the velvet. The rooms cleverly appointed, the ancient designs on the wallpaper, furniture of taste, rescued Victorian opulence, what was it meant to enclose? The beginning was wrong. The coupling did not occur. It should grow from entwined bodies.

The bath filled up. She nursed her body in, squatting on her knees, then, spreading her hands over the surface of the water as one does over a heater in a cold room, she slid back, even wetting her hair, wholly given over to the warmth and the dainty clean smell of lemon soap.

9

The crowd mounted the stone steps quickly. Perhaps when they reached street level their lives would have changed, roads gold, different homes and families waiting.

Two men moved faster than the crowd and the crowd let them through. Their lives were not outside the tunnel.

Breavman climbed at another speed, studying graffiti, wondering what secretary he could separate for the afternoon from her office routine. He had nowhere to go. He had abandoned the lectures he usually attended at that hour ever since the famous professor had agreed to let him do the term thesis on Breavman’s own book.

“Stop!”

At least it sounded like stop. Breavman stopped but the command was not for him.

“Brother!”

He wished he understood their language. Why did he think he knew what the words were? The two men were fighting on the steps, wedging Breavman against the wall. He extracted his feet with difficulty, like someone stepping out of quicksand.

It took two seconds. They hugged each other tightly. There was a hollow grunt, Breavman could not be sure from which man. Then one stood up and ran. The other’s head hung over the edge of the step less muscularly than a head should. The throat was widely and deeply cut.

Several voices shrieked for the police. A man who had the air of a doctor kneeled beside the body, which was already soaked in blood, shook his head philosophically to indicate that he was used to this sort of thing, then got up and went away. His attention had quieted the crowd, which was now beginning to bottleneck the passage, but after he had disappeared for some moments the cries for the police were renewed.

Breavman thought he should do something. He took off his jacket, intending to cover the victim, not the face, perhaps the shoulders. But what for? You did this for shock. The slit throat was past shock. It was softly bleeding over the IRT steps at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. At exactly one o’clock in the afternoon. Poor lousy urban matador. The white-on-white tie nattily knotted. The brown and white shoes very pointed and recently polished.

Breavman folded the jacket over his arm. It would implicate him. The police would want to know why he draped his jacket over a corpse. A bloody jacket was not a good idea for a souvenir. Sirens from the street. The crowd began to break up and Breavman went with it.

A few blocks away Breavman reflected that two years before he would have done it. A small death, like discovering that you can no longer slip into old underwear or ting the bell with the wooden mallet.

Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?

Two years ago he would have dipped the jacket, made the gesture, connected himself with the accident. Was the ritual dissolving? Was this an advance from morbidity?

A vision of Nazi youth presented itself. Rows and rows of the gold heads filing past the assassinated soldier. They lowered their company flags into the wound and promised. Breavman swallowed bile.

A steady underground question persisted. Who was the man? Sometimes the question was obscured into Where did he buy the shoes? and From what corner did he flash them? Who was the man? Was he the man asleep in the subway at three in the morning dressed in a brand-new suit with cuff marks over the white part of his shoes? Did girls like his blue hair tonic? What shabby room did he step out of, glittering like the plastic madonna on the dresser? Who was the man? Where was he climbing? What was the quarrel, where was the girl, how much was the money? The knife into what water from what foggy bridge? Barry Fitzgerald and the rookie cop want to know everything.

Why wasn’t he thinking about the man?

Breavman supported himself against a trash basket and vomited. A Chinese waiter ran out of the restaurant.

“Do it up the street. People eat here.”

Puking clears the soul, he thought as he walked away. He was walking with all his body, which was newly light, easy with athletic promise. You’re filled with poison, it’s brewing in every pouch and hole and pocket of your insides, you’re a swamp, then the sickening miracle, sloof! And you’re empty, free, begin again your second cold clear chance, thank you, thank you.

The buildings, doorways, sidewalk cracks, city trees shone bright and precise. He was where he was, all of him, beside a dry-cleaning store, high on the smell of clean brown-wrapped clothes. He was nowhere else. In the window was a secular bust of a man with a chipped plaster shirt and a painted tie. It didn’t remind him of anything when he stared at it. He was wildly happy to be where he was. Clean and empty, he had a place to begin from, this particular place. He could choose to go anywhere but he didn’t have to think about that because here he was and every free deep breath was a beginning. For a second he lived in a real city, one that had a mayor and garbage men and statistical records. For one second.

Puking clears the soul. Breavman remembered what he felt like. Fry’s Stationery, buying school supplies. Ten years old. The whole new school year coiled like a dragon to be conquered by sharp yellow Eagle pencils. Fresh erasers, rows of them, crying to be sacrificed for purity and stars for Neatness. The stacks of exercise books dazzlingly empty of mistakes, more perfect than Perfect. Unblunted compasses, lethal, containing millions of circles, too sharp and substantial for the cardboard box that contained them. Grown-up ink, black triumphs, eradicable mistakes. Leather bags for the dedicated trek from home to class, arms free for snowball or chestnut attacks. Paper clips surprisingly heavy in their small box, rulers with markings as complicated and important as a Spitfire’s dashboard, sticky red-bordered labels to fasten your name to anything. All tools benign, unused. Nothing yet an accomplice to failure. Fry’s smelled newer than even a winter newspaper brought in after the thump on the porch. And he commanded all these sparkling lieutenants.

Puking clears the soul but the bad juices come back quick. New York got lost in Breavman’s private city. Gauze grew on everything and as usual he had to imagine the real shape of things. He no longer felt the light Olympic candidate. The painted plaster bust reminded him of some religious statues in a window a few blocks back. They were gaudy, plastic, luminous, sort of jolly. The bust was old, unclean, the white the colour of soiled therapeutic stockings. He tried to spit out the taste in his mouth. The plaster shirt, the sky, the sidewalk, everything was the colour of mucus. Who was the man? Why didn’t he know the folklore of New York? Why didn’t he remember that article about the particular trees which they planted in cities, hardy ones that withstood the polluted air?

He took the wrong Seventh Avenue subway. When he climbed to the street he noticed everyone was black. It was too complicated to get out of Harlem. He hailed a taxi to get him back across town. At World Student House the Puerto Rican elevator man conducted the creaky machine to the eleventh floor. Breavman wished he could understand the words to the song he was singing. He decided he would say gracias when he left the elevator.

“Watch your step.”

“Thanks,” said Breavman in perfect English.

He knew he’d hate his room before he unlocked the door. It was exactly the same as he’d left it. Who was the man? He didn’t want to look out the window where General and Mrs. Grant were, or Gabriel on the roof of Riverside Church, or the shining Hudson, alien and boring.

He sat down on the bed, holding the key tightly in his right hand in exactly the position it had been when he twisted it in the keyhole, biting the inside of his cheek with molars. He was not really staring at the chair but the chair was the only image in his mind. He didn’t move a muscle for forty-five minutes. At that point it occurred to him in a wave of terror that if he didn’t make a great effort to rouse himself he would sit there forever. The maid would find him frozen.

Down at the cafeteria the fast-moving short-order man called him back for change.

“Giving it away, Professor?”

“No, I need it, Sam.”

“Name is Eddy, Professor.”

“Eddy? Glad to meet you, Sam.”

I’m cracking up, thought Breavman. He was wet-eyed happy because of the trivial exchange. He sat at a small table, his hands clasped over the cup of tea, enjoying the warmth. Then he saw Shell for the first time.

Fantastic luck, she was sitting alone, but no, here was a man coming to her table, balancing a cup in each of his hands. Shell stood up to take one from him. She has small breasts, I love her clothes, I hope she has nowhere to go, prayed Breavman. I hope she sits there all night. He looked around the cafeteria. Everyone was staring at her.

He pressed his thumb and forefinger in the corners of his eyes, his elbow on the table – a gesture he always regarded as phony. The war-lined desk colonel signing the order that sends the boys, his boys, on the suicide mission, and then we see him steeled for the casualty lists, and all the secretaries have gone home, he is alone with his pin-studded maps, and maybe a montage of the young men in training, close-up of young faces.

Now he was sure. It was the first thing in a long time he had learned about himself. He wanted no legions to command. He didn’t want to stand on any marble balcony. He didn’t want to ride with Alexander, be a boy-king. He didn’t want to smash his fist across the city, lead the Jews, have visions, love multitudes, bear a mark on his forehead, look in every mirror, lake, hub-cap, for reflection of the mark. Please no. He wanted comfort. He wanted to be comforted.

He grabbed the bunch of napkins out of the tumbler, wiped the excess ink from his ballpen on a corner of one of them, and scribbled nine poems, certain that she would stay as long as he wrote. He shredded the napkins as he dug the pen in, and he couldn’t read three-quarters of what he’d done; not that it was any good, but that had nothing to do with it. He stuffed the debris into his jacket and stood up. He was armed with amulets.

“Excuse me,” he said to the man with her, not looking at her at all.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

Maybe I’ll say it ten more times.

“Excuse me.”

“Can I help you?” A little anger showing. The accent was not American.

“May I – I would like to talk to the person you are with.” His heart was driving so hard he could believe he was transmitting the beats like a time signal before the news.

The man granted permission by turning up the palm of his open hand.

“You’re beautiful, I think.”

“Thank you.”

She didn’t speak it, her mouth formed the words as she looked at her loosely clasped hands composed at the edge of the table like a schoolgirl’s.

Then he walked out of the room, grateful it was a cafeteria and he had already paid his bill. He didn’t know who she was or what she did but he had no doubt whatever that he would see her again and know her.

10

Shell took a lover at the end of her fifth year of marriage. It was shortly after she started her new job. She knew what she was doing.

Talking with Gordon had failed. He was only too eager to talk. She wanted them both to go to psychiatrists.

“Really, Shell.” He smiled at her paternally, as if she were an adolescent reciting the Rubaiyat with too much belief.

“I mean it. The insurance covers it.”

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” he understated, meaning that it was the most outrageous thing he had ever heard of.

“I do.”

“I’ve read Simone de Beauvoir,” he said with gentle humour. “I know this world is not kind to women.”

“I’m talking about us. Please talk with me. Don’t let this night go by.”

“Just a second, darling.” He knew that at this precise moment she was challenging him to a solemn meeting. He suspected that it was the last time she would ever confront him like this. He also knew that there was nothing within himself that he could summon to meet her. “I really don’t think you can characterize our lives together as a catastrophe.”

“I don’t want to characterize anything, I want –”

“We’ve been pretty lucky.” His brand of humility took in the apartment, Shell’s closet of dresses, the plans for the second floor of the house, which were laid out on the desk and to which he was anxious to return.

“Do you want me to thank you?”

“That wasn’t becoming.” He allowed her to know he was angry by speaking with a slight British intonation. “Let’s try to understand the process of marriage.”

“Please!”

“Don’t get hysterical on me. Oh, come on, Shell, let’s grow up. A marriage changes. It can’t always be passion and promises….”

It never was. But what was the use of shouting that? He fictionalized an early storm of flesh and wildness from which they had matured. He believed it or he wanted her to believe it. She would never forgive him for that dishonesty.

“… thing we have now is extremely valuable …”

Suddenly she didn’t want the doctors, didn’t want to save anything. She watched him speak with that terrible scrutinizing attention that can make a stranger of a bed-mate. He felt that he spoke to her from a far distance. She was a cub reporter in the audience. It was too late for easy married mumbling or intimate silence. He knew she was pretending to be convinced, was grateful to her for the pretence. What else could she do – weep, burn down the walls? She was in a room with him.

Later she said, “Well, where should we put the partition?” and they leaned over the house plans, playing house.

Breavman often reviews this scene. Shell told it to him a year later. He sees the two of them bending over the oiled desk, backs towards him, and he sees himself in the corner of the antique room, staring at the incredible hair, waiting for her to feel his gaze, turn, rise, come to him, while Gordon works with his sharp pencil, sketching in the bathroom, the insult of a nursery. She comes to him, they whisper, she looks back, they leave. And in some of the versions he says, “Shell, sit still, build the house, be ugly.” But her beauty makes him selfish. She has to come.

When she decided to change her job Gordon thought it was a good idea. She was glad to get back into the academic atmosphere. It was a tracking-back, Gordon said. She could re-establish her bearings. Shell simply couldn’t stand another day at Harper’s Bazaar. Watching the cold bodies, clothes.

A friend of hers was doing a couple of afternoons a week of voluntary work at World Student House, hostessing at teas for foreign students, hanging decorations, showing America at its smiling prettiest to the future ministers of black republics. She informed Shell that there was a job open in the Recreation Department. Since a friend of the family was a director and benefactor of the organization her application and interview were formalities. She moved into a pleasant green office decorated with UNESCO reproductions, which looked over Riverside Park, much the same view as Breavman’s, though less elevated.

She did her work well. The Guest Speakers Programme, the Sunday Dinner Programme, the Tours Programme were better run than they had ever been. She emerged as an expert organizer. People listened to her. Perhaps a creature that lovely wasn’t supposed to speak such sense. Nobody wanted to disappoint her. Success terrified her. Perhaps this was what she was meant to do, not love, not live close. Nevertheless, she liked working with students, meeting people her own age who were planning and beginning their careers. She walked into the spring atmosphere, she found herself making plans.

It was strange how friendly she felt to Gordon. The construction of the house was fascinating. Every detail interested her. They rented a truck to pick up panelling from an old country hotel which was being demolished. Gordon saw his study in oak. Shell suggested one full wall for the living-room, the other three left in brick. She was puzzled by her own concern.

Then it occurred to her that she was leaving him. Her interest was exactly the kind displayed to a cousin with whom one has grown up and whom one does not expect to see again for a long time. One clamours to hear everything about the family – for a little while.

When she slept with Med it was merely the signature to a note of absence she had been writing for almost a year.

He was a visiting professor from Lebanon, a remarkably handsome young man who was an expert in these matters, who, in intimate circumstances, would admit to his companion that the constant proximity of “desirable little things” was what most attracted him to the academic life. He was over six feet, thin, hair black and carefully wild and swept back, eyes black and always slightly squinted as if he were looking over stretches of sand for high deeds to perform. He was a T. E. Lawrence Bedouin with an Oxford accent and theatrically exquisite manners. He was always so obviously on the make, so captivated by his charm and indisputable good looks, so dedicated to his vocation, so phony that he was altogether delightful.

Shell allowed him to court her extravagantly for three weeks. He was not in his best form because he really believed her beautiful and this intruded on the perfection of his technique.

He gave her a filigree brooch shaped like a scimitar which he claimed belonged to his mother but which she wouldn’t have accepted if she hadn’t been sure he travelled with a bag of them. She accepted a transparent black nightgown like the ones advertised in the back of Playboy, the kind he seriously believed every American girl coveted – she was delighted with his naïveté.

Deprived of sweet sexual fiat for so long, indeed never having known it, she righteously defended the privilege to make herself sick. And because he was so pretty, so absurd, nothing she did with him could be serious or important. What she knew was going to happen would not really have happened. Except that she needed the dynamite of adultery to blast her life, destroy the rising house.

Over whose hips was she pulling the flimsy black costume?

She could see her hair through the material.

In the mirror of a bathroom in the hotel on upper Broadway. Steel-rimmed, round-cornered mirror. Whose body?

Med had reserved the room for a week. The critical week. He had never spent so much money on an adventure.

The bathroom was brilliantly clean. She had been frightened that it would have a naked bulb on a cord, cracked porcelain, hair on old soap. Is this Shell? she inquired blankly of her image, not because she wanted to know, or even open the subject, but because that question was the only form her modesty could assume.

At first Med couldn’t speak. He had made a mistake, for men of his character the most painful mistake, occurring once or twice in a lifetime and crushing the heart: he might have loved her. The room was dim. He had arranged the lighting, tuned his transistor radio to the classical-music station. She seemed to create her own silence, her own shadow to stand in. She was not part of his setting.

“Isn’t that the Fifth?” he said finally.

“I don’t know.”

She knew which symphony it was. The answer she spoke was in response to the question before the mirror.

“I believe it is. Da, da da da da. Of course it is.”

She wished he would begin.

She felt no desire. This both pleased and pained her. Desire she would hoard for a lover. Med was not her lover. Desire would have made what she was doing important, and it was not important, it must not be important. A weapon, yes, but not a special night in her heart. Not with this clown. Yet, and this was the pain, he was a man and surely she should long for only someone to hold her after all this time. She had dreamed love, bites, surrender, but all she felt now was interest. Interest! Perhaps Gordon was her true mate after all.

Med relied on a Peeping Tom survey of her body to inflame him.

It fascinated her to see a man overwhelmed with desire.

Oh Shell, cries Breavman as he learns of the hotel, as she tells him in the voice she uses when she must tell him everything. Shell, fly away. Heap flowers in the stone fountain. Fight with your sister. Not you with the Expert Fool, in a room like the ones Breavman built. Not you who wore white dresses.

As Med lay beside her, silently cataloguing what he had gathered, Shell succumbed to a wave of hatred which made her grit her teeth. She did not know where to attach it. First she tried Med. He was too simple. Besides for the first time since she had known him he seemed genuinely sad, not theatrically melancholy. She guessed he was walking through a museum of dead female forms. She absently massaged the nape of his neck. She tried to hate herself but all she could hate was her silly body. She hated Gordon! She was here because of him. No, that was not true. But still she hated him and the truth of this threw open her eyes, wide in the dark.

She inspected herself as she dressed. Her body seemed an interesting alien twin, a growth which she didn’t own, like a wart on one’s finger.

Breavman bites his lip as he listens.

“I shouldn’t tell you this.” Shell says.

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t the me you’re holding now.”

“Yes it was. It is.”

“Does that hurt you?”

“Yes,” he says, kissing her eyes. “We have to bring everything to each other. Even the times we are corpses.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I know you do.”

If I can always decipher that, Breavman believes, then nothing can happen to us.

Armed with the betrayal, Shell approached her husband.

One needs weapons to hunt those close. Foreign steel must be introduced. The world in the married house is too spongy, familiar. The pain, present in plenty, is absorbed. Other worlds must be ushered in to cut the numb.

Gordon was running hot water over a box of strawberries. He knew it would happen like this. Auden had said so. After her first few words he seemed not to hear what she said. He had always known that this was the way it would come.

He answered, “I see” and “Of course I understand” and “I see” several more times. He kept his hand between the hot and the cold. Preserving the colourful wrapper intact assumed great importance.

Then suddenly she was leaving him. His life was changing right now.

“I want to live by myself for a little while.”

“A little while?”

“I don’t know how long.”

“In other words it could be a very long time.”

“Perhaps.”

“In other words you have no intention of returning.”

“I don’t know, Gordon. Can’t you see I don’t know?”

“You don’t know but you have a pretty good idea.”

“Gordon, stop. You won’t get anything out of me like that. You never have.”

At this point it occurred to Shell that when she had begun to speak to him she had not intended to leave but to give him a last chance.

“Stay here.”

He turned off the tap, pushed the box with deliberation into a corner of the sink as though it were a chessman, and wiped his hands. It was an ugly voice he used. The words were less than a plea and more than a proposition.

“Stay. Don’t break up our marriage over this.”

“Is it so little?”

“Women have affairs,” he said without philosophy.

“I was with a man,” she said incredulously.

“I know.” And the softer: “It’s not the end of the world.”

But she wanted it to be the end of the world. She wanted a mark on the forehead to prove the union was rotten. That he was fighting for his life was difficult for her to perceive. She interpreted his speech as part of his daily affront. Now he wanted to formalize the disaster.

“I won’t interfere. I won’t ask you questions.”

“No.”

He thought she was bargaining.

“You’ll get it out of your system. You’ll see, we’ll weather this.”

“No!”

He never understood to what she was shouting “No.”

Even men of limited imagination can sometimes imagine the worst. So he could not have been really surprised to see her packing one day, or to hear themselves discussing who would take what bureau, what candle-mould, or to find himself on the telephone making arrangements with movers to save Shell the trouble. For years now he had known he didn’t deserve her; it was a matter of time. Now it was happening and he had already imagined his gentlemanly role.

Shell visited her parents in Hartford. They still lived in the big white house, just the two of them. Officially they regretted the separation and hoped she’d soon return to her husband and her senses. But she had a long talk with her father as they walked over the property. The leaves were drained of green but they had not yet turned bright. She was surprised how easily she was able to talk to him.

“He had no right,” was all he said about Gordon, but it was a handsome old man speaking, who had lived out some kind of man’s life, and it fortified her.

He let her talk, inviting it with his silence and the paths he chose. When she was through he spoke about the first growth of some trees he had planted.

She could not help feeling that her mother regarded the breakup as a sinister triumph of heredity, like haemophilia in a royal child that had seemed too healthy.

Shell was lucky to be able to rent a small apartment on 23rd Street. She didn’t want to get too far from the Village. Except for a tiny kitchen, bathroom, and vestibule, she lived in one room. She stood the tall clock beside the entrance to the main room. She painted the walls lavender and threw lavender translucent draperies over the windows, which seemed to etherize the light, make it thin, and perfume the air with cool colour.

It was not her home in the same way her body was not her own. She merely lived in them. She watched herself move among the pretty things. She didn’t believe that she was the proper woman to have such a good career job, or to leave a husband or to entertain a lover. It horrified her.

She would not see Med again, of course, and one afternoon in the cafeteria she told him why. She was not created for a minor adventure. Their interview was interrupted by a young man whose curious declaration moved her unreasonably.

Breavman thought about her all the time but he experienced no lust for her. This was new. He thought about her presence with no longing. She was alive, her beauty existed, she was pulling on her gloves or pushing back her hair or staring at a movie with her huge eyes. He did not want to tear down the theatre in his fantasy and rescue her from the dark fiction. She was there. She was in the city, or some city, some train, some castle or office. He knew their bodies would move together. That was the least of it.

He didn’t think of himself as a lover. He knew they would lie mouth to mouth, happier, safer, wilder than ever before. One of the comforts of her merely being was that he need make no plans.

Once or twice he told himself that he ought to find her, ask people. It wasn’t necessary. He was willing to enter into homage whether he saw her again or not. Like a Wordsworthian hero, he did not wish her his.

He didn’t even remember her face too perfectly. He hadn’t studied it closely. He had lowered his head and dug his pen into napkin poems. She was what he expected, was always expecting. It was like coming home at night after a tedious extended journey. You stand a minute in the vestibule. No light is switched on. He didn’t have to explore her features. He could walk blindfolded into praise of her, once the first open armourless glance guaranteed her beauty.

It was the very last time Breavman let go the past and hard promises which he could barely articulate. He did no writing. He suspended himself in the present. He read an architectural survey of New York City and was surprised at his capacity for concentration and interest. He listened to lectures without thinking about the professor’s ambition. He built a kite. He strolled through Riverside Park without coveting the solitary nurses or growing the destinies of children in toy racers. The trees were fine as they were, losing their leaves, both Latin and common names unknown. There wasn’t much terror in the old women in black coats and lisle stockings sitting on the benches of upper Broadway, or the mutilated vendors of pencils and plastic cups. He had never been so calm.

He spent many evenings in the Music Room of World Student House. Thick blue carpet, wood panelling, dark heavy furniture, and a sign commanding quiet. The record collection was only adequate but it was all discovery for him. He had never really listened to music before. It had been a backdrop for poems and talk.

Now he listened to other men. How they spoke! It made his own voice small and put his body back into the multitudes of the world. No images formed while he listened, nothing he could steal for his page. It was their landscape where he sat guest.

He was following the flute in a Schubert quartet. It climbed and returned and ascended again, launched and received by low powerful strings. Shell opened the door, stepped into the room, turned to the door to give her attention to closing it softly. She quickly crossed the silent carpet and sat in a chair beside the french windows, through which she could see the darkening park, walls, and street.

He noticed the way she tried to relax her body, to make herself like a child hearing a favourite story. But her hands tightened on the carved wooden arms and for a hundredth of a second she was suffering in an electric chair. Then she sank back again and tried to annihilate herself in the melody.

Some women possess their beauty as they do a custom sportscar or a thoroughbred horse. They drive it hard to every appointment and grant interviews from the saddle. The lucky ones have small accidents and learn to walk in the street, because nobody wants to listen to an arrogant old lady. Some women wear moss over their beauty and occasionally something rips it away – a lover, a pregnancy, maybe a death – and an incredible smile shows through, deep happy eyes, perfect skin, but this is temporary and soon the moss reforms. Some women study and counterfeit beauty. Industries have been established to serve these women, and men are conditioned to favour them. Some women inherit beauty as a family feature, and learn to value it slowly, as the scion of a great family becomes proud of an unusual chin because so many distinguished men bore it. And some women, Breavman thought, women like Shell, create it as they go along, changing not so much their faces as the air around them. They break down old rules of light and cannot be interpreted or compared. They make every room original.

He believed she was in some kind of pain, or rather, defeat. The loveliness she composed seemed to rebel and escape her, as sometimes a poem under the pen becomes wild and uncontrollable. This did not modify his wonder at her. What she created was still remarkable. Into that he wouldn’t dare intrude. But perhaps he could have some part in comforting her.

She recognized him and met his stare, having learned that this was the best method to greet the public seducer, and immediately perceived that there was in his eyes nothing that tried to make her an indifferent means, an object. She was simply being adored. For some curious reason she remembered a certain dress she had worn when she was at school and wished vaguely to be wearing it or know where it was. His head was inclined, he was smiling. He’s ready to watch me all night, she thought. Not speak, not ask anything. She wondered who he was. His face was young but there were unusually deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. It was as if all his experience were recorded there. The mouth would have been too full and sensual without the chastening lines, like those idiotic fat kissing lips of Hindu gods.

Well, what was she doing thinking about his lips? And what was she doing in this chair sitting so stilly for him? She should be back at her apartment, thinking, considering her future, learning a language, sorting things out, or whatever people who live alone are supposed to do when they come back at night.

She realized that years ago this was exactly how she would have liked to be observed, with music, before a window, with light made soft by old wood.

Soon she wouldn’t be able to see the separate stones in the wall, or the iron fence against the bushes. The sidewalks were mother-of-pearl, and although she could not see it, she knew the sun was dragging darkness as it cut behind the rose-edged New Jersey hills. Would he never turn away?

She closed her eyes and could still feel his stare. It had the power of defenceless praise. It did not call her beautiful, but called her to delight in her beauty, which is more understandable and human, and it pleased her to contemplate the pleasure she created. Who was the man who did this to her? She opened her eyes and smiled her curiosity at him. He stood up and walked to her.

“Will you come with me?”

“All right.”

“It’s almost dark.”

They left the room softly. Breavman closed the door carefully. They exchanged their names in whispers and laughed when they remembered that they could talk out loud.

They walked back and forth on the cement expanse that stretches in front of Grant’s Tomb. There is a certain formality about that area; at night it could be the private garden of an illustrious friend. They went in step over the large squares.

“The Grants are excellent hosts,” said Shell.

“They retire very early of an evening,” said Breavman.

“Wouldn’t you say their house is a wee bit pretentious?” said Shell.

“That’s generous. The entrance hall looks like a bloody mausoleum!” said Breavman. “And I hear he drinks.”

“So does she.”

They joined hands and ran down the hill. Crisp leaves splintered under their feet and they looked for drifts of them to trample down. Then they watched the traffic speed on the driveway below, the lights of countless cars. On the Hudson there were other lights, the necklace of the George Washington bridge, the slow-moving barges and the Alcoa sign across the water. The air was clear, the stars big. They stood close and inherited everything.

“I must go now.”

“Stay up the night with me! We’ll go to the fish market. There are great noble monsters packed in ice. There are turtles, live ones, for famous restaurants. We’ll rescue one and write messages on his shell and put him in the sea, Shell, sea-shell. Or we’ll go to the vegetable market. They’ve got red-net bags full of onions that look like huge pearls. Or we’ll go down to Forty-second Street and see ten movies and buy a mimeographed bulletin of jobs we can get in Pakistan –”

“I work tomorrow.”

“Which has nothing to do with it.”

“But I’d better go now.”

“I know this is unheard of in America, but I’ll walk you home.”

“I live on Twenty-third Street.”

“Exactly what I’d hoped. It’s over a hundred blocks.”

Shell took his arm, he brought his elbow close against her hand, and they were both part of a single motion, a sort of gentle Siamese beast that could cover ten thousand blocks. She took her arm away after a little while and he felt empty.

“Is there something wrong?”

“I’m tired, I guess. There’s a cab.”

“Talk to me a second before we get into a car.”

She thought it was too difficult to explain. He would consider her a perfect fool of a possessive female if she told him. She didn’t want to walk that close to anyone casually. And was the man supposed to declare himself after knowing her for half an evening? And she didn’t even know her own desires; he was a stranger. Of one thing only she was certain. She could not expend herself in the casual.

“I’m married,” was all she said.

He studied her face. It was a temptation not to connect her loveliness with prosaic human problems. All her expressions were so beautiful, what did it matter what provoked them? Weren’t her lips perfect when they trembled? Then he remembered the pain he had sensed in her when she was sitting before the window. He shook his head and answered her.

“No, no, I don’t think you are.”

He hailed a taxi and before he could touch the handle of the door the cabbie leaned over and pushed it open. Times Square was a sudden invasion of light. Blue veins showed through the skin of their faces and hands and the bald head of the driver. They welcomed the comparative darkness of Seventh Avenue. They weren’t close enough yet to enjoy ugliness.

He told the cab to wait and took her to the elevator.

“I won’t ask you up,” Shell said without coyness.

“I know. We have time.”

“Thank you for saying that. I loved our walk.”

He dismissed the taxi and walked the hundred blocks himself. Trying not to step on cracks was the extent of any ordeal he entertained. He had retired into comfort, which is doing what you know you can do.

Shell got ready for bed quickly. When she was lying in the dark she suddenly realized that she hadn’t brushed her hair.

11

Breavman always envied the old artists who had great and accepted ideas to serve. Then the colour of gold could be laid on and glory written down. The death of a god in scarlet and glowing leaf is very different from the collapse of a drunkard in a blue café, no matter what underground literature might profess.

He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of the page is no guarantee. Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation. He hated to argue about the techniques of verse. The poem is a dirty, bloody, burning thing that has to be grabbed first with bare hands. Once the fire celebrated Light, the dirt Humility, the blood Sacrifice. Now the poets are professional fire-eaters, freelancing at any carnival. The fire goes down easily and honours no one in particular.

Once, for a while, he seemed to serve something other than himself. Those were the only poems he ever wrote. They were for Shell. He wanted to give her back her body.

Beneath my hands

your small breasts

are the upturned bellies

of breathing fallen sparrows.

Or was it really for her that he worked? It made it easier for him if she liked her body. The bed was more peaceful. They didn’t begin as poems at all, but propaganda. The verdict was poetry. If she continued to believe her flesh an indifferent enemy then she would not let him look at her as he wanted.

He would fold the sheet away from her to watch her while she slept. There was nothing in the room but her uncovered flesh. He didn’t have to compare it with anything. To kneel beside her and run his fingers on her lips, follow every shape, was to annihilate sunsets he couldn’t touch. Ambition, demands of excellence were happily lost as he rested in her. This was most excellent. But she had to feel herself whole. A goddess mustn’t fidget. So he must work to make her joyous and still. She learned the conventional instrument of climax, which for a woman is the beginning of pride and stillness.

When she finally shyly traded her body with his she wasn’t altogether certain that she wouldn’t disgust him. Gordon had said he loved her but he had refrained from touching her. Five years. He had allowed limited contact. Not her body but the fingers of one hand might trace his furtive dash to pleasure. Her flesh died from that. Every night it went greyer.

Breavman brushed aside the silk like a cobweb fallen across her shoulders. She made a little noise of pleasure and resignation, as if now he knew the worst. He rested his head on her breast, this old attitude speaking best for him.

She learned quickly, but no woman is so beautiful she will not want her beauty told again in rhyme. He was a professional, he knew how to build a lover to court her.

He thought poems made things happen. He had no contempt for the robot lover who made every night a celebration and any meal they took a feast. He was a skilful product, riveted with care, whom Breavman wouldn’t have minded being himself. He approved of the lover’s tenderness, was even envious of some of the things the lover said, as though he were a wit Breavman had invited for dinner.

The lover, being planned so well, had a life of his own and often left Breavman behind. He came to Shell with his gift, let us say, of an ostrich feather bought at a Second Avenue store or tea roses from the shops at the corner of Eighth Street. He sat at Shell’s table and they exchanged gossip and plans.

Wherever you move

I hear the sounds of closing wings

of falling wings

I am speechless

because you have fallen beside me

because your eyelashes

are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

“They cashed a cheque for me at the supermarket.”

“The privileges of beauty. The last high caste left in classless America.”

“No, they did the same for a little brown old lady.”

“So the neighbourhood virtues persist.”

“How did your work go?”

“I blackened my page.”

I dread the time

when your mouth

begins to call me hunter.

The chatter went on and on. Stories of Hartford, the stone fountain, the summers at Lake George, huge houses remembered. Stories of Montreal, night drives with Krantz, death of a father. And as they lived together their own stories grew, myths of first meeting, first loving, quiet of coming trips.

“Can I read you something?”

“Yours?”

“You know I can’t stand anybody else’s work.”

She wanted him to sit beside her in a special favourite way.

“Is it about me?”

“Well, wait till I read the damn thing.”

She listened seriously. She asked him to read it again. She had never been so happy. He began in his low voice which always abdicated before the meaning of the words, never forced an effect. She loved this honesty in him, this intensity that made everything important.

“Oh it’s fine, Lawrence, it’s really fine.”

“Good. That’s what I wanted.”

“But it’s not for me – it’s not for anyone.”

“No, Shell, it’s for you.”

She had a treat for him, frozen strawberries.

When you call me close

to tell me

your body is not beautiful

I want to summon

the eyes and hidden mouths

of stone of light of water

to testify against you.

Breavman watched his deputy make her happy while he stared and stared. One night he watched her while she slept. He wanted to know what happened to her. Some faces die of sleep. Mouths go limp. Gone eyes leave a corpse behind. But she was whole and lovely, her hand close to her mouth and clutching a corner of sheet. He heard a cry in the street. He crept to the window but he could see nothing. The cry sounded like the death of something.

I want them

to surrender before you

the trembling rhyme of your face

from their deep caskets.

I don’t care who’s being killed, he thought. I don’t care what crusades are being planned in historical cafés. I don’t care about lives massacred in slums. He searched the extent of his human concern beyond the room. It was this: cool condolence for the women less beautiful than she, for the men less lucky than he.

Because he was attached to magic the poems continued. He didn’t realize that Shell was won not by the text but by the totality of his attention.

“Can I come in?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I’m getting dressed.”

“Precisely.”

“Don’t come in, please. You’re going to get horribly tired of me. All the books say I’m supposed to guard my mystery.”

“I want to watch you get mysteriously dressed.”

It was not strange that she interpreted this devotion to her presence as love.

When you call me close

to tell me

your body is not beautiful

I want my body and my hands

to be pools

for your looking and laughing.

12

Shell decided to go through with the divorce. Gordon acquiesced. He had intended to put up a battle but when she visited him at his office he was intimidated by her. She was so quiet and friendly, inquiring about his work, happy for his success. She referred to the marriage tenderly, but was firm about its ending, as though it were an after-supper game in the twilight but now the children had to come home to bed. He did not have to guess at the source of her strength. Except for one afternoon when they were filling out some final papers and he made a last-ditch effort to keep her, he was happy he’d had the luck to spend five years with her. And in a few years his literary disposition, unrequited by Newsweek, would allow him to dramatize himself to younger women with this little tragedy.

“This is between me and Gordon,” she said to Breavman. Like general lovers, they could only speak in each other’s arms. “So don’t go getting your hat.”

They had lived together for almost a year. She didn’t want him to regard the divorce as a signal to propose. Of course she wanted to marry him. She was not equipped for lovers, for her idea of love was essentially one of loyalty, a loyalty grounded in passion.

Sometimes she believed that no one could give so much tenderness, attention, except as an investment in the future. Sometimes she knew, she could locate the pain in her heart, that he could give so much only if he was going away.

She had already given everything to him, a bestowal we make only once in our lives. She wanted him to love her freely. That is most of the total gift. She had also been bred in the school of hero-martyrs, and saw herself, perhaps, as an Héloise. Only the man of adventure could love – that was his writing – and only the lady who had abandoned her house and name – that was conventional society. Adventurers leave the couch, ladies return to their name; this knowledge is the ordeal which keeps the clasp tight.

It isn’t often we meet someone who has the same vision of what we might be as we have for ourselves. Shell and Breavman, or rather his deputy, saw each other with this remarkable generosity.

She came in crying one afternoon. He took her gloves and purse, put them on the oiled-wood commode, led her to the green sofa.

“Because of what I told Gordon.”

“You had to tell him.”

“Not everything I did. I’m terrible.”

“You’re a terrible vicious witch.”

“I told him how good it is with you; I didn’t have to do that. I just wanted to hurt him.”

They talked all night until Shell could declare, “I hate him.”

Breavman observed to himself that she was further from divorce than she thought. Women take very seriously an attempt to mutilate their bodies. Breavman did not understand that as soon as she uttered the words in his arms she was free from hatred.

He was bothered by the knowledge that Shell was making real decisions, acting, changing her life. He wanted to watch her at rest. It involved him in the world of houses and traffic lights. She was becoming an authentic citizen, using his love for strength.

Suppose he went along with her towards living intimacy, towards comforting incessant married talk. Wasn’t he abandoning something more austere and ideal, even though he laughed at it, something which could apply her beauty to streets, traffic, mountains, ignite the landscape – which he could master if he were alone? Wasn’t that why he stared at her, indulged himself in every motion, expression? Perhaps it was only the conviction that he wasn’t created for comfort which disturbed him. Disturbed him because it was vanishing.

He was very comfortable. He had begun to accept his deputy’s joy. This lover was the most successful thing he had ever made, and the temptation was to supply him with wallet and identification and drown the master Breavman in a particularly garbage-strewn stretch of the Hudson River.

The Breavman eye, trained for volcano-watching, heavenly hosts, ideal thighs and now perfectly at work on the landscape of Shell’s body, was in danger of sleep. More and more the lover had Shell to himself. These are the times Breavman does not remember too well because he was so happy.

13

Summer was still very young.

Did you know forget-me-nots were that tiny?

They climbed the hill behind the cabin, listened to the birds, checked the guide to identify their calls.

He didn’t want to give her the little flowers because they both listened to names so carefully.

They talked about the conduct of parting. This to lovers is as remote and interesting as a discussion of H-bomb defence at a convention of mayors.

“… and if it isn’t working for one of us, we’ve got to tell the other.”

“… and let’s hope we have the courage to be surgical.”

Shell was delighted by a certain cluster of birch.

“They look like naked trees! They make the woods look black.”

At night they listened to the sound of the lake beating the sand and shore stones. A dark luminous sky made of burned silver foil. The cries of birds, wetter and more desperate now, as though food and lives were involved.

Shell said that every sound of the lake was different. Breavman preferred not to investigate; he enjoyed the blur of happiness. She could listen more carefully than he. Details made her richer, chained him.

“If you tape their whistles, Shell, and slow them down, you can hear the most extraordinary things. What the naked ear hears as one note is often in reality two or three notes sung simultaneously. A bird can sing three notes at the same time!”

“I wish I could speak that way. I wish I could say twelve things at once. I wish I could say all there was to say in one word. I hate all the things that can happen between the beginning of a sentence and the end.”

He worked while she slept. When he heard her easy breathing he knew the day was sealed and he could begin to record it.

A queer distortion of honesty holds me back from you …

Shell made herself wake up in the middle of the night. Moths battered against the window beside which he worked. She crept behind him and kissed his neck.

He wheeled around in surprise, pencil in hand, and scraped skin from her cheek. He upset the chair as he stood.

They faced one another in the cold flat light of the Coleman lantern. The night was deafening. The whirring and thudding of the moths, the hiss of the lantern, the water working on boulders, small animals hunting, nothing was at rest.

“I thought I …” He stopped.

“You thought you were alone!” she cried in pain.

“I thought I …”

“You thought you were alone.” he recorded when she was asleep again.

14

One night, watching her, he decided he would leave the next morning.

Otherwise he’d stay beside her always, staring at her.

It was the middle of June. He was running an elevator in a small office building, scab labour. He picked up extra money cleaning some of the offices on Friday evenings. It was a rickety elevator, carried a maximum of five passengers, and went out of commission if brought too far below the basement floor level.

At night there was Shell, poems and the journal while she slept.

Most of the time he was happy. This surprised and disturbed him, as generals get uneasy during a protracted peace. He enjoyed the elevator, which was sometimes a chariot, sometimes a torture device of Kafka, sometimes a time machine, and, the worst times, an elevator. He told people who asked that his name was Charon and welcomed them aboard.

Then there were the evening meals with Shell. Straw mats on an oiled-wood folding table. Candlelight and the smell of beeswax. The elaborate food lovers will prepare for one another, cooked in wine, held together by toothpicks. Or hilarious gentle morning feasts out of cans and frozen boxes.

There were weekend breakfasts of eggs and blueberry muffins when Shell was the genius of an ancient farmhouse kitchen histories away from New York – which they could abandon at any time for the green sofa, which was dateless. There were movie afternoons, mythological analyses of C Westerns, historic spaghetti dinners at Tony’s at which the phoniness of Bergman was discovered.

The poems continued, celebrating the two of them. Poems of parting, a man writing to a woman he will not let out of his sight. He had enough for a fat book but he didn’t need a book. That would come later when he needed to convince himself that he had lived such a life of work and love.

Breavman became his deputy. He returned to his watchtower an hour every few days to fill in his journal. He wrote quickly and blindly, disbelieving what he was doing, like a thrice-failed suicide looking for razor blades.

He exorcized the glory demons. The pages were jammed into an antique drawer that Shell respected. It was a Pandora’s box of visas and airline-ticket folders that would spirit him away if she opened it. Then he would climb back into the warm bed, their bodies sweetened by the threat.

God, she was beautiful. Why shouldn’t he stay with her? Why shouldn’t he be a citizen with a woman and a job? Why shouldn’t he join the world? The beauty he had planned as a repose between solitudes now led him to demand old questions of loneliness.

What did he betray if he remained with her? He didn’t dare recite the half-baked claims. And now he could taste the guilt that would nourish him if he left her. But he didn’t want to leave for good. He needed to be by himself, so he could miss her, to get perspective.

He shoved an air-mail letter into the stuffed drawer.

He watched her sleeping, sheet clutched in her hand like an amulet, hair sprung over the pillow in Hokusai waves. Certainly he would be willing to murder for that suspended body. It was the only allegiance. Then why turn from it?

His mind leaped beyond parting to regret. He was writing to her from a great distance, from some desperate flesh-covered desk in the future.

My darling Shell, there is someone lost in me whom I drowned stupidly in risky games a while ago – I would like to bring him to you, he’d jump into your daydreams without asking and take care of your flesh like a drunk scholar, with laughing and precious secret footnotes. But as I say, he is drowned, or crumpled in cowardly sleep, heavily medicated, dreamless, his ears jammed with seaweed or cotton – I don’t even know the location of the body, except that sometimes he stirs like a starving foetus in my heart when I remember you dressing or at work in the kitchen. That’s all I can write. I would have liked to bring him to you – not this page, not this regret.

He looked up from his lined book. He imagined Shell’s silhouette and his own. Valentine sweethearts of his parents’ time. A card on his collector’s shelf. Could he embalm her for easy reference?

She changed her position, drawing the white sheet tight along the side of her body, so that her waist and thigh seemed to emerge out of rough marble. He had no comparisons. It wasn’t just that the forms were perfect, or that he knew them so well. It was not a sleeping beauty, everybody’s princess. It was Shell. It was a certain particular woman who had an address and the features of her family. She was not a kaleidoscope to be adjusted for different visions. All her expressions represented feelings. When she laughed it was because. When she took his hand in the middle of the night it was because. She was the reason. Shell, the Shell he knew, was the owner of the body. It answered her, was her. It didn’t serve him from a pedestal. He had collided with a particular person. Beautiful or not, or ruined with vitriol tomorrow, it didn’t matter. Shell was the one he loved.

When the room was half filled with sunlight Shell opened her eyes.

“Hello,” said Breavman.

“Hello. You haven’t been to sleep at all?”

“No.”

“Come now.”

She sat up and straightened the bedclothes and pulled a corner down to invite him in. He sat on the edge of the bed. She wanted to know what was the matter.

“Shell, I think I should go to Montreal for a little …”

“You’re leaving?”

He felt her stiffen.

“I’ll be back. Krantz is coming back – he wrote and offered me this job at a camp….”

“I knew you were leaving. For the past few weeks I could just tell.”

“This is just for the summer….”

“How long?”

“The summer.”

“How many months?”

Before he could answer she brought her fingertips to her mouth with a little hurt sound.

“What is it?” asked Breavman.

“I sound like Gordon did.”

He took her in his arms to tell her this wasn’t the same thing at all. She recalled him to their promise to be surgical.

“That’s nonsense, you know it is. C’mon, let’s create a great breakfast.”

He stayed that day and the next, but the third day he left.

“Really, Shell, it’s just the summer.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“I wish you’d be more miserable.”

She smiled.

1

Concerning the bodies Breavman lost. No detective will find them. He lost them in the condition of their highest beauty. They are:

a rat

a frog

a girl sleeping

a man on the mountain

the moon

You and I have our bodies, mutilated as they might be by time and memory. Breavman lost them in fire where they persist whole and perfect. This kind of permanence is no comfort to anyone. After many burnings they became faint constellations which controlled him as they turned in his own sky.

It might be said they were eaten by the Mosaic bush each of us grows in our heart but few of us cares to ignite.

2

He stood on the lawn of the Allan Memorial, looking down at Montreal.

Loonies have the best view in town.

Here and there were clusters of people gathered on the expensive grass around wood furniture. It could have been a country club. The nurses gave it away. White and perfect, there was one on the circumference of every group, not quite joining the conversation, but in quiet control, like a moon.

“Good evening, Mr. Breavman,” said the floor nurse. “Your mother will be glad to see you.”

Was that reproach in her smile?

He opened the door. The room was cool and dark. As soon as his mother saw him it began. He sat down. He didn’t bother saying hello this time.

“… I want you to have the house, Lawrence, it’s for you so you’ll have a place for your head, you’ve got to protect yourself, they’ll take everything away, they have no heart, for me it’s the end of the story, what I did for everyone, and now I have to be with the crazy people, lying like a dog, the whole world outside, the whole world, I wouldn’t let a dog lie this way, I should be in a hospital, is this a hospital? do they know about my feet, that I can’t walk? but my son is too busy, oh he’s a great man, too busy for his mother, a poet for the world, for the world …!”

Here she began to shout. Nobody looked in.

“… but for his mother he’s too busy, for his shiksa he’s got plenty of time, for her he doesn’t count minutes, after what they did to our people, I had to hide in the cellar on Easter, they chased us, what I went through, and to see a son, to see my son, a traitor to his people, I have to forget about everything, I have no son….”

She continued for an hour, staring at the ceiling as she ranted. When it was nine o’clock he said, “I’m not supposed to stay any longer, Mother.”

She stopped suddenly and blinked.

“Lawrence?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Are you taking care of yourself?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Are you eating enough?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“What did you eat today?”

He mumbled a few words. He tried to make up a menu she’d approve. He could hardly speak, not that she could hear.

“… never took a cent, it was everything for my son, fifteen years with a sick man, did I ask for diamonds like other women….”

He left her talking.

There was a therapeutic dance going on outside. Nurses held by frightened patients. Recorded pop music, romantic fantasies even more ludicrous in this setting.

When the swallows come back to Capistrano

Behind the circle of soft light in which they moved rose the dark slope of Mount Royal. Below them flashed the whole commercial city.

He watched the dancers and, as we do when confronted with the helpless, he heaped on them all the chaotic love he couldn’t put anywhere else. They lived in terror.

He wished that one of the immaculate white women would walk him down the hill.

3

He saw Tamara almost every night of the two weeks he was in the city.

She had abandoned her psychiatrist and espoused Art, which was less demanding and cheaper.

“Let’s not learn a single new thing about one another, Tamara.”

“Is that laziness or friendship?”

“It’s love!”

He staged a theatrical swoon.

She lived in a curious little room on Fort Street, a street of dolls’ houses. There was a marble fireplace with carved torches and hearts, above it a narrow mirror surrounded by slender wood pillars and entablatures, a kind of brown Acropolis.

“That mirror’s doing nobody any good up there.”

They pried it out and arranged it beside the couch.

The room had been partitioned flimsily by an economical landlady. Tamara’s third, because of the high ceiling, seemed to be standing on one end. She liked it because it felt so temporary.

Tamara was a painter now, who did only self-portraits. There were canvases everywhere. The sole background for all the portraits was this room she lived in. There was paint under her fingernails.

“Why do you only do yourself?”

“Can you think of anyone more beautiful, charming, intelligent, sensitive, et cetera?”

“You’re getting fat, Tamara.”

“So I can paint my childhood.”

Her hair was the same black, and she hadn’t cut it.

They founded the Compassionate Philistines one night, and limited the membership to two. It was devoted to the adoration of the vulgar. They celebrated the fins of the new Cadillac, defended Hollywood and the Hit Parade, wall-to-wall carpets, Polynesian restaurants, affirmed their allegiance to the Affluent Society.

Wallpaper roses were peeling from the grapevine moulding. The single piece of furniture was a small Salvation Army couch, over-stuffed and severely wounded. She supported herself as an artist’s model and ate only bananas, the theory of the week.

The night before he left she had a surprise for him and all loyal Compassionate Philistines. She removed her bandanna. She had dyed her hair blonde in accordance with the aims of the organization.

Good-bye, old Tamara, Breavman recorded for his biographers, may you flourish, you have a three-hundred-thousand-dollar mouth.

4

When would the old dialogue with Krantz resume?

The lake was beautiful in the evening. Frogs went off like coiled springs.

When would they sit beside the water like small figures in a misty scroll painting, and talk about their long exile? He wanted to tell him everything.

Krantz lectured the counsellors on Indoor Games for Rainy Days. Krantz prepared a days-off schedule. Krantz set up a new buddy system for the waterfront and drilled the counsellors for two hours. Krantz carried a clip-board and a whistle around his neck.

No crude bugle wakened them in the morning, but a recording on the pa of the first few bars of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto. Krantz’s idea. On the fifth morning of the pre-camp training programme which Krantz had instituted for the counsellors, Breavman knew that this particular piece of music had been ruined for him for life.

Well, Krantz was busy. And there was this girl, Anne, who had followed him from England. Thank God she wasn’t beautiful. She was a modern dancer.

After the organization was completed and the kids arrived, things would run smoothly and they would repair their old commentary on the universe.

Krantz explained the American game of baseball.

“If a guy catches a ball after it’s hit, the batter’s out.”

“That sounds rational,” said Anne, and they hugged.

He hoped the dialogue would begin soon, because there was nothing he liked about camp. Obscene. He felt it the minute he arrived. There is something obscene about a rich kids’ camp. Something so obvious it disgusts. It’s like an amusement park, like rows of elaborate pinball machines. He looked around at the playing fields, handball-courts, bunks, boats – receptacles to hold children for a summer, relieve parents. Gangrene in the family. Living rooms back in Montreal were stinking with twisted intimacy.

He was glad that four hundred miles away Shell was waiting.

The counsellors were on the dock, lying in the sun. Breavman surveyed the flesh. Soon it would all be brown, bronze would grow around the bra straps. Now they were city-white. How the pines must despise them!

Breavman looked at a tall girl named Wanda. She was sitting at the far end of the dock, dangling her toes in the water. She had good legs and yellow hair but they didn’t whip him. She wasn’t quite in the great golden tradition. Wanda, you’re safe from Breavman.

All the girls were very plain. And this was the joke. He knew what two months in that community would do. He’d be writing sonnets to all of them. These poems-to-be made him tired.

The Laurentian sky was jammed with stars. Breavman, who didn’t know the names of constellations, judged confusion to be an aspect of their beauty.

“Counsellors’ meeting,” Krantz called up to the balcony.

“Let’s not go, Krantz.”

“Brilliant idea, except that I’m chairman.”

As they walked to the Counsellors’ Lounge they were joined by Ed, a first-year law student at McGill.

“First guy to make it with Wanda gets it,” Ed proposed. “I mean, it’s a matter of time. We’re all going to make her before the summer’s over, it happens every season, but this way one of us stands to collect.”

Breavman hated that kind of young-buck talk. He wished he had the courage to smash his face. Maybe Krantz would do it. He was supposed to be a lover now.

“I suppose you’re wondering how we can be certain when the first man claims the money.” Ed, the legalist, explained the silence of the other two. Breavman searched the silence for their old unity.

“I think we can trust each other,” said Krantz. “Breavman?”

Breavman called their attention to a falling star.

“A contract of cosmic significance.”

They agreed that five dollars each would make the pool worthwhile.

What did you expect, Breavman, reunion on a windy hill, a knife ceremony and the exchange of blood?

5

The bus depot was a chaos of parents, children, fishing rods, tennis racquets, and bewildered dogs dragged to see their young masters away. Mothers who had been awaiting the great day for weeks were suddenly stricken with a certainty that their babies would starve without them. A special diet was pressed into Breavman’s hand along with a five-dollar bill.

“I know you’ll look after him,” a woman shouted hurriedly, scanning the crowd meanwhile for someone else to bribe.

Fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure Breavman sneaked into one of the empty waiting buses. He closed his eyes and listened to the confusion beyond the window. What was he doing with these people?

“My name is Martin Stark. Capital S, small t, small a, small r, small k. No e.”

Breavman wheeled around.

In the seat behind him, sitting very stiffly, was a boy of about twelve years. His eyes were incredibly white, not naturally, but as if he were straining to show as much white as possible. This gave him an expression of having just seen a catastrophe.

“Sometimes I spell it with an e and then I have to tear up the page and begin again.”

He spoke in a monotone, but over-articulating each word as if it were an elocution lesson.

“My name is Breavman. Capital B, small r, small e …”

He had been warned about Martin, who was going to be one of his campers. According to Ed, Martin was half-nut, half-genius. His mother was supposed to be ashamed of him. At any rate she never came on Visiting Day. Today, Breavman learned from the boy, she had come an hour early and deposited him in the bus with the command not to stir. Thus she avoided meeting the other parents.

“I’m your counsellor this summer, Martin.”

Martin registered no reaction to this information. He continued to stare beyond Breavman with a kind of vacant, unchanging terror. He had a bony face and a great Caesar nose. Because he generally clenched his teeth when he wasn’t talking, the lines of his jaw were severely outlined.

“What’s your favourite store?” asked Martin.

“What’s yours?”

“Dionne’s. What’s your favourite parking lot?”

“I don’t know. What’s yours?”

“Dionne’s Parking Lot.”

The questions excited Martin because now he asked breathlessly, “How many windows are in the building Dionne’s is in?”

“I don’t know, Martin. How many?”

“In all the walls?”

“Of course all the walls. What good would it do to know the number of windows in only one wall or even three walls?”

Martin supplied a number triumphantly. Breavman idiotically promised himself he would check next time he was in town.

“How many cars were in the Dionne’s Parking Lot last Thursday?”

“Tell me.”

Fifty campers invaded the bus. There was much scrambling and bargaining for seats and Breavman’s rapport with the boy was lost. Martin sat calmly through the ride, mumbling to himself. Breavman learned later that he liked to give himself four-figure numbers to multiply together.

On the way north Breavman asked him, “Do you like the country side?”

“After I investigate it.”

6

Three hundred jaws make a lot of noise chewing together. The benches were always too far from or close to the table and needed complicated co-operative action to adjust. He almost slapped a camper for blowing bubbles in his glass of milk.

After the meal Breavman and Ed performed, Breavman pumping out intricate chords that he knew were lost and Ed ruining the high registers of his harmonica to rise above the general mess-hall din.

Breavman, who always wanted to hear Handel playing in his head, beat the wire strings of a borrowed guitar. He had no callouses to resist the bite of the strings on the fingers of his left hand.

His campers and Ed’s shared a bunkhouse, and the counsellors had a partitioned area to themselves in the same wood building. They had between them decided on a policy of rigorous discipline for the first few days. Then they would ease off and be nice guys. After a stern talk the boys went to bed efficiently, except for Martin, who took half an hour to urinate. Ed told them to keep quiet in the morning no matter what time they got up.

The counsellors lay on their cots, the atmosphere of strict control hanging heavy. Martin’s queer clipped voice rang out.

“Can I make number two before line-up?”

“Yes, Martin.”

“Can I clean my nose?”

“If it isn’t a noisy operation.”

“Can I write my brother?”

Ed leaned over and whispered to Breavman, “He has no brother.”

When they were asleep he ran to the kitchen, where there was a telephone. He phoned Shell in New York. He wanted her voice to obliterate the day. He wanted to hear her say the word “darling.” He had phoned her half a dozen times from the city and he owed a huge bill.

He gave nothing to her and waited, reading over and over the Telephone Company’s printed instructions on how to dial a number. An interior voice was screaming: It doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Shell told him how much she loved Joseph Conrad.

They said good-bye softly, both of them knowing the three minutes had failed.

He wrote for two hours, describing the day in detail. The black-fly bites on his arm disturbed him and he put that down. His Indian jacket was too hot but he didn’t feel like taking it off. He put that down.

7

Martin fascinated him. He reckoned that he had misinterpreted Martin’s expression. It was not vacant terror but general wonder. He was that rarest creature, a blissful mad-child. The other children understood his election and treated him with a kind of bemused awe.

One afternoon they entertained themselves by encircling Martin and firing large numbers at him to multiply.

He rocked back and forth, like a man at prayer, his eyes closed. He beat his thighs with open palms as he thought, like an awkward bird trying to leave the ground, and made a buzzing sound as though his mind were machinery.

“Em-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m …”

“Look at him go!”

“Em-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m …”

“C’mon, Martin boy!”

“Eighty-one thousand, nine hundred and eighteen.” he announced, opening his eyes. The boys cheered and hugged him.

Then he caught sight of a small pine tree. He stopped dead, stared, and walked out of the circle. Breavman followed him.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh yes. I believe I’d better count these.”

Until supper he amused himself by discovering how many needles there were on an average pine tree.

Krantz was annoyed when he discovered what Breavman’s afternoon activity was.

“That isn’t what Mrs. Stark pays her money for.”

“No?”

It was incredible that they should have put themselves into a position where one could castigate the other.

“Not to have her son used as a side-show freak.”

“What does she pay her money for?”

“Come off it, Breavman. You know it wasn’t healthy. She wants the kid to be like everyone else – integrated, inconspicuous. It’s hard enough on her as it is.”

“Okay, we’ll force him into baseball.”

“Infractions of the regulations will be severely disciplined, Herr Breavman.”

8

A horse-shoe of hills rose behind the bunks. On one of the hills there was an amphitheatre with wooden benches and stage. It was used for plays, singsongs, and on Sabbath as a House of Prayer.

How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob,

and thy dwelling place, O Israel …

They sang in Hebrew, their voices mingling with the sunlight. It was fragrant there, the pines high, blasted, and black. The camp was assembled in white clothes.

That’s how we are beautiful, he thought, that’s the only time – when we sing. Storm troopers, band of crusaders, gang of stinking slaves, righteous citizens – only tolerable when their voices ring in unison. Any imperfect song hints at the ideal theme.

Ed told a wonderful Sholem Aleichem story about a young boy who wanted to play the fiddle but was forbidden to by his Orthodox parents. For a minute Breavman thought he would overdo it, but no, he swayed and danced under his imaginary fiddle and everyone believed him.

The same Ed who bet with a girl’s body.

Breavman sat thinking that he could never do as well, never be so calm and magical. And that’s what he wanted to be: the gentle hero the folk come to love, the man who talks to animals, the Baal Shem Tov who carried children piggy-back.

He would never be able to pronounce a Jewish word with any confidence.

“Krantz,” he whispered, “why weren’t we allowed to cross the tracks?”

Twelve righteous faces told him to shh.

Still, and he knew it was arrogance, he often considered himself the Authentic Jew. His background had taught him the alien experience. He was grateful for that. Now he extended that experience to his own people.

What was it all about anyhow? A solitary man in a desert, begging for the inclination of a face.

Anne performed a Hasidic dance, annihilating anything womanly in her body with the crammed, ironic movements. But for a few moments they were lost in Europe, their skins untanned, waiting in narrow streets for miracles and the opportunity for revenge they would never take.

After the Sabbath services a butterfly seemed to follow him down the hill, disappearing as he left the wooded area for the hot campus. He felt the honour of it all through the day.

9

“It’s so hard,” said Shell’s voice. “Everybody has a body.”

“I know,” Breavman said. “And there’s one point in an evening when the thing most urgently needed is just an arm around the shoulder.”

“I’m so glad we can still talk.”

Her honesty obliged her to describe her temptations. She wanted to keep nothing from him. They both understood the danger of this technique: there are humans that desire me. Keep me or they will.

He leaned against the wall in the dark kitchen and listened. How curious that anyone should speak to him so softly! How had he managed to arrange the miracle in which someone spoke softly to him? It was a magic he was sure he never possessed, like reading one’s first poems. But here was his own name whispered.

An ugly forecast developed in his heart that he would drive the whisperer to a hundred indifferent beds and silence her.

“Shell, I’m coming to New York tomorrow!”

“You’re quitting camp?”

“There’s nothing for me here.”

“Oh, Lawrence.”

It was raining when he went outside, her voice still with him. He began to circle one of the playing fields. The tall pines around the field and hills gave him the impression of a bowl which contained him. There was one black hill that seemed so connected with his father that he could hardly bear to look up at it as he came round and round, stumbling like a drunk.

The rain hazed the electric lights isolated here and there. An indescribable feeling of shame overwhelmed him. His father was involved in the hills, moving like a wind among the millions of wet leaves.

Then an idea crushed him – he had ancestors! His ancestors reached back and back, like daisies connected in a necklace. He completed circle after circle in the mud.

He stumbled and collapsed, tasting the ground. He lay very still while his clothes soaked. Something very important was going to happen in this arena. He was sure of that. Not in gold, not in light, but in this mud something necessary and inevitable would take place. He had to stay to watch it unfold. As soon as he wondered why he wasn’t cold he began to shiver.

He sent Shell a funny telegram explaining why he couldn’t come.

10

Breavman received a letter from Mrs. Stark, Martin’s mother. It wasn’t customary for parents to reply to the official reports the counsellors were obliged to send.

Dear Mr. Breavman,

I’m sure my son Martin is in excellent hands.

I’m not anxious and I don’t expect any further detailed communications concerning his behaviour.

Very sincerely,

R. F. STARK

“What the hell did you write her?” demanded Krantz.

“Look, Krantz, I happen to like the kid. I took a lot of trouble over the letter. I tried to show that I thought he was a very valuable human being.”

“Oh, you did?”

“What was I supposed to say?”

“Nothing. As little as possible. I told you what she’s like. For two months of every year she doesn’t have to look at him every day and can pretend that he’s a normal boy doing normal things with other normal boys at a normal camp.”

“Well, he isn’t. He’s much more important than that.”

“Very good, Breavman, very compassionate. But keep it to yourself, will you? It was Breavman you were pleasing, not the boy’s mother.”

They were standing on the balcony of the Administration Building. Krantz was about to announce Evening Activity over the PA.

Didn’t Krantz know what he knew about Martin? No, that wasn’t true. He didn’t know anything about the boy, but he loved him. Martin was a divine idiot. Surely the community should consider itself honoured to have him in their midst. He shouldn’t be tolerated – the institutions should be constructed around him, the traditionally incoherent oracle.

Out in the open, tempered by the dialogue, it wouldn’t sound so mad.

Krantz looked at his watch, which he wore on the inside of his wrist. As he turned to go in he caught sight of a figure lying face down in the darkness near a row of bushes at the bottom of the lawn.

“For God’s sake, Breavman, that’s the sort of thing I mean.”

Breavman walked quickly across the lawn.

“What are you doing, Martin?”

“Twenty thousand and twenty-six.”

Breavman returned to the balcony.

“He’s counting grass.”

Krantz shut his eyes and tapped the banister.

“What’s your evening activity, Breavman?”

“Scavenger hunt.”

“Well, get him over there with the rest of the group.”

“He isn’t interested in a scavenger hunt.”

Krantz leaned forward and said with an exasperated smile, “Convince him. That’s what you’re supposed to be here for.”

“What difference does it make whether he goes looking for yesterday’s newspaper or counts grass?”

Krantz leaped down the stairs, helped Martin up, and offered him a piggy-back across the field, to where Breavman’s group was assembled. Martin climbed on gleefully and as he rode stuck his index fingers in his ears for no apparent reason, squinting as if he were expecting some drum-splitting explosion.

Every night, just before he went to sleep, it was Martin’s custom to declare how much fun he had had that day. He checked it against some mysterious ideal.

“Well, Martin, how did it go today?” asked Breavman, sitting on his bed.

The mechanical voice never hesitated.

“Seventy-four per cent.”

“Is that good?

“Permissible.”

11

He marvelled at how still he could lie.

He was stiller than the water which took the green of the mountains.

Wanda was fidgeting, pretending to write a letter in what was left of the light of the day. So her long yellow hair wasn’t quite in the great tradition. Her gold-haired limbs could be worshipped individually, but they did not amalgamate into beauty. Nevertheless, how many thighs could he kiss at the same time?

If I had a really immense mouth.

The flies were very bad. They put on Six-Twelve. Wanda extended her arm to him but instead of applying the lotion himself gave the bottle to her. His fantasy: applying the lotion with greater and greater frenzy all over her flesh.

A light rain swept across the face of the water, veiling it with a silver net. From time to time they heard the cheer of the camp, which had assembled in the mess hall for a Lassie movie.

The rain passed and the still surface recomposed itself.

“I’ve never really lived by a lake,” said Wanda, who was given to walking barefoot.

“Now don’t get into poetry, Wanda.”

He absently caressed her face and hair, which was softer than he had imagined.

An inner eye flying away from the boathouse like a slow high star gave him the view of a tiny plywood box in which two minuscule figures (mating insects?) made inevitable ballet movements to each other.

Wanda was trying to get her head into a position in which she could kiss his caressing fingers.

Finally he kissed her lips, mouth, stomach, all the parts.

Then something very disturbing occurred.

Her face blurred into the face of little Lisa, it was dark in the boat-house, and that face blurred into one he didn’t recognize, that one dissolved into the face of Bertha, maybe it was the blonde hair. He stared hard to make the changing stop, to return to the girl beside him.

He chased the different faces with his mouth, stopping no one. Wanda mistook his exercise for passion.

They walked back up the path. The sky was mauve. A moon emerged from a gentle accumulation of clouds. The path was softened by millions of pine needles. Martin would find out how many, perhaps.

Wanda sneezed. The damp wood planks.

“It was so peaceful down there, so peaceful.”

Breavman was tempted to punish her for the trite rhythm of her sentence by telling her about the pool for her body.

“Do you know what the ambition of our generation is, Wanda? We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently.”

“Can’t you say anything that isn’t cruel?” she squeaked as she ran from him.

He sat up all night to punish himself for hurting her. The morning birds began. In the window grew a cool grey light, the trees beyond still black. There was a light mist on the mountain but he didn’t feel like following it.

A few days later he discovered that he had caught Wanda’s cold. And he couldn’t understand the way his campers were shoving food down their faces. They bubbled in the milk, diluting it with spit, fought over extras, sculptured out of squeezed bread.

Breavman glanced at Martin. The boy hadn’t eaten anything. Krantz had warned him that he must supervise the boy’s diet closely. Sometimes he went on mysterious hunger strikes, the reasons for which could never be discovered. On this occasion Breavman could have hugged him.

His head was completely stuffed. The flies were vicious. He went to bed with the campers but couldn’t sleep.

He lay there thinking stupidly of Krantz and Anne, lovingly of Shell.

The horizontal position was a trap. He would learn to sleep standing up, like horses.

Poor Krantz and Anne off in the woods. How long can they lie naked before the black flies get them? His hands will have to leave her flesh and hair to scratch his own.

“Can I come in?”

It was Wanda. Of course she could come in. He was fettered on the bed, wasn’t he?

“I just want to tell you why I haven’t let you see me.”

She turned off the lights to give them an even chance against the flies. They mingled fingers as she talked. Just before he drew to himself and kissed her lightly, he noticed a firefly in the corner. It was flashing infrequently. Breavman was sure it was almost dead.

“Why are you kissing me?”

“I don’t know. It’s not what I came here for. Just the opposite.”

He was taking a great interest in the firefly. It wasn’t dead yet.

“Why the hell don’t you know?”

She was fumbling with something under her blouse. “You’ve broken my bra strap.”

“This is a great conversation.”

“I’d better go.”

“You’d better go. He’d better go. We’d better go. They’d better go.”

“You can’t seem to talk to anyone.”

Was that supposed to make him miserable? It didn’t. He had given himself to the firefly’s crisis. The intervals became longer and longer between the small cold flashes. It was Tinker Bell. Everybody had to believe in magic. Nobody believed in magic. He didn’t believe in magic. Magic didn’t believe in magic. Please don’t die.

It didn’t. It flashed long after Wanda left. It flashed when Krantz came to borrow Ed’s Time magazine. It flashed as he tried to sleep. It flashed as he scribbled his journal in the dark.

Boohoohoohoohoohoo say all the little children.

12

It was three in the morning and Breavman was glad they were all sleeping. It was tidier that way, the campers and counsellors arranged on their cots, row after row. When they were awake there were too many possibilities, egos to encounter, faces to interpret, worlds to enter. The variety was confusing. It was hard enough to meet one other person. A community is an alibi for the failure of individual love.

A clear night, cold enough to turn the breath to steam. The landscape seemed intimately connected to the sky, as if it were held in the grip of the high, icy stars. Trees, hills, wood buildings, even a low streak of mist, were riveted to the rock of the planet. It seemed that nothing would ever move, nothing could break the general sleep.

Breavman walked, almost marched, between the black-filled cabins. He was exhilarated to be the only free agent in this frozen world. Wanda was asleep, her hair colourless. Martin was asleep, his jaws relaxed, at home in his terror. Anne was asleep, a dancer out of training. Krantz was asleep. Certainly he knew how Krantz slept, how his lips budged forward each time he exhaled his jagged snore.

He dissolved the walls in his mind as he walked between them, and he took an inventory of each form’s isolation. This night’s sleep was strangely graceless. He noted the greedy expression a sleeper wears, that of a solitary eater at a banquet. In sleep every man is an only child. They turned, they shifted, drew up a limb, uncocked an elbow, turned again, shifted again, a series of prize crabs, each on his private white beach.

All their ambition, energy, speed, individuality was swaddled in excelsior, like rows of Christmas ornaments out of season. Each form, so intent on power, was locked in a nursery struggle far away. And it seemed that the night, so sharp and still, the physical world, would wait motionless until they all came back.

You’ve lost, Breavman addressed them out loud. It’s a hypnotists’ tournament, this little life of ours, and I’m the winner.

He decided to share the prize with Krantz.

The screen in the window above Krantz’s bed had a bulge in it. When Breavman tapped it from the outside it created a miniature thunder.

His face did not appear. Breavman tapped again. Krantz’s disembodied voice began in a monotone.

“You are stepping on the flowers, Breavman. If you look down, you will discover that you are in a flower-bed. Why are you standing on the flowers, Breavman?”

“Krantz, listen to this: The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.”

“That’s very good, Breavman. Good night.”

“The last superiority of the refuge is a sleeping sense of the insomniac world.”

“Oh, excellent.”

“The refuge world of the superiority is a last sense of the sleeping insomniac.”

“Umm. Yes.”

There was a creaking of springs and Krantz blinked out of the window.

“Hello, Breavman.”

“You can go back to sleep now, Krantz. I just wanted to wake you up.”

“Well, you might as well rouse the camp. Rouse the camp, Breavman! It’s the night.”

“For what?”

“A Children’s Crusade. We’ll march on Montreal.”

“So there’s a reason for all this discipline. Forgive me, Krantz, I should have known.”

They planned the assault on Montreal and the ensuing martyrdom with sinister enthusiasm. After four minutes of talk Breavman broke into the fantasy.

“Is this for my benefit, Krantz? Some sort of charitable therapy?”

“God damn you, Breavman!”

The bed creaked again and in a few seconds Krantz was outside, wearing a bathrobe and a towel around his neck.

“Let’s walk, Breavman.”

“You were humouring me, Krantz.”

“I don’t know how you can be so perceptive in one instant and so miserably blind in another. I admit it. I was asleep and I felt like telling you to fuck off. Besides, Anne was in bed with me.”

“I’m sorry, I –”

“No, I want to talk to you, now. I’ve been trying to get to talk to you for weeks.”

“What?”

“You’ve made yourself completely unavailable, Breavman. To me, to everyone….”

They stood beside the canoe racks, talking, listening to the water. The sand was damp and it was really too cold to be there but neither wished to cripple the communication that had begun, and which both knew was fragile.

The mist along the shore began to weave itself thick out of snaky wisps, and the edge of the sky brightened into a royal blue.

They told each other about their girls, a little solemnly, carefully omitting any sexual information.

13

He watched Martin clean his nose, his great Caesarian nose that should have sponsored historic campaigns but only counted grass and pine needles.

Every morning Martin got up half an hour early to fulfil the ritual.

Toothpicks, cotton-wool, vaseline, mirrors.

Breavman asked him why.

“I like to have a clean nose.”

Martin asked Breavman to mail a letter to his brother. Mrs. Stark had given instructions that they be intercepted and destroyed. Breavman read them and they brought him closer to the boy’s anguish.

Dear Bully fat Bully you dirty

I got your last thirty-four letters and saw in a second the millions of lies. I hope you starve and your boner breaks in half with lots of screams and lets the beetles out after what you told her about me. Why don’t you fill your mouth with towels and razor-blades. Mummy is not a stupid skull she sneaked a look in the flashlight and read the poison shit you wrote me under the blankets.

love your brother,

MARTIN STARK

14

Day off. Despite the hot drive in the bus he was exhilarated to be back in Montreal. But who were the bastards responsible for tearing down the best parts of the city?

He visited his mother, was unable to make her understand he’d been away. Same horror as always.

He walked along Sherbrooke Street. The women of Montreal were beautiful. Launched from tiny ankles, their legs shot up like guided missiles into atmospheres of private height.

He formed wild theories out of pleats and creases.

Wrists, white and fast as falling stars, plunged him into arm-holes. Tonight they would have to comb his eyeballs out of all their hair.

He planted hundreds of hands in bosoms, like hidden money. Therefore he called on Tamara.

“Come in, old chappie, old.”

Smell of turpentine. Another batch of agonized self-portraits. “Tamara, you’re the only woman I can talk to. For the past two weeks I’ve gone to sleep with your mouth in my hand.”

“How’s camp? How’s Krantz?”

“Flourishing. But he’ll never make a Compassionate P.”

“You smell delicious. And you’re so brown. Yummy.”

“Let’s be immoderate.”

“Good idea in any given situation.”

“Let’s praise each other’s genitalia. Don’t you hate that word?”

“For women. It’s good for men. Sounds loopy – things hanging. Makes me think of chandelier.”

“You’re great, Tamara. God, I like being with you. I can be anything.”

“So can I.”

And Shell with her open gift, it struck him, forced him into a kind of nobility.

“Let’s resort to everything.”

They left the room at five in the morning to eat a huge meal at the China Gardens. Laughing like maniacs, they fed each other with chopsticks and decided they were in love. The waiters stared. They hadn’t bothered to remove the paint.

Walking back, they talked about Shell, how beautiful she was. He asked Tamara if she would mind his phoning New York.

“Of course not. She’s something else.”

Shell was sleepy but glad to hear from him. She spoke in a little girl’s voice. He told her he loved her.

He took the early morning bus back to camp. Immortal Tamara, she walked with him to the terminal. After one hour’s sleep he called that real affection.

15

Now we must take a closer look at Breavman’s journal:

Friday night. Sabbath. Ritual music on the PA. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts. The earth is full of your glory. If I could only end my hate. If I could believe what they wrote and wrapped in silk and crowned with gold. I want to write the word.

All our bodies are brown. All the children are dressed in white. Make us able to worship.

Take me home again. Build up my house again. Make me a dweller in thee. Take my pain. I can’t use it any longer. It makes nothing beautiful. It makes the leaves into cinders. It makes the water foul. It makes your body into a stone. Holy life. Let me lead it. I don’t want to hate. Let me flourish. Let the dream of you flourish in me.

Brother, give me your new car. I want to ride to my love. In return I offer you this wheelchair. Brother, give me all your money. I want to buy everything my love wants. In return I offer you blindness so you may live the rest of your days in absolute control over everyone. Brother, give me your wife. It is she whom I love. In return I have commanded all the whores of the city to give you infinite credit.

Thou. Help me to work. All the works of my hand belong to you. Do not let me make my offering so paltry. Do not make me insane. Do not let me descend raving your name.

I have no taste for flesh but my own.

Lead me away from safety. There is no safety where I am.

How shall I dedicate my days to thee? Now I have finally said it. How shall I dedicate my days to thee?

16

Dearest Shell,

Your jade earring with the filigree silver. I pictured it on your ear. Then I pictured the side of your head and the wind-paths of hair. Then your face. Finally all your beauty.

Then I remembered your suspicion of beauty’s praise, so I praised your soul, yours being the only one I believe in.

I discovered that the beauty of your eyes and flesh was just the soul’s everyday clothes. It turned to music when I asked it what it wore on Sabbath.

All my love, darling,

LAWRENCE

17

Anne and Breavman were on night duty together. They sat on the steps of one of the bunks waiting for the counsellors to check in.

Yes, yes, Krantz was in the city on camp business.

Her braid was like a thick twisting river. Fireflies, some as high as the tops of the pines, some beside the roots.

Here is my poem for you.

I don’t know you, Anne.

I don’t know you, Anne.

I don’t know you, Anne.

Eternal theme: small flies and moths flinging themselves against the light bulb.

“This is the kind of night I’d like to get drunk,” she said.

“I’d like to get sober.”

A light rain began to fall. He turned up his face, trying to give himself away.

“I’m going for a walk.”

“May I come along? I don’t mind asking because I feel I know you. Krantz has told me so much.”

It rained for ten seconds. They walked down the road to the village. They stopped where the pine scent was heaviest. He found himself swaying back and forth as though he were in a synagogue. He wanted her, and the more he wanted her the more he became a part of the mist and trees. I’ll never get out of this, he told himself. This is where I’ll stay. I like the smell. I like being that close, that far away. He felt he was manufacturing the mist. It was steaming out of his pores.

“I’ll go back if you want to stay alone.”

He didn’t answer for a thousand years.

“No, we both better go.”

He didn’t move.

“What’s that?” Anne asked about a noise.

He began to tell her about swallows, cliff-dwelling swallows, barn-dwelling swallows. He knew everything about swallows. He had disguised himself as a swallow and lived among them to learn their ways.

He was standing close to her but he received no trace of the radar signal to embrace. He walked swiftly away. He came back. He pulled her braid. It was thick, as he imagined. He strode away again and snatched a stick from the bushes by the side of the road.

He swung it wildly, smashing the foliage. He beat the ground around her feet. She danced, laughing. He raised the dust knee-high. But the bushes had to be attacked again, the trunks of the trees, the low yellow grass, white in the night. Then more dust, the branch nicking her ankles. He wanted to raise the dust over both of them, slice up their bodies with the sharp switch.

She ran from him. He ran behind her, whipping the calves of her legs. They were both screaming with laughter. She ran to the lights of the camp.

18

Dear Anne

I’d like

to watch

your toes

when you’re

naked.

Which he delivered to her several hundred times with his eyes without even thinking.

19

“Fifty cents for a hand on her crotch.”

Krantz was joking with Breavman about selling Anne to him piece by piece. Breavman didn’t like the joke but he laughed.

“An almost unused nipple for three bits?”

Oh, Krantz.

They had quarrelled over Breavman’s treatment of Martin. Breavman had categorically refused to enjoin the boy to participate in group activities. He had put his job on the line.

“You know we can’t start looking for replacements at this point in the season.”

“In that case you’ll have to let me handle him my own way.”

“I’m not telling you to force him into activities, but I swear you encourage him in the other direction.”

“I enjoy his madness. He enjoys his madness. He’s the only free person I’ve ever met. Nothing that anybody else does is as important as what he does.”

“You’re talking a lot of nonsense, Breavman.”

“Probably.”

Then Breavman had decided he couldn’t deliver a sermon to the camp on Saturday morning when his turn came around. He had nothing to say to anyone.

Krantz looked at him squarely.

“You made a mistake, coming up here, didn’t you?”

“And you made one asking me. We both wanted to prove different things. So now you know you’re your own man, Krantz.”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I know.”

It was a moment, this true meeting, and Breavman didn’t try to stretch it into a guarantee. He had trained himself to delight in the fraction. “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.”

“Of course you know that you’re identifying with Martin and are only excluding yourself when you allow him to separate himself from the group.”

“Not that jargon, Krantz, please.”

“I remember everything, Breavman. But I can’t live in it.”

“Good.”

Therefore Breavman was obliged to laugh when Anne joined them and Krantz said, “Buttocks are going very cheap.”

20

In the evening he stayed motionless on the mess hall balcony. Krantz was about to put a record on the PA.

“Hey, Anne, you want Mozart, the Forty-ninth?” he shouted. She ran towards him.

Breavman saw clover in the grass, a discovery, and mist drifting across the tops of the low mountains, like the fade in a photo. Ripples on the water moving in the same direction as the mist, from black into silver into black.

He didn’t move a muscle, didn’t know whether he was at peace or paralysed.

Steve, the Hungarian tractor driver, passed below the balcony, picking a white flower from a bush. They were levelling out some land for another playing field, filling in a marsh.

The flute-bird had a needle in its whistle. A broken door down the hill beside the thick-bottomed pines.

“London Bridge is falling down

falling down

falling down”

sang a file of children.

Down the pine-needled path stood Martin, motionless as Breavman, his arm stretched out in a Fascist salute, his sleeve rolled up.

He was waiting for mosquitoes to land.

Martin had a new obsession. He elected himself to be the Scourge of Mosquitoes, counting them as he killed them. There was nothing frantic about his technique. He extended his arm and invited them. When one landed, wham! up came the other hand. “I hate you,” he told each one individually, and noted the statistic.

Martin saw his counsellor standing on the balcony.

“A hundred and eighty,” he called up as greeting.

Mozart came loud over the pa, sewing together everything that Breavman observed. It wove, it married the two figures bending over the records, whatever the music touched, child trapped in London Bridge, mountain-top dissolving in mist, empty swing rocking like a pendulum, the row of glistening red canoes, the players clustered underneath the basket, leaping for the ball like a stroboscopic photo of a splashing drop of water – whatever it touched was frozen in an immense tapestry. He was in it, a figure by a railing.

21

Since his mission against the mosquitoes had begun, Martin’s enjoyment percentages soared. All the days were up around 98 per cent. The other boys delighted in him and made him the ornament of the bunk, to be shown off to visitors and wondered at. Martin remained an innocent performer. He spent most afternoons down at the marsh where the tractors were preparing new fields to run on. His arm was swollen with bites. Breavman applied calamine.

On his next day off Breavman took a canoe down the lake. Redwing blackbirds rose and plunged into the reeds. He ripped open a stalk of a waterlily. It was veined with purple foam.

The lake was glass-calm. He could make out sounds of camp from time to time, the pa announcing General Swim; recorded music filtered through the forest and crept over the water.

He went down the creek as far as he could before sandbars stopped him. The only indication of current was the leaning underwater weeds. Clams black and thickly coated with mud – an unclean food. A snap of water and the green stretched-out body of a frog zoomed under the canoe. The low sun was blinding. As he paddled back to his camp-site it turned the paddle gold.

He built a fire, spread out his sleeping bag in the moss, and prepared to watch the sky.

The sun is always part of the sky, but the moon is a splendid and remote stranger. The moon. Your eye keeps coming back to it as it would do to a beautiful woman in a restaurant. He thought about Shell. The same moment he believed he had the confidence to live alone he believed he could live with Shell.

The mist was riding slowly on the reflection of birch trees; now it was piled like a snowdrift.

Four hours later he awakened with a start and grabbed his axe.

“It’s Martin Stark,” said Martin.

The fire was still giving some light, but not enough. He shone his flash in the boy’s face. One cheek had been badly scratched by branches but the boy grinned widely.

“What’s your favourite store?”

“What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

“What’s your favourite store?”

Breavman wrapped the sleeping bag around the boy and ruffled his hair.

“Dionne’s.”

“What’s your favourite parking lot?”

“Dionne’s Parking Lot.”

When the ritual was finished Breavman packed up, lifted him into the canoe, and shoved off for camp. He didn’t want to think about what would have happened if Martin hadn’t been able to find him. That cheek needed iodine. And it seemed that some of the bites were infected.

It was beautiful paddling back, reeds scraping the bottom of the canoe and turning it into a big fragile drum. Martin was an Indian chief squatting beside him, bundled in the sleeping bag. The sky displayed continents of fire.

“When I’m back home,” Martin said loudly, “rats eat me.”

“I’m sorry, Martin.”

“Hundreds and hundreds of them.”

When Breavman saw the lights of the camp he had a wild urge to pass them, to keep paddling up the lake with the boy, make a site somewhere up the shore among the naked birch trees.

“Keep it down, Martin. They’ll kill us if they hear us.”

“That would be all right.”

22

Green? Beige? Riding in the bus he tried to remember the colour of his mother’s room. In this way he avoided thinking about her lying there. Some careful shade determined at a medical conference.

In this room she spends her time. It has a good view of the southern slopes of Mount Royal. In the spring you get the smell of lilacs. You want to throw the window open to get more of the perfume, but you can’t. The window slides up only so far. They don’t want any suicides littering the lawn.

“We haven’t seen you for a while, Mr. Breavman,” said the head nurse.

“Haven’t we?”

His mother was staring at the ceiling. He looked up there himself. Maybe something was going on that nobody knew about.

The walls were clever grey.

“Are you feeling better, Mother?” He gave the cue.

“Am I feeling better? better for what? that I should go outside and see what he’s doing with his life? thank you, for that I don’t have to go outside, for that I can lie here, in this room, beside the crazy people, your mother in an insane asylum….”

“You know it isn’t that, Mother. Just somewhere you can rest –”

“Rest! How can I rest with what I know? traitor for a son, don’t you think I know where I am? with their needles and their polite manner, a mother like this and he’s away swimming –”

“But, Mother, nobody’s trying to hurt –”

What was he doing, trying to argue with her? She flung out one arm and groped for something on the night table, but everything had been taken away.

“Don’t interrupt your mother, haven’t I suffered enough? a sick man for fifteen years, don’t I know? don’t I know, don’t I know …?”

“Mother, please, don’t scream –”

“Oh! he’s ashamed of his mother, his mother will wake up the neighbours, his mother will frighten away his goyish girlfriends, traitor! what all of you have done to me! a mother has to be quiet, I was beautiful, I came from Russia a beauty, people looked at me –”

“Let me speak to you –”

“People spoke to me, does my child speak to me? the world knows I lie here like a stone, a beauty, they called me a Russian beauty, but what I gave to my child, to treat a mother, I can’t stand to think of it, you should have it from your own child, like today is Tuesday over the whole world you should have it from your child what I had, rat in my house, I can’t believe my life, that this should happen to me, I was so good to my parents, my mother had cancer, the doctor held her stomach in his hand, does anyone try to help me? does my son lift a finger? Cancer! cancer! I had to see everything, I had to give my life away to sick people, this isn’t my life, to see these things, your father would kill you, my face is old, I don’t know who I am in the mirror, wrinkles where I was beautiful….”

He sat back, didn’t try to break in again. If she let him speak she wouldn’t hear. He really didn’t know what he would have been able to say had he known she was listening.

He attempted to let his mind wander, but he hung on every wild detail, waiting for the hour to be up.

He knocked on Tamara’s door at about ten o’clock. There were a few whispers exchanged inside. She called out, “Who is it?”

“Breavman from the north. But you’re busy.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Night.”

“Night.”

Good night, Tamara. It’s all right to share your mouth. It belongs to everyone, like a park.

He wrote two letters to Shell and then phoned her so he could get to sleep.

23

Ed’s bunk was expected to win the baseball game.

The foul-lines were marked with Israeli flags.

What right did he have to resent their using the symbol? It wasn’t engraved on his shield.

A child brandished a Pepsi, cheering for his side.

Breavman passed out hot dogs. He was glad he’d learned to suspect his Gentile neighbours of uncleanliness, not to believe in flags. Now he could apply that training to his own tribe.

A home run.

Send your children to the academies in Alexandria. Don’t be surprised if they come back Alexandrians.

Three cheers. Mazel tov.

Hello Canada, you big Canada, you dull, beautiful resources. Everybody is Canadian. The Jew’s disguise won’t work.

When it was Ed’s turn to umpire, Breavman walked across the field to the marsh and watched Martin kill mosquitoes. The tractor man knew him well because he often came to see Martin fulfil his mission.

The boy had killed over six thousand mosquitoes.

“I’ll kill some for you, Martin.”

“That won’t help my score.”

“Then I’ll start my own score.”

“I’ll beat you.”

Martin’s feet were wet. Some of the bites were definitely infected. He should send him back to the bunk, but he seemed to be enjoying himself so thoroughly. All his days were 99 per cent.

“I dare you to start your own score.”

As they accompanied their groups back to the campus Ed said, “Not only did you lose the game, Breavman, but you owe me five dollars.”

“What for?”

“Wanda. Last night.”

“Oh, God, the pool. I’d forgotten.”

He checked his journal and gratefully paid the money.

24

All the days were sunny and the bodies bronze. All he watched was the sand and the exposed flesh, marvelling at the softer city white when a strap fell away. He wanted all the strange flesh-shadows.

He hardly ever looked at the sky. A bird swooping low over the beach surprised him. One of the Brandenburgs was blaring over the PA. He was lying on his back, eyes closed, annihilating himself in the heat and glare and music. Suddenly someone was kneeling over him.

“Let me squeeze it,” went Anne’s voice.

He opened his eyes and shivered.

“No, let me,” Wanda laughed.

They were trying to get at a blackhead in his forehead.

“Leave me alone,” he shouted like a maniac.

The violence of his reaction astonished them.

He pretended to smile, waited a decent interval, left the beach. The bunk was too cool. The night air hadn’t been cooked away. He looked around the small wooden cubicle. His laundry bag was bulging. He’d forgotten to send it off. That couldn’t be right. Not right for him. There was a box of Ritz crackers on the window-sill. That wasn’t how he was supposed to eat. He pulled out his journal. That wasn’t how he was supposed to write.

25

Martin Stark was killed in the first week of August 1958. He was accidentally run over by a bulldozer which was clearing a marshy area. The driver of the bulldozer, the Hungarian named Steve, was not aware that he had hit anything except the usual clumps, roots, stones. Martin was probably hiding in the reeds the better to trap his enemy.

When he didn’t show for supper Breavman thought he might be up there. He asked a junior counsellor to sit at his table. He walked leisurely to the marsh, glad for an excuse to leave the noisy mess hall.

He heard a noise from the weeds. He imagined that Martin had seen him coming and wanted to play a hiding game. He took off his shoes and waded in. He was terribly squashed, a tractor tread right across his back. He was lying face down. Where Breavman turned him over his mouth was full of guts.

Breavman walked back to the mess hall and told Krantz. His face went white. They agreed that the campers must not find out and that the body be removed secretly. Krantz went up to the marsh and returned in a few minutes.

“You stay up there until the camp’s asleep. Ed will take your bunk.”

“I want to go into town with the body,” Breavman said.

“We’ll see.”

“No, we won’t see. I’m going in with Martin.”

“Breavman, get the hell up there now and don’t give me arguments at a time like this. What’s the matter with you?”

He stood guard for a few hours. Nobody came by. The mosquitoes were very bad. He wondered what they were doing to the body. They’d been all over when he found it. There wasn’t much of a moon. He could hear the seniors singing at their bonfire. At about one in the morning the police and ambulance arrived. They worked under the headlights.

“I’m going in with him.”

Krantz had just spoken to Mrs. Stark on the phone. She had been remarkably calm. She had even mentioned that she wouldn’t press charges of criminal negligence. Krantz was very shaken.

“All right.”

“And I’m not coming back.”

“What do you mean you’re not coming back? Don’t start with me now, Breavman.”

“I’m quitting.”

“Camp runs another three weeks. I don’t have anybody to replace you.”

“I don’t care.”

Krantz grabbed his arm.

“You got a contract, Breavman.”

“Screw the contract. Don’t pay me.”

“You phony little bastard, at a time like this –”

“And you owe me five dollars. I had Wanda first. July eleventh, if you want to see my journal.”

“For Christ’s sake, Breavman, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Don’t you see where you are? Don’t you see what is happening? A child has been killed and you’re talking about a lay –”

“A lay. That’s your language. Five dollars, Krantz. Then I’m getting out of here. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be –”

It was impossible to say who threw the first punch.

26

DON’T SQUEEZE ANYTHING OUT OF THE BODY IT DOESN’T OWE YOU ANYTHING was the complete entry.

He banged it out on the bus to Montreal, typewriter on knees.

It was the worst stretch of the road, signs and gas stations, and the back of the driver’s neck, and his damn washable plastic shirt was boiling him.

If only death could seize him, come through the scum, dignify.

What was it they sang at the end of the book?

Strength! strength! let us renew ourselves!

He would never learn the names of the trees he passed, he’d never learn anything, he’d always confront a lazy mystery. He wanted to be the tall black mourner who learns everything at the hole.

I’m sorry, Father, I don’t know the Latin for butterflies, I don’t know what stone the lookout is made of.

The driver was having trouble with the doors. Maybe they’d never open. How would it be to suffocate in a plastic shirt?

27

Dearest Shell,

It will take me a little while to tell you.

It’s two in the morning. You’re sleeping between the green-striped sheets we bought together and I know exactly how your body looks. You are lying on your side, knees bent like a jockey, and you’ve probably pushed the pillow off the bed and your hair looks like calligraphy, and one hand is cupped beside your mouth, and one arm leads over the edge like a bowsprit and your fingers are limp like things that are drifting.

It’s wonderful to be able to speak to you, my darling Shell. I can be peaceful because I know what I want to say.

I’m afraid of loneliness. Just visit a mental hospital or factory, sit in a bus or cafeteria. Everywhere people are living in utter loneliness. I tremble when I think of all the single voices raised, lottery-chance hooks aimed at the sky. And their bodies are growing old, hearts beginning to leak like old accordions, trouble in the kidneys, sphincters going limp like old elastic bands. It’s happening to us, to you under the green stripes. It makes me want to take your hand. And this is the miracle that all the juke-boxes are eating quarters for. That we can protest this indifferent massacre. Taking your hand is a very good protest. I wish you were beside me now.

I went to a funeral today. It was no way to bury a child. His real death contrasted violently with the hush-hush sacredness of the chapel. The beautiful words didn’t belong on the rabbi’s lips. I don’t know if any modern man is fit to bury a person. The family’s grief was real, but the air-conditioned chapel conspired against its expression. I felt lousy and choked because I had nothing to say to the corpse. When they carried away the undersized coffin I thought the boy was cheated.

I can’t claim any lesson. When you read my journal you’ll see how close I am to murder. I can’t even think about it or I stop moving. I mean literally. I can’t move a muscle. All I know is that something prosaic, the comfortable world, has been destroyed irrevocably, and something important guaranteed.

A religious stink hovers above this city and we all breathe it. Work goes on at the Oratoire St. Joseph, the copper dome is raised. The Temple Emmanuel initiates a building fund. A religious stink composed of musty shrine and tabernacle smells, decayed wreaths and rotting bar-mitzvah tables. Boredom, money, vanity, guilt, packs the pews. The candles, memorials, eternal lights shine unconvincingly, like neon signs, sincere as advertising. The holy vessels belch miasmal smoke. Good lovers turn away.

I’m not a good lover or I’d be with you now. I’d be beside you, not using this longing for a proof of feeling. That’s why I’m writing you and sending you this summer’s journal. I want you to know something about me. Here it is day by day. Dearest Shell, if you let me I’d always keep you four hundred miles away and write you pretty poems and letters. That’s true. I’m afraid to live any place but in expectation. I’m no life-risk.

At the beginning of the summer we said: let’s be surgical. I don’t want to see or hear from you. I’d like to counterpoint this with tenderness but I’m not going to. I want no attachments. I want to begin again. I think I love you, but I love the idea of a clean slate more. I can say these things to you because we’ve come that close. The temptation of discipline makes me ruthless.

I want to end this letter now. It’s the first one I didn’t make a carbon of. I’m close to flying down and jumping into bed beside you. Please don’t phone or write. Something wants to begin in me.

LAWRENCE

Shell sent three telegrams that he didn’t answer. Five times he allowed his phone to ring all night.

One morning she awakened suddenly and couldn’t catch her breath. Lawrence had done exactly the same thing to her as Gordon – the letters, everything!

28

They drank patiently, waiting for incoherence.

“You know, of course, Tamara, that we’re losing the Cold War?”

“No!”

“Plain as the nose. You know what Chinese youth are doing this very minute?”

“Smelting pig-iron in back yards?”

“Correct. And the Russians are learning trigonometry in kindergarten. What do you think about that, Tamara?”

“Black thoughts.”

“But it doesn’t matter, Tamara.”

“Why?”

He was trying to stand a bottle on its pouring rim.

“I’ll tell you why, Tamara. Because we’re all ripe for a concentration camp.”

That was a little brutal for their stage of intoxication. On the couch he mumbled beside her.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You were saying something.”

“Do you want to know what I’m saying, Tamara?”

“Yeah.”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I’ll tell you.”

Silence.

“Well?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“Okay, you tell me.”

“I’m saying this: …”

There was a pause. He leaped up, ran to the window, smashed his fist through the glass.

“Get the car, Krantz,” he screamed. “Get the car, get the car! …”

29

Let us study one more shadow.

He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. Patricia was sleeping back at his room on Stanley, profound sleep of isolation, her red hair fallen on her shoulders as if arranged by a Botticelli wind.

He could not help thinking that she was too beautiful for him to have, that he wasn’t tall enough or straight, that people didn’t turn to look at him in street-cars, that he didn’t command the glory of the flesh.

She deserved someone, an athlete perhaps, who moved with a grace equal to hers, exercised the same immediate tyranny of beauty in face and limb.

He met her at a cast party. She had played the lead in Hedda Gabler. A cold bitch, she’d done it well, all the ambition and vine leaves. She was as beautiful as Shell, Tamara, one of the great. She was from Winnipeg.

“Do they have Art in Winnipeg?”

Later on that night they walked up Mountain Street. Breavman showed her an iron fence which hid in its calligraphy silhouettes of swallows, rabbits, chipmunks. She opened fast to him. She told him she had an ulcer. Christ, at her age.

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen. I know you’re surprised.”

“I’m surprised you can be that calm and live with whatever it is that’s eating your stomach.”

But something had to pay for the way she moved, her steps like early Spanish music, her face which acted above pain.

He showed her curious parts of the city that night. He tried to see his eighteen-year-old city again. Here was a wall he had loved. There was a crazy filigree doorway he wanted her to see, but when they approached he saw the building had been torn down.

“Où sont les neiges?” he said theatrically.

She looked straight at him and said, “You’ve won me, Lawrence Breavman.”

And he supposed that that was what he had been trying to do.

They lay apart like two slabs. Nothing his hands or mouth could do involved him in her beauty. It was like years ago with Tamara, the silent torture bed.

He knew he couldn’t begin the whole process again. What had happened to his plan? They finally found words to say and tenderness, the kind that follows failure.

They stayed in the room together.

By the end of the next day he had written a still-born poem about two armies marching to battle from different corners of a continent. They never meet in conflict in the central plain. Winter eats through the battalions like a storm of moths at a brocade gown, leaving the metal threads of artillery strewn gunnerless miles behind the frozen men, pointless designs on a vast closet floor. Then months later two corporals of different language meet in a green, unblasted field. Their feet are bound with strips of cloth torn from the uniforms of superiors. The field they meet on is the one that distant powerful marshals ordained for glory. Because the men have come from different directions they face each other, but they have forgotten why they stumbled there.

That next night he watched her move about his room. He had never seen anything so beautiful. She was nested in a brown chair studying a script. He remembered a colour he loved in the crucible of melted brass. Her hair was that colour and her warm body seemed to reflect it just as the caster’s face glows above the poured moulds.

PAUVRE GRANDE BEAUTÉ!

POOR PERFECT BEAUTY!

He gave all his silent praise for her limbs, lips, not to the clamour of personal desire, but to the pure demand of excellence.

They had talked enough for her to be naked. The line of her belly reminded him of the soft forms drawn on the cave well by the artist-hunter. He remembered her intestines.

QUEL MAL MYSTÉRIEUX RONGE SON FLANC D’ATHLÈTE?

WHAT UNKNOWN EVIL HARROWS HER LITHE SIDE?

Lying beside her he thought wildly that a miracle would deliver them into a sexual embrace. He didn’t know why, because they were nice people, the natural language of bodies, because she was leaving tomorrow. She rested her hand on his thigh, no desire in the touch. She went to sleep and he opened his eyes in the black and his room was never emptier or a woman further away. He listened to her breathing. It was like the delicate engine of some cruel machine spreading distance after distance between them. Her sleep was the final withdrawal, more perfect than anything she could say or do. She slept with a deeper grace than that with which she moved.

He knew that hair couldn’t feel; he kissed her hair.

He was heading towards Côte des Neiges. The night had been devised by a purist of Montreal autumns. A light rain made the black iron fences shine. Leaves lay precisely etched on the wet pavement, flat as if they’d fallen from diaries. A wind blurred the leaves of the young acacia on MacGregor Street. He was walking an old route of fences and mansions he knew by heart.

The need for Shell stabbed him in a few seconds. He actually felt himself impaled in the air by a spear of longing. And with the longing came a burden of loneliness he knew he could not support. Why were they in different cities?

He ran to the Mount Royal Hotel. A cleaning lady on her knees thanked him for the mud.

He was dialling, shouting at the operator, reversing the charges.

The phone rang nine times before she answered it.

“Shell!”

“I wasn’t going to answer.”

“Marry me! That’s what I want.”

There was a long silence.

“Lawrence, you can’t treat people like this.”

“Won’t you marry me?”

“I read your journal.”

Oh, her voice was so beautiful, fuzzy with sleep.

“Never mind my journal. I know I hurt you. Please don’t remember it.”

“I want to go back to sleep.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t hang up,” she said wearily. “I’ll wait till you say goodbye.”

“I love you, Shell.”

There was another long silence and he thought he heard her crying.

“I do. Really.”

“Please go away. I can’t be what you need.”

“Yes, you can. You are.”

“Nobody can be what you need.”

“Shell, this is crazy, talking this way, four hundred miles apart. I’m coming to New York.”

“Have you any money?”

“What kind of a question is that?”

“Do you have any money for a ticket? You quit camp, and I know you didn’t have much when you started.”

He never heard her voice so bitter. It sobered him.

“I’m coming.”

“Because I don’t want to wait for you if you’re not.”

“Shell?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything left?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll talk.”

“All right. I’ll say good night now.”

She said that in her old voice, the voice that accepted him and helped him with his ambitions. It made him sad to hear it. For himself, he had exhausted the emotion that impelled the call. He didn’t need to go to New York.

30

He began his tour through the heart streets of Montreal. The streets were changing. The Victorian gingerbread was going down everywhere, and on every second corner was the half-covered skeleton of a new, flat office building. The city seemed fierce to go modern, as though it had suddenly been converted to some new theory of hygiene and had learned with horror that it was impossible to scrape the dirt out of gargoyle crevices and carved grape vines, and therefore was determined to cauterize the whole landscape.

But they were beautiful. They were the only beauty, the last magic. Breavman knew what he knew, that their bodies never died. Everything else was fiction. It was the beauty they carried. He remembered them all, there was nothing lost. To serve them. His mind sang praise as he climbed a street to the mountain.

For the body of Heather, which slept and slept.

For the body of Bertha, which fell with apples and a flute.

For the body of Lisa, early and late, which smelled of speed and forests.

For the body of Tamara, whose thighs made him a fetishist of thighs.

For the body of Norma, goose-fleshed, wet.

For the body of Patricia, which he had still to tame.

For the body of Shell, which was altogether sweet in his memory, which he loved as he walked, the little breasts he wrote about, and her hair which was so black it shone blue.

For all the bodies in and out of bathing suits, clothes, water, going between rooms, lying on grass, taking the print of grass, dancing discipline, leaping over horses, growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line, the cream in them, the sun on them, the oil anointed.

A thousand shadows, a single fire, everything that happened, twisted by telling, served the vision, and when he saw it, he was in the very centre of things.

Blindly he climbed the wooden steps that led up the side of the mountain. He was stopped by the high walls of the hospital. Its Italian towers looked sinister. His mother was sleeping in one of them.

He turned and looked at the city below him.

The heart of the city wasn’t down there among the new buildings and widened streets. It was right over there at the Allan, which, with drugs and electricity, was keeping the businessmen sane and their wives from suicide and their children free from hatred. The hospital was the true heart, pumping stability and creations and orgasms and sleep into all the withering commercial limbs. His mother was sleeping in one of the towers. With windows that didn’t quite open.

The restaurant bathed the corner of Stanley and St. Catherine in a light that made your skin yellow and the veins show through. It was a big place, mirrored, crowded as usual. There wasn’t a woman he could see. Breavman noted that a lot of the men used hair tonic; the sides of their heads seemed shiny and wet. Most of them were thin. And there seemed to be a uniform, almost. Tight chinos with belts in the back, V-neck sweaters without shirts.

He sat at a table. He was very thirsty. He felt in his pocket. Shell was right. He didn’t have much money.

No, he wouldn’t go to New York. He knew that. But he must always be connected to her. That must never be severed. Every -thing was simple as long as he was connected to her, as long as they remembered.

One day what he did to her, to the child, would enter his understanding with such a smash of guilt that he would sit motionless for days, until others carried him and medical machines brought him back to speech.

But that was not today.

The juke-box wailed. He believed he understood the longing of the cheap tunes better than anyone there. The Wurlitzer was a great beast, blinking in pain. It was everybody’s neon wound. A suffering ventriloquist. It was the kind of pet people wanted. An eternal bear for baiting, with electric blood. Breavman had a quarter to spare. It was fat, it loved its chains, it gobbled and was ready to fester all night.

Breavman thought he’d just sit back and sip his Orange Crush. A memory hit him urgently and he asked a waitress for her pencil. On a napkin he scribbled:

Jesus! I just remembered what Lisa’s favourite game was. After a heavy snow we would go into a back yard with a few of our friends. The expanse of snow would be white and unbroken. Bertha was the spinner. You held her hands while she turned on her heels, you circled her until your feet left the ground. Then she let go and you flew over the snow. You remained still in whatever position you landed. When everyone had been flung in this fashion into the fresh snow, the beautiful part of the game began. You stood up carefully, taking great pains not to disturb the impression you had made. Now the comparisons. Of course you would have done your best to land in some crazy position, arms and legs sticking out. Then we walked away, leaving a lovely white field of blossom-like shapes with footprint stems.

BEAUTIFUL LOSERS

For Steve Smith (1943–1964)

Somebody said lift that bale.

– Ray Charles singing “Ol’ Man River”

1

Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-1680)? Is that enough? Are you the Iroquois Virgin? Are you the Lily of the Shores of the Mohawk River? Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face. I’ve come after you, Catherine Tekakwitha. I want to know what goes on under that rosy blanket. Do I have any right? I fell in love with a religious picture of you. You were standing among birch trees, my favorite trees. God knows how far up your moccasins were laced. There was a river behind you, no doubt the Mohawk River. Two birds in the left foreground would be delighted if you tickled their white throats or even if you used them as an example of something or other in a parable. Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out to the country very often. Could you teach me about leaves? Do you know anything about narcotic mushrooms? Lady Marilyn just died a few years ago. May I say that some old scholar four hundred years from now, maybe of my own blood, will come after her in the way I come after you? But right now you must know more about heaven. Does it look like one of these little plastic altars that glow in the dark? I swear I won’t mind if it does. Are the stars tiny, after all? Can an old scholar find love at last and stop having to pull himself off every night so he can get to sleep? I don’t even hate books any more. I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve read and, frankly, it never seemed very important to me or to the world. My friend F. used to say in his hopped-up fashion: We’ve got to learn to stop bravely at the surface. We’ve got to learn to love appearances. F. died in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex. His face turned black, this I saw with my own eyes, and they say there wasn’t much left of his prick. A nurse told me it looked like the inside of a worm. Salut F., old and loud friend! I wonder if your memory will persist. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, if you must know, I am so human as to suffer from constipation, the rewards of a sedentary life. Is it any wonder I have sent my heart out into the birch trees? Is it any wonder that an old scholar who never made much money wants to climb into your Technicolor postcard?

2

I am a well-known folklorist, an authority on the A——s, a tribe I have no intention of disgracing by my interest. There are, perhaps, ten full-blooded A——s left, four of them teen-age girls. I will add that F. took full advantage of my anthropological status to fuck all four of them. Old friend, you paid your dues. The A——s seem to have made their appearance in the fifteenth century, or rather, a sizable remnant of the tribe. Their brief history is characterized by incessant defeat. The very name of the tribe, A——, is the word for corpse in the language of all the neighboring tribes. There is no record that this unfortunate people ever won a single battle, while the songs and legends of its enemies are virtually nothing but a sustained howl of triumph. My interest in this pack of failures betrays my character. Borrowing money from me, F. often said: Thanks, you old A—— ! Catherine Tekakwitha, do you listen?

3

Catherine Tekakwitha, I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits. Yes, an old scholar dares to think big. I don’t know what they are saying about you these days because my Latin is almost defunct. “Que le succès couronne nos espérances, et nous verrons sur les autels, auprès des Martyrs canadiens, une Vierge iroquoise – près des roses du martyre le his de la virginité.” A note by one Ed. L., S.J., written in August 1926. But what does it matter? I don’t want to carry my old belligerent life on my journey up the Mohawk River. Pace, Company of Jesus! F. said: A strong man cannot but love the Church. Catherine Tekakwitha, what care we if they cast you in plaster? I am at present studying the plans of a birch-bark canoe. Your brethren have forgotten how to build them. And what if there is a plastic reproduction of your little body on the dashboard of every Montréal taxi? It can’t be a bad thing. Love cannot be hoarded. Is there a part of Jesus in every stamped-out crucifix? I think there is. Desire changes the world! What makes the mountain side of maple turn red? Peace, you manufacturers of religious trinkets! You handle sacred material! Catherine Tekakwitha, do you see how I get carried away? How I want the world to be mystical and good? Are the stars tiny, after all? Who will put us to sleep? Should I save my fingernails? Is matter holy? I want the barber to bury my hair. Catherine Tekakwitha, are you at work on me already?

4

Marie de l’Incarnation, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, maybe you could arouse me if I could move out of myself. I want to get as much as I can. F. said that he’d never once heard of a female saint he wouldn’t like to have screwed. What did he mean? F., don’t tell me that at last you are becoming profound. F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?

5

The French gave the Iroquois their name. Naming food is one thing, naming a people is another, not that the people in question seem to care today. If they never cared, so much the worse for me: I’m far too willing to shoulder the alleged humiliations of harmless peoples, as evidenced by my life work with the A——s. Why do I feel so lousy when I wake up every morning? Wondering if I’m going to be able to shit or not. Is my body going to work? Will my bowels churn? Has the old machine turned the food brown? Is it surprising that I’ve tunneled through libraries after news about victims? Fictional victims! All the victims we ourselves do not murder or imprison are fictional victims. I live in a small apartment building. The bottom of the elevator shaft is accessible through the sub-basement. While I sat downtown preparing a paper on lemmings she crawled into the elevator shaft and sat there with her arms around her drawn-up knees (or so the police determined from the mess). I came home every night at twenty to eleven, regular as Kant. She was going to teach me a lesson, my old wife. You and your fictional victims, she used to say. Her life had become gray by imperceptible degrees, for I swear, that very night, probably at the exact moment when she was squeezing into the shaft, I looked up from the lemming research and closed my eyes, remembering her as young and bright, the sun dancing in her hair as she sucked me off in a canoe on Lake Orford. We were the only ones who lived in the sub-basement, we were the only ones who commanded the little elevator into those depths. But she taught no one a lesson, not the kind of lesson she meant. A delivery boy from the Bar-B-Q did the dirty work by misreading the numbers on a warm brown paper bag. Edith! F. spent the night with me. He confessed at 4 a.m. that he’d slept with Edith five or six times in the twenty years he’d known her. Irony! We ordered chicken from the same place and we talked about my poor squashed wife, our fingers greasy, barbecue-sauce drops on the linoleum. Five or six times, a mere friendship. Could I stand on some holy mountain of experience, a long way off, and sweetly nod my Chinese head over their little love? What harm had been done to the stars? You lousy fucker, I said, how many times, five or six? Ah, F. smiled, grief makes us precise! So let it be known that the Iroquois, the brethren of Catherine Tekakwitha, were given the name Iroquois by the French. They called themselves Hodenosaunee, which means People of the Long House. They had developed a new dimension to conversation. They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took full responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koué, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to pierce the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion. Catherine Tekakwitha, speak to me in Hiro-Koué. I have no right to mind what the Jesuits say to the slaves, but on that cool Laurentian night which I work toward, when we are wrapped in our birch-bark rocket, joined in the ancient enduring way, flesh to spirit, and I ask you my old question: are the stars tiny, after all, O Catherine Tekakwitha, answer me in Hiro-Koué. That other night F. and I quarreled for hours. We didn’t know when morning arrived because the only window of that miserable apartment faced into the ventilation shaft.

– You lousy fucker, how many times, five or six?

– Ah, grief makes us precise!

– Five or six, five or six, five or six?

– Listen, my friend, the elevator is working again.

– Listen, F., don’t give me any of your mystical shit.

– Seven.

– Seven times with Edith?

– Correct.

– You were trying to protect me with an optional lie?

– Correct.

– And seven itself might just be another option.

– Correct.

– But you were trying to protect me, weren’t you? Oh, F., do you think I can learn to perceive the diamonds of good amongst all the shit?

– It is all diamond.

– Damn you, rotten wife-fucker, that answer is no comfort. You ruin everything with your saintly pretensions. This is a bad morning. My wife’s in no shape to be buried. They’re going to straighten her out in some stinking doll hospital. How am I going to feel in the elevator on my way to the library? Don’t give me this all diamond shit, shove it up your occult hole. Help a fellow out. Don’t fuck his wife for him.

Thus the conversation ran into the morning we could not perceive. He kept to his diamond line. Catherine Tekakwitha, I wanted to believe him. We talked until we exhausted ourselves, and we pulled each other off, as we did when we were boys in what is now downtown but what was once the woods.

6

F. talked a great deal about Indians, and in an irritating facile manner. As far as I know he had no scholarship on the subject beyond a contemptuous and minor acquaintance with my own books, his sexual exploitation of my four teen-age A——s, and about a thousand Hollywood Westerns. He compared the Indians to the ancient Greeks, suggesting a similarity of character, a common belief that every talent must unfold itself in fighting, a love of wrestling, an inherent incapacity to unite for any length of time, an absolute dedication to the idea of the contest and the virtue of ambition. None of the four teen-age A——s achieved orgasm, which, he said, must be characteristic of the sexual pessimism of the entire tribe, and he concluded, therefore, that every other Indian woman could. I couldn’t argue. It is true that the A——s seem to present a very accurate negative of the whole Indian picture. I was slightly jealous of him for his deduction. His knowledge of ancient Greece was based entirely on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, a few homosexual encounters with restaurateurs (he ate free at almost every soda fountain in the city), and a plaster reproduction of the Akropolis which, for some reason, he had coated with red nail polish. He had meant to use colorless nail polish merely as a preservative, but naturally he succumbed to his flamboyant disposition at the drug-store counter when confronted with that fortress of bright samples which ranged the cardboard ramparts like so many Canadian Mounties. He chose a color named Tibetan Desire, which amused him since it was, he claimed, such a contradiction in terms. The entire night he consecrated to the staining of his plaster model. I sat beside him as he worked. He was humming snatches from “The Great Pretender,” a song which was to change the popular music of our day. I could not take my eyes from the tiny brush which he wielded so happily. White to viscous red, one column after another, a transfusion of blood into the powdery ruined fingers of the little monument. F. saying: I’m wearing my heart like a crown. So they disappeared, the leprous metopes and triglyphs and other wiggly names signifying purity, pale temple and destroyed altar disappeared under the scarlet glaze. F. said: Here, my friend, you finish the caryatids. So I took the brush, thus Cliton after Themistocles. F. sang: Ohohohoho, I’m the great pretender, my need is such I pretend too much, and so on – an obvious song under the circumstances but not inappropriate. F. often said: Never overlook the obvious. We were happy! Why should I resist the exclamation? I had not been so happy since before puberty. How close I came, earlier in this paragraph, to betraying that happy night! No, I will not! When we had covered every inch of the old plaster bone F. placed it on a card table in front of a window. The sun was just coming up over the sawtooth roof of the factory next door. The window was rosy and our handicraft, not yet dry, gleamed like a huge ruby, a fantastic jewel! It seemed like the intricate cradle of all the few noble perishable sentiments I had managed to preserve, and somewhere safe I could leave them. F. had stretched out on the carpet, stomach down, chin in hands supported by wrists and elbows, gazing up at the red akropolis and the soft morning beyond. He beckoned to me to lie beside him. Look at it from here, he said, squint your eyes a bit. I did as he suggested, narrowed my eyes, and – it burst into a cool lovely fire, sending out rays in all directions (except downward, since that was where the card table was). Don’t weep, F. said, and we began to talk.

– That’s the way it must have looked to them, some early morning when they looked up at it.

– The ancient Athenians, I whispered.

– No, F. said, the old Indians, the Red Men.

– Did they have such a thing, did they build an akropolis? I asked him, for I seemed to have forgotten everything I knew, lost it in stroke after stroke of the small brush, and I was ready to believe anything. Tell me, F., did the Indians have such a thing?

– I don’t know.

– Then what are you talking about? Are you trying to make a damn fool of me?

– Lie down, take it easy. Discipline yourself. Aren’t you happy?

– No.

– Why have you allowed yourself to be robbed?

– F., you spoil everything. We were having such a nice morning.

– Why have you allowed yourself to be robbed?

– Why do you always try to humiliate me? I asked him so solemnly that I scared myself. He stood up, covered the model with a plastic Remington typewriter cover. He did this so gently, with a kind of pain, that for the first time I saw that F. suffered, but from what I could not tell.

– We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o’clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it’s all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull’s eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don’t forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate’s sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that’s how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it’s my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, firemen! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it’s burning in crayon like the akropolis rose!

And so on. I couldn’t hope to write down half the things he said. He raved like a lunatic, spit flying with every second word. I guess the disease was already nibbling at his brain, for he died like that, years later, raving. What a night! And from this distance, how sweet our argument now seems, two grown men lying on the floor! What a perfect night! I swear I can still feel the warmth of it, and what he did with Edith matters not at all, indeed, I marry them in their unlawful bed, with an open heart I affirm the true right of any man and woman to their dark slobbering nights which are rare enough, and against which too many laws conspire. If only I could live in this perspective. How quickly they come and go, the memories of F., the nights of comradeship, the ladders we climbed and the happy views of simple human clockwork. How quickly pettiness returns, and that most ignoble form of real estate, the possessive occupation and tyranny over two square inches of human flesh, the wife’s cunt.

7

The Iroquois almost won. Their three major enemies were the Hurons, the Algonquins, and the French. “La Nouvelle-France se va perdre si elle n’est fortement et promptement secourue.” So wrote le P. Vimont, Supérieur de Québec, in 1641. Whoop! Whoop! Remember the movies. The Iroquois was a confederation of five tribes situated between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Going from east to west we have the Agniers (whom the English called Mohawks), the Onneyouts, the Onnontagués, the Goyoqouins (or Goyogouins), and the Tsonnontouans. The Mohawks (whom the French called Agniers) occupied a territory between the upper reaches of the Hudson River, Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Richelieu River (first called the Iroquois River). Catherine Tekakwitha was a Mohawk, born 1656. Twenty-one years of her life she spent among the Mohawks, on the banks of the Mohawk River, a veritable Mohawk lady. The Iroquois were composed of twenty-five thousand souls. They could put two thousand five hundred warriors in the field, or ten per cent of the confederation. Of these only five or six hundred were Mohawks, but they were especially ferocious, and not only that, they possessed firearms which they got from the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany) in exchange for furs. I am proud that Catherine Tekakwitha was or is a Mohawk. Her brethren must be right out of those uncompromising black and white movies before the Western became psychological. Right now I feel about her as many of my readers must feel about pretty Negresses who sit across from them in the subway, their thin hard legs shooting down from what pink secrets. Many of my readers will never find out. Is this fair? And what about the lily cocks unbeknownst to so many female American citizens? Undress, undress, I want to cry out, let’s look at each other. Let’s have education! F. said: At twenty-eight (yes, my friend, it took that long) I stopped fucking colors. Catherine Tekakwitha, I hope you are very dark. I want to detect a little whiff of raw meat and white blood on your thick black hair. I hope there is a little grease left in your thick black hair. Or is it all buried in the Vatican, vaults of hidden combs? One night in our seventh year of marriage Edith coated herself with deep red greasy stuff she had bought in some theatrical supply store. She applied it from a tube. Twenty to eleven, back from the library, and there she was, stark naked in the middle of the room, sexual surprise for her old man. She handed me the tube, saying: Let’s be other people. Meaning, I suppose, new ways to kiss, chew, suck, bounce. It’s stupid, she said, her voice cracking, but let’s be other people. Why should I diminish her intention? Perhaps she meant: Come on a new journey with me, a journey only strangers can take, and we can remember it when we are ourselves again, and therefore never be merely ourselves again. Perhaps she had some landscape in mind where she always meant to travel, just as I envisage a northern river, a night as clean and bright as river pebbles, for my supreme trip with Catherine Tekakwitha. I should have gone with Edith. I should have stepped out of my clothes and into the greasy disguise. Why is it that only now, years past, my prick rises up at the vision of her standing there so absurdly painted, her breasts dark as eggplants, her face resembling Al Jolson? Why does the blood rush now so uselessly? I disdained her tube. Take a bath, I said. I listened to her splashing, looking forward to our midnight snack. My mean little triumph had made me hungry.

8

Lots of priests got killed and eaten and so forth. Micmacs, Abénaquis, Montagnais, Attikamègues, Hurons: the Company of Jesus had their way with them. Lots of semen in the forest, I’ll bet. Not the Iroquois, they ate priests’ hearts. Wonder what it was like. F. said he once ate a raw sheep’s heart. Edith liked brains. René Goupil got it on September 29, 1642, first victim in black robes of the Mohawks. Yum, yummy. Le P. Jogues fell under the “hatchet of the barbarian” on October 18, 1646. It’s all down there in black and white. The Church loves such details. I love such details. Here come the little fat angels with their queer bums. Here come the Indians. Here comes Catherine Tekakwitha ten years later, lily out of the soil watered by the Gardener with the blood of martyrs. F., you ruined my life with your experiments. You ate a raw sheep’s heart, you ate bark, once you ate shit. How can I live in the world beside all your damn adventures? F. once said: There is nothing so depressing as the eccentricity of a contemporary. She was a Tortoise, best clan of the Mohawks. Our journey will be slow, but we’ll win. Her father was an Iroquois, an asshole, as it turns out. Her mother was an Algonquin Christian, baptized and educated at Three-Rivers, which happens to be a lousy town for an Indian girl (I was told recently by a young Abénaqui who went to school there). She was taken captive in an Iroquois raid, which was probably the best lay she ever had. Help me, someone, help my crude tongue. Where is my silver tongue? Aren’t I meant to speak of God? She was the slave of an Iroquois brave, and she had a wild tongue or something because he married her when he could have just pushed her around. She was accepted by the tribe and enjoyed all the rights of the Tortoises from that day on. It is recorded that she prayed incessantly. Glog, glog, dear God, hump, fart push, sweet Almighty, slurp, flark, glamph, hiccup, jerk, zzzzzz, snort, Jesus, she must have made his life hell.

9

F. said: Connect nothing. He screamed that remark at me while overlooking my wet cock about twenty years ago. I don’t know what he saw in my swooning eyes, maybe some glimmering of a fake universal comprehension. Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same color as the night. Out, out along the narrow highway sails my mind, driven by curiosity, luminous with acceptance, far and out, like a feathered hook whipped deep into the light above the stream by a magnificent cast. Somewhere, out of my reach, my control, the hook unbends into a spear, the spear shears itself into a needle, and the needle sews the world together. It sews skin onto the skeleton and lipstick on a lip, it sews Edith to her greasepaint, crouching (for as long as I, this book, or an eternal eye remembers) in our lightless sub-basement, it sews scarves to mountain, it goes through everything like a relentless bloodstream, and the tunnel is filled with a comforting message, a beautiful knowledge of unity. All the disparates of the world, the different wings of the paradox, coin-faces of problem, petal-pulling questions, scissors-shaped conscience, all the polarities, things and their images and things which cast no shadow, and just the everyday explosions on a street, this face and that, a house and a toothache, explosions which merely have different letters in their names, my needle pierces it all, and I myself, my greedy fantasies, everything which has existed and does exist, we are part of a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning. Connect nothing: F. shouted. Place things side by side on your arborite table, if you must, but connect nothing! Come back, F. shouted, pulling my limp cock like a bell rope, shaking it like a dinner bell in the hands of a grand hostess who wants the next course served. Don’t be fooled, he cried. Twenty years ago, as I say. I am just speculating now what it was that occasioned his outburst, that is, some kind of smirk of universal acceptance, which is very disagreeable on the face of a young man. It was that same afternoon that F. told me one of his most remarkable lies.

– My friend, F. said, you mustn’t feel guilty about any of this.

– Any of what?

– Oh, you know, sucking each other, watching the movies, Vaseline, fooling around with the dog, sneaking off during government hours, under the armpits.

– I don’t feel in the least guilty.

– You do. But don’t. You see, F. said, this isn’t homosexuality at all.

– Oh, F., come off it. Homosexuality is a name.

– That’s why I’m telling you this, my friend. You live in a world of names. That’s why I have the charity to tell you this.

– Are you trying to ruin another evening?

– Listen to me, you poor A——!

– It’s you who feel guilty, F. Guilty as hell. You’re the guilty party.

– Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

– I know what you want to do, F. You want to destroy the evening. You’re not satisfied with a couple of simple comes and a nice poke in the hole.

– All right, my friend, you’ve convinced me. I’m perishing with guilt. I’ll keep quiet.

– What were you going to say?

– Some fabrication of my guilty guilt.

– Well, tell me, now that you started the whole thing.

– No.

– Tell me, F., for Christ’s sake, it’s just conversation now.

– No.

– God damn you, F., you are trying to destroy the evening.

– You’re pathetic. That’s why you must not try to connect anything, your connection would be pathetic. The Jews didn’t let young men study the Cabala. Connections should be forbidden citizens under seventy.

– Please tell me.

– You mustn’t feel guilty about any of this because it isn’t strictly homosexual.

– I know it isn’t, I –

– Shut up. It isn’t strictly homosexual because I am not strictly male. The truth is, I had a Swedish operation, I used to be a girl.

– Nobody’s perfect.

– Shut up, shut up. A man tires in his works of charity. I was born a girl, I went to school as a girl in a blue tunic, with a little embroidered crest on the front of it.

– F., you’re not talking to one of your shoeshine boys. I happen to know you very well. We lived on the same street, we went to school together, we were in the same class, I saw you a million times in the shower after gym. You were a boy when you went to school. We played doctor in the woods. What’s the point of all this?

– Thus do the starving refuse sustenance.

– I hate the way you try to end everything off.

But I broke off the argument just then because I noticed that it was almost eight, and we were in danger of missing the entire double feature. How I enjoyed the movies that night. Why did I feel so light? Why did I have so deep a sense of comradeship with F.? Walking home through the snow my future seemed to open me: I resolved to give up work on the A——s, whose disastrous history was not yet clear to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it didn’t bother me, I knew that the future would be strewn with invitations, like a President’s calendar. The cold, which hither -to froze my balls off every winter, braced me that night, and my brain, for which I have always had little respect, seemed constructed of arrangements of crystal, like a storm of snowflakes, filling my life with rainbow pictures. However, it didn’t work out that way. The A——s found their mouthpiece and the future dried up like an old dug. What was F.’s part in that lovely night? Had he done something which opened doors, doors which I slammed back in their frames? He tried to tell me something. I still don’t understand. Is it fair that I don’t understand? Why did I have to be stuck with such an obtuse friend? My life might have been so gloriously different. I might never have married Edith, who, I now confess, was an A——

10

I always wanted to be loved by the Communist Party and the Mother Church. I wanted to live in a folk song like Joe Hill. I wanted to weep for the innocent people my bomb would have to maim. I wanted to thank the peasant father who fed us on the run. I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half, people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand. I wanted to be against the rich, even though some of them knew Dante: just before his destruction one of them would learn that I knew Dante, too. I wanted my face carried in Peking, a poem written down my shoulder. I wanted to smile at dogma, yet ruin my ego against it. I wanted to confront the machines of Broadway. I wanted Fifth Avenue to remember its Indian trails. I wanted to come out of a mining town with rude manners and convictions given to me by an atheist uncle, barfly disgrace of the family. I wanted to rush across America in a sealed train, the only white man whom the Negroes will accept at the treaty convention. I wanted to attend cocktail parties wearing a machine gun. I wanted to tell an old girl friend who is appalled at my methods that revolutions do not happen on buffet tables, you can’t pick and choose, and watch her silver evening gown dampen at the crotch. I wanted to fight against the Secret Police takeover, but from within the Party. I wanted an old lady who had lost her sons to mention me in her prayers in a mud church, taking her sons’ word for it. I wanted to cross myself at dirty words. I wanted to tolerate pagan remnants in village ritual, arguing against the Curia. I wanted to deal in secret real estate, agent of ageless, anonymous billionaire. I wanted to write well about the Jews. I wanted to be shot among the Basques for carrying the Body into the battlefield against Franco. I wanted to preach about marriage from the unassailable pulpit of virginity, watching the black hairs on the legs of brides. I wanted to write a tract against birth control in very simple English, a pamphlet to be sold in the foyer, illustrated with two-color drawings of shooting stars and eternity. I wanted to suppress dancing for a time. I wanted to be a junkie priest who makes a record for Folkways. I wanted to be transferred for political reasons. I have just discovered that Cardinal ——— has taken a huge bribe from a ladies’ magazine, have suffered a fairy attack from my confessor, have seen the peasants betrayed for a necessary reason, but the bells are ringing this evening, it is another evening in God’s world, and there are many to be fed, many knees yearning to be bent, I mount the worn steps in my tattered ermine.

11

The long house of the Iroquois must be clear. Length: varied from one hundred to one hundred fifty feet. Height and width: twenty-five feet. Lateral beams supporting a roof made from large pieces of bark, cedar, ash, elm, or pine. Neither window nor chimney, but a door at each extremity. Light got in and smoke got out through holes in the roof. Several fires in the cabin, four families to each fire. Families arranged so that there was a corridor running down the length of the cabin. “La manière dont les familles se groupent dans les cabanes n’est pas pour entraver le libertinage.” Thus le P. Edouard Lecompte, S.J., wrote in 1930, whetting our sexual appetite in his expert Company manner. The long-house setup did little to “hinder licentiousness.” What went on in the dark tunnel? Catherine Tekakwitha, what did you see with your swollen eyes? What juices mixing on the bearskin? Was it worse than a movie theater? F. said: The atmosphere of a movie theater is a nighttime marriage of a man’s prison and a woman’s prison; the prisoners know nothing about it – only the bricks and gates have combined; in the ventilation system the mystic union is consummated: the smells absorb each other. F.’s extravagant observation coincides with something a clergyman told me. He said that on Sunday morning the odor of semen hangs like a damp cloud above the men gathered for chapel at Bordeaux Jail. The modern art-cinema house, made of concrete and velvet, is a joke, which, as F. said, is nothing but the death of an emotion. No marriage in these stark confines, everybody sitting on their genitals because: silver genitals on the screen. Bring back hidden sex! Let cocks again rise and twine like ivy round the gold projector beam, and cunts yawn under gloves and white paper bags of candy, and no naked flashing breasts lure the dirty laundry of our daily lives into the movie palace, deadly as a radar signal, no neorealist patent fucking hang the impenetrable curtains of possibility between each member of the audience! In the gloomy long house of my mind let me trade wives, let me stumble upon you, Catherine Tekakwitha, three hundred years old, fragrant as a birch sapling, no matter what the priests or plague have done to you.

12

The Plague! The Plague! It invades my pages of research. My desk is suddenly contagious. My erection topples like a futuristic Walt Disney film of the leaning Tower of Pisa, to the music of timpani and creaking doors. I speed down my zipper and out falls dust and rubble. Hard cock alone leads to Thee, this I know because I’ve lost everything in this dust. Plague among the Mohawks! In 1660 it broke out, raging along the Mohawk River, assaulting the Indian villages, Gandaouagué, Gandagoron, Tionnontoguen, like a forest fire powered by the wind, and it came to Ossernenon, where lived Catherine Tekakwitha, four years old. Down goes her warrior father and her Christian mother, croaking out her final confession, down goes her little brother, his little prick useless as an appendix forever. Of this doomed, intermarried family, only Catherine Tekakwitha survived, the price of admission gouged in her face. Catherine Tekakwitha is not pretty! Now I want to run from my books and dreams. I don’t want to fuck a pig. Can I yearn after pimples and pock marks? I want to go outside and walk in the park and look at the long legs of American children. What keeps me here while lilacs grow outside for everybody? Can F. teach me something? He said that at the age of sixteen he stopped fucking faces. Edith was lovely when I first met her in the hotel, where she sold manicures. Her hair was black, long and smooth, the softness of cotton rather than silk. Her eyes were black, a solid depthless black that gave nothing away (except once or twice), like those sunglasses made of mirrors. In fact, she often wore that kind of sunglasses. Her lips were not full but very soft. Her kisses were loose, somehow unspecific, as if her mouth couldn’t choose where to stay. It slipped over my body like a novice on roller skates. I always hoped it would fasten somewhere perfect and find its home in my ecstasy, but off it slipped after too brief a perch, in search of nothing but balance, driven not by passion but by a banana peel. God knows what F. has to say about all this, damn him. I couldn’t bear to discover that she lingered for him. Stay, stay, I wanted to shout at her in the thick air of the sub-basement, come back, come back, don’t you see where all my skin is pointing? But off she skidded, up the piggy steps of my toes, a leap into my ear while my manhood ached like a frantic radio tower, come back, come back, a plunge into my eye where she sucked too hard (remembering her taste for brains), not there, not there, now grazing the hair of my chest like a seagull over spray, come back to Capistrano sang the knob, up to my kneecap, a desert of sensation, exploring the kneecap so very carefully as if it hid a locket clasp her tongue could spring, infuriating waste of tongue, now descending like laundry down the washboard of my ribs, her mouth wants me to turn over so that it can roller-coast down my spine or some foolish thing, no I won’t turn over and bury my hope, down, down, come back, come back, no I won’t fold it against my stomach like a hideaway bed, Edith, Edith, let some things happen in heaven, don’t make me tell you! … I didn’t think this would force itself into my preparations. It is very hard to court you, Catherine Tekakwitha, with your pock-marked face and your insatiable curiosity. One lick, now and then, brief warm coronations promising glory, an occasional collar of ermine teeth, then a swift disgrace, as if the archbishop suddenly learned he’d crowned the wrong son, her saliva cold as an icicle as it dried down the length of her exit, and this member of mine rigid as a goal post, hopeless as a pillar of salt in the destruction, ready at last to settle for a lonely night with my own hands, Edith! I broke my problem to F.

– I listen in envy, F. said. Don’t you know you’re being loved?

– I want her to love me in my way.

– You’ve got to learn –

– No lessons, I’m not going to settle for lessons this time. This is my bed and my wife, I have some rights.

– Then ask her.

– What do you mean “ask her”?

– Please make me come with your mouth, Edith.

– You’re disgusting, F. How dare you use that language in connection with Edith? I didn’t tell you this so that you could soil our intimacy.

– I’m sorry.

– Of course, I could ask her, that’s obvious. But then she’d be under duress, or worse, it would become a matter of duty. I don’t want to hold a strap over her.

– Yes you do.

– I warn you, F., I’m not going to take your cowardly guru shit.

– You are being loved, you are being invited into a great love, and I envy you.

– And stay away from Edith. I don’t like the way she sits between us at the movies. That is just courtesy on our part.

– I’m grateful to you both. I assure you, she could love no other man as she loves you.

– Do you think that’s true, F.?

– I know it’s true. Great love is not a partnership, for a partnership can be dissolved by law or parting, and you’re stuck with a great love, as a matter of fact, you are stuck with two great loves, Edith’s and mine. Great love needs a servant, but you don’t know how to use your servants.

– How should I ask her?

– With whips, with imperial commands, with a leap into her mouth and a lesson in choking.

I see F. standing there, the window behind him, his paper-thin ears almost transparent. I remember the expensively appointed slum room, the view of the factory he was trying to buy, his collection of soap arranged like a model town on the green felt of an elaborately carved billiard table. The light came through his ears as if they were made of a bar of Pears Soap. I hear his phony voice, the slight Eskimo accent which he affected after a student summer in the Arctic. You are stuck with two great loves, F. said. What a poor custodian I have been of those two loves, an ignorant custodian who walked his days in a dream museum of self-pity. F. and Edith loved me! But I didn’t hear his declaration that morning or didn’t believe it. You don’t know how to use your servants, F. said, his ears beaming like Jap lanterns. I was loved in 1950! But I didn’t speak to Edith, I couldn’t. Night after night I lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the elevator, my silent commands buried in my brain, like those urgent proud inscriptions on Egyptian monuments dumb under tons of sand. So her mouth sailed crazily over my body like a flock of Bikini birds, their migratory instincts destroyed by radiation.

– But I warn you, F. continued, a time will come when you’ll want nothing in the world but those aimless kisses.

Talking about transparent skin, Edith’s throat was like that, the thinnest, softest cover. You thought a heavy shell necklace would draw blood. To kiss her there was to intrude into something private and skeletal, like a turtle’s shoulder. Her shoulders were bony but not meager. She wasn’t thin but no matter how full the flesh her bones were always in command. From the age of thirteen she had the kind of skin which was called ripe, and the men who pursued her then (she was finally raped in a stone quarry) said that she was the kind of girl who would age quickly, which is the way that men on corners comfort themselves about an unattainable child. She grew up in a small town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, where she infuriated a number of men who thought that they should be able to rub her small breasts and round bum simply because she was an Indian, an A—— at that! At sixteen, when I married her, I myself believed that her skin couldn’t last. It had that fragile juicy quality we associate with growing things just about to decline. At twenty-four, the year of her death, nothing had altered but her buttocks. At sixteen they had been two half spheres suspended in midair, later they came to rest on two deep curved creases, and this was the extent of her body’s decay until she was squashed all at once. Let me think about her. She liked me to rub her skin with olive oil. I complied even though I really didn’t like playing around with food. Sometimes she filled her belly-button hole with oil and using her little finger she drew the spokes of Asoka’s wheel, then she smeared it, skin darkening. Her breasts were small, somewhat muscular, fruit with fiber. Her freakish nipples make me want to tear up my desk when I remember them, which I do at this very instant, miserable paper memory while my cock soars hopelessly into her mangled coffin, and my arms wave my duties away, even you, Catherine Tekakwitha, whom I court with this confession. Her wondrous nipples were dark as mud and very long when stiffened by desire, over an inch high, wrinkled with wisdom and sucking. I stuffed them into my nostrils (one at a time). I stuffed them in my ears. I believed continually that if anatomy permitted and I could have stuffed a nipple into each of my ears at the same time – shock treatment! What is the use of reviving this fantasy, impossible then as now? But I want those leathery electrodes in my head! I want to hear the mystery explained, I want to hear the conversations between those stiff wrinkled sages. There were such messages going between them that even Edith could not hear, signals, warnings, conceits. Revelations! Mathematics! I told F. about this the night of her death.

– You could have had everything you wanted.

– Why do you torment me, F.?

– You lost yourself in particulars. All parts of the body are erotogenic, or at least have the possibility of so becoming. If she had stuck her index fingers in your ears you would have got the same results.

– Are you sure?

– Yes.

– Have you tried it?

– Yes.

– I have to ask you this. With Edith?

– Yes.

– F. !

– Listen, my friend, the elevators, the buzzers, the fan: the world is waking up in the heads of a few million.

– Stop. Did you do that with her? Did you go that far? Did you do that together? You’re going to sit right there and tell me every detail. I hate you, F.

– Well, she stuck her index fingers –

– Was she wearing nail polish?

– No.

– She was, damn you, she was! Stop trying to protect me.

– All right, she was. She stuck her red nails in my ears –

– You enjoy this, don’t you?

– She stuck her fingers in my ears and I stuck my fingers in her ears and we kissed.

– You did it to each other? With your bare fingers? You touched ears and fingers?

– You begin to learn.

– Shut up. What did her ears feel like?

– Tight.

– Tight!

– Edith had very tight ears, nearly virgin, I’d say.

– Get out, F.! Get off our bed! Take your hands off me!

– Listen, or I’ll break your neck, chicken voyeur. We were fully dressed except for our fingers. Yes! We sucked each other’s fingers, and then we stuck them in each other’s ears –

– The ring, did she take the ring off?

– I don’t think so. I was worried about my eardrums because of her long red nails, she was digging so hard. We shut our eyes and we kissed like friends, without opening our mouths. Suddenly the sounds of the lobby were gone and I was listening to Edith.

– To her body! Where did this happen? When did you do this to me?

– So those are your questions. It happened in a telephone booth in the lobby of a movie theater downtown.

– What theater?

– The System Theatre.

– You’re lying! There is no telephone booth in the System. There’s only one or two telephones on the wall separated by glass partitions, I think. You did it out in the open! I know that dirty basement lobby! There’s always some fairy hanging around there, drawing cocks and telephone numbers on the green wall. Out in the open! Was anyone watching? How could you do this to me?

– You were in the men’s room. We were waiting for you beside the telephones, eating chocolate-covered ice-cream bars. I don’t know what was keeping you so long. We finished our ice cream. Edith spotted a flake of chocolate sticking to my little finger. In a very charming fashion she leaned over and flicked it into her mouth with her tongue, like an anteater. She had overlooked a flake of chocolate on her own wrist. I swooped in and got that, clumsily, I confess. Then it turned into a game. Games are nature’s most beautiful creation. All animals play games, and the truly Messianic vision of the brotherhood of creatures must be based on the idea of the game, indeed –

– So Edith began it! And who touched whose ear first? I have to know everything now. You saw her tongue stretched out, you probably stared. Who started it with the ears?

– I don’t remember. Maybe we were under the influence of the telephones. If you remember, one of the fluorescent lights was flickering, and the corner where we were standing jumped in and out of shadows as though great wings were passing over us or the huge blades of an immense electric fan. The telephones kept their steady black, the only stable shape in the shifting gloom. They hung there like carved masks, black, gleaming, smooth as the toes of kissed stone R.C. saints. We were sucking each other’s fingers, slightly frightened now, like children pulling at lollipops during the car chase. And then one of the telephones rang! It rang just once. I am always startled when a pay phone rings. It is so imperial and forlorn, like the best poem of a minor poet, like King Michael saying goodbye to Communist Romania, like a message in a floating bottle which begins: If anyone finds this, know that –

– Damn you, F.! You’re torturing me. Please.

– You asked me for the whole picture. I forgot to mention that the lights were buzzing, unevenly, like the snores of a sinus victim. I was sucking her narrow finger, careful of the sharp nail, thinking of the wolves who bleed to death from licking the blood-baited knife. When the light was healthy our skin was yellow, the merest pimple exaggerated, and when it failed we fell into a purple pallor, our skin like old wet mushrooms. And when it rang we were so startled that we actually bit each other! Children in a scary cave. Yes, there was someone watching us, not that we cared. He was watching us in the mirror of the fortune-telling scale which he was climbing off and on, dropping in nickel after nickel, dialing various questions, or the same one for all I know. And where the hell were you? The basement of the System is a horrible place if you do not stick with the people you came with. It smells like a desperate clearing in a siege of rats –

– You lie. Edith’s skin was perfect. And it smells of piss, nothing else, just piss. And never mind what I was doing.

– I know what you were doing, but never mind. When the telephone rang this fellow wheeled around and stepped off the scale, quite gracefully, I must say, and in that moment the whole eerie place seemed like his personal office. We were standing between him and his telephone, and I feared (it sounds ridiculous) that he would do some violence, pull a knife or expose himself, for his whole weary life among the water pipes and urinals seemed to hang on this telephone message –

– I remember him! He was wearing one of those Western string neckties.

– Right. I remember thinking in that instant of terror that he had conjured up the ring himself with his incessant dialing, that he had been performing a ritual, like rain-making. He was looking right through us as he stepped forward. He stopped, waiting, I suppose, for the second ring, which never came. He snapped his fingers, turned, climbed back on the scale, and returned to his combinations. We felt delivered, Edith and I! The telephone, hitherto so foreboding and powerful, was our friend! It was the agent of some benign electronic deity, and we wanted to praise it. I suppose that certain primitive bird and snake dances began the same way, a need to imitate the fearful and the beautiful, yes, an imitative procedure to acquire some of the qualities of the adored awesome beast.

– What are you trying to tell me, F.?

– We invented the Telephone Dance. Spontaneously. I don’t know who made the first move. Suddenly our index fingers were in each other’s ears. We became telephones!

– I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

– Why are you crying?

– I think you have ruined my life, F. For years I’ve been telling secrets to an enemy.

– You’re wrong, my friend. I have loved you, we’ve both loved you, and you’re very close to understanding this.

– No, F., no. Maybe it’s true, but it’s been too hard, too much crazy education, and God knows for what. Every second day I’ve had to learn something, some lesson, some lousy parable, and what am I this morning, a Doctor of Shit.

– That’s it. That’s love!

– Please go away.

– Don’t you want to hear what happened when I was a telephone?

– I do, but I don’t want to beg. I have to beg you for every scrap of information about the world.

– But that’s the only way you value it. When it falls on you from out of the trees you think it’s rotten fruit.

– Tell me about Edith when you were telephones.

– No.

– Arrwk! Sob! Ahahah! Sob!

– Contain yourself. Discipline!

– You’re killing me, you’re killing me, you’re killing me!

– Now you’re ready. We dug our index fingers in each other’s ears. I won’t deny the sexual implications. You are ready to face them now. All parts of the body are erotogenic. Assholes can be trained with whips and kisses, that’s elementary. Pricks and cunts have become monstrous! Down with genital imperialism! All flesh can come! Don’t you see what we have lost? Why have we abdicated so much pleasure to that which lives in our underwear? Orgasms in the shoulder! Knees going off like firecrackers! Hair in motion! And not only caresses leading us into the nourishing anonymity of the climax, not only sucking and wet tubes, but wind and conversation and a beautiful pair of gloves, fingers blushing! Lost! Lost!

– You’re insane. I’ve told my secrets to an insane person.

– There we were, locked in the Telephone Dance. Edith’s ears began to wrap around my fingers, at least so it seemed. She was very highly developed, perhaps the most highly developed woman I ever knew. Her ears folded around my throbbing fingers –

– I don’t want the details! I see the two of you a lot clearer than you could ever describe. That’s a picture I’ll never be able to get out of my mind.

– Jealousy is the education you have chosen.

– Fuck you. What did you hear?

– Hear is not the right word. I became a telephone. Edith was the electrical conversation that went through me.

– Well, what was it, what was it?

– Machinery.

– Machinery?

– Ordinary eternal machinery.

– And?

– Ordinary eternal machinery.

– Is that all you’re going to say?

– Ordinary eternal machinery like the grinding of the stars.

– That’s better.

– That was a distortion of the truth, which, I see, suits you very well. I distorted the truth to make it easy for you. The truth is: ordinary eternal machinery.

– Was it nice?

– It was the most beautiful thing I have ever felt.

– Did she like it?

– No.

– Really?

– Yes, she liked it. How anxious you are to be deceived!

– F., I could kill you for what you’ve done. Courts would forgive me.

– You’ve done enough killing for one night.

– Get off our bed! Our bed! This was our bed!

I don’t want to think too much about what F. said. Why must I? Who was he after all but a madman who lost control of his bowels, a fucker of one’s wife, a collector of soap, a politician? Ordinary eternal machinery. Do I have to understand that? This morning is another morning, flowers have opened up again, men turn on their sides to see whom they have married, everything is ready to begin anew. Why must I be lashed to the past by the words of a dead man? Why must I reproduce these conversations so painstakingly, letting not one lost comma alter the beat of our voices? I want to talk to men in taverns and buses and remember nothing. And you, Catherine Tekakwitha, burning in your stall of time, does it please you that I strip myself so cruelly? I fear you smell of the Plague. The long house where you crouch day after day smells of the Plague. Why is my research so hard? Why can’t I memorize baseball statistics like the Prime Minister? Why do baseball statistics smell like the Plague? What has happened to the morning? My desk smells! 1660 smells! The Indians are dying! The trails smell! They are pouring roads over the trails, it doesn’t help. Save the Indians! Serve them the hearts of Jesuits! I caught the Plague in my butterfly net. I merely wanted to fuck a saint, as F. advised. I don’t know why it seemed like such a good idea. I barely understand it but it seemed like the only thing left to me. Here I am courting with research, the only juggling I can do, waiting for the statues to move – and what happens? I’ve poisoned the air, I’ve lost my erection. Is it because I’ve stumbled on the truth about Canada? I don’t want to stumble on the truth about Canada. Have the Jews paid for the destruction of Jericho? Will the French learn how to hunt? Are wigwam souvenirs enough? City Fathers, kill me, for I have talked too much about the Plague. I thought the Indians died of bullet wounds and broken treaties. More roads! The forest stinks! Catherine Tekakwitha, is there something sinister in your escape from the Plague? Do I have to love a mutant? Look at me, Catherine Tekakwitha, a man with a stack of contagious papers, limp in the groin. Look at you, Catherine Tekakwitha, your face half eaten, unable to go outside in the sun because of the damage to your eyes. Shouldn’t I be chasing someone earlier than you? Discipline, as F. said. This must not be easy. And if I knew where my research led, where would the danger be? I confess that I don’t know the point of anything. Take one step to the side and it’s all absurd. What is this fucking of a dead saint? It’s impossible. We all know that. I’ll publish a paper on Catherine Tekakwitha, that’s all. I’ll get married again. The National Museum needs me. I’ve been through a lot, I’ll make a marvelous lecturer. I’ll pass off F.’s sayings as my own, become a wit, a mystic wit. He owes me that much. I’ll give away his soap collection to female students, a bar at a time, lemon cunts, pine cunts, I’ll be a master of mixed juices. I’ll run for Parliament, just like F. I’ll get the Eskimo accent. I’ll have the wives of other men. Edith! Her lovely body comes stalking back, the balanced walk, the selfish eyes (or are they?). Oh, she does not stink of the Plague. Please don’t make me think about your parts. Her belly button was a tiny swirl, almost hidden. If all the breeze it took to ruffle a tea rose suddenly became flesh, it would be like her belly button. On different occasions she covered it with oil, semen, thirty-five dollars’ worth of perfume, a burr, rice, urine, the parings of a man’s fingernails, another man’s tears, spit, a thimbleful of rain water. I’ve got to recall the occasions.

OIL: Countless times. She kept a bottle of olive oil beside the bed. I always thought flies would come.

SEMEN: F.’s too? I couldn’t bear that. She made me deposit it there myself. She wanted to see me masturbate for the last time. How could I tell her that it was the most intense climax of my life? rice: Raw rice. She kept one grain in there for a week, claiming that she could cook it.

URINE: Don’t be ashamed, she said.

FINGERNAILS: She said that Orthodox Jews buried their fingernail parings. I’m uneasy as I remember this. It’s just the kind of observation that F. would make. Did she get the idea from him?

MAN’S TEARS: A curious incident. We were sunbathing on the beach at Old Orchard, Maine. A complete stranger in a blue bathing suit threw himself on her stomach, weeping. I grabbed his hair to pull him away. She struck my hand sharply. I looked around; nobody had noticed so I felt a little better about it. I timed the man: he cried for five minutes. There were thousands stretched on the beach. Why did he have to pick us? I smiled stupidly at people passing, as if this loony were my bereaved brother-in-law. Nobody seemed to notice. He had on one of those cheap wool bathing suits that do nothing for the balls. He cried quietly, Edith’s right hand on the nape of his neck. This isn’t happening, I tried to think, Edith’s not a sandy whore. Abruptly and clumsily, he rose on one knee, stood up, ran away. Edith looked after him for a while, then turned to comfort me. He was an A——, she whispered. Impossible! I shouted furiously. I’ve documented every living A—— ! You’re lying, Edith! You loved him slobbering on your navel. Admit it! Perhaps you’re right, she said, perhaps he wasn’t an A——. That was a chance I couldn’t take. I spent the rest of the day patroling miles of beach, but he’d gone somewhere with his snotty nose.

SPIT: I don’t know why. In fact, I can’t remember when exactly. Have I imagined this one?

RAIN WATER: She got the idea it was raining at two in the morning. We couldn’t tell because of the window situation. I took a thimble and went upstairs. She appreciated the favor.

There is no doubt that she believed her belly button to be a sensory organ, better than that, a purse which guaranteed possession in her personal voodoo system. Many times she held me hard and soft against her there, telling stories through the night. Why was I never quite comfortable? Why did I listen to the fan and the elevator?

13

Days without work. Why did that list depress me? I should never have made the list. I’ve done something bad to your belly, Edith. I tried to use it. I tried to use your belly against the Plague. I tried to be a man in a padded locker room telling a beautiful smutty story to eternity. I tried to be an emcee in tuxedo arousing a lodge of honeymooners, my bed full of golf widows. I forgot that I was desperate. I forgot that I began this research in desperation. My briefcase fooled me. My tidy notes led me astray. I thought I was doing a job. The old books on Catherine Tekakwitha by P. Cholenec, the manuscripts of M. Remy, Miracles faits en sa paroisse par l’intercession de la B. Cath. Tekakwith, 1696, from the archives of Collège Sainte-Marie – the evidence tricked me into mastery. I started making plans like a graduating class. I forgot who I was. I forgot that I never learned to play the harmonica. I forgot that I gave up the guitar because F chord made my fingers bleed. I forgot about the socks I’ve stiffened with semen. I tried to sail past the Plague in a gondola, young tenor about to be discovered by talent-scout tourist. I forgot about jars Edith handed me that I couldn’t open. I forgot the way Edith died, the way F. died, wiping his ass with a curtain. I forgot that I only have one more chance. I thought Edith would rest in a catalogue. I thought I was a citizen, private, user of public facilities. I forgot about constipation! Constipation didn’t let me forget. Constipation ever since I compiled the list. Five days ruined in their first half-hours. Why me? – the great complaint of the constipated. Why doesn’t the world work for me? The lonely sitting man in the porcelain machine. What did I do wrong yesterday? What unassailable bank in my psyche needs shit? How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me? The hater of history crouched over the immaculate bowl. How can I prove the body is on my side? Is my stomach an enemy? The chronic loser at morning roulette plans his suicide: a leap into the St. Lawrence weighted with a sealed bowel. What good are movies? I am too heavy for music. I am invisible if I leave no daily evidence. Old food is poison, and the sacks leak. Unlock me! Exhausted Houdini! Lost ordinary magic! The squatting man bargains with God, submitting list after list of New Year’s Resolutions. I will eat only lettuce. Give me diarrhea if I’ve got to have something. Let me help the flowers and dung beetles. Let me into the world club. I am not enjoying sunsets, then for whom do they burn? I’ll miss my train. My portion of the world’s work will not be done, I warn you. If sphincter must be coin let it be Chinese coin. Why me? I’ll use science against you. I’ll drop in pills like depth charges. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, don’t make it tighter. Nothing helps, is that what you want me to learn? The straining man perched on a circle prepares to abandon all systems. Take hope, take cathedrals, take the radio, take my research. These are hard to give up, but a load of shit is harder still. Yes, yes, I abandon even the system of renunciation. In the tiled dawn courtroom a folded man tries a thousand oaths. Let me testify! Let me prove Order! Let me cast a shadow! Please make me empty, if I’m empty then I can receive, if I can receive it means it comes from somewhere outside of me, if it comes from outside of me I’m not alone! I cannot bear this loneliness. Above all it is loneliness. I don’t want to be a star, merely dying. Please let me be hungry, then I am not the dead center, then I can single out the trees in their particular lives, then I can be curious about the names of rivers, the altitude of mountains, the different spellings of Tekakwitha, Tegahouita, Tegahkouita, Tehgakwita, Tekakouita, oh, I want to be fascinated by phenomena! I don’t want to live inside! Renew my life. How can I exist as the vessel of yesterday’s slaughter? Is the meat punishing me? Are there wild herds who think poorly of me? Murder in the kitchen! Dachau farmyards! We are grooming beings to eat! Does God love the world? What a monstrous system of nourishment! All of us animal tribes at eternal war! What have we won? Humans, the dietary Nazis! Death at the center of nourishment! Who will apologize to the cows? It’s not our fault, we didn’t think this whole thing up. These kidneys are kidneys. This is not chicken, this is a chicken. Think of the death camps in the basement of a hotel. Blood on the pillows! Matter impaled on toothbrushes! All animals eating, not for pleasure, not for gold, not for power, but merely to be. For whose eternal Pleasure? Tomorrow I begin my fast. I resign. But I can’t resign with a full stomach. And does fasting please or offend Thee? You might construe it as pride or cowardice. I have memorized my bathroom forever. Edith kept it very clean, but I have been less fastidious. Is it fair to ask the intended to scrub the electric chair? I’m using old newspapers, I’ll buy rolls when I deserve them. I’ve promised the toilet much attention if it will be good to me, I’ll unblock it. But why should I humiliate myself now? You don’t polish windows in a car wreck. When my body starts, the old routines will start, I promise. Help! Give me a hint. For five days, except for that first half-hour of failure, I cannot enter the bathroom. My teeth and hair are dirty. I can’t begin to shave, to mock myself with a little deposit of hair. I would stink at an autopsy. Nobody wants to eat me, I’m sure. What’s it like outside? Is there an outside? I am the sealed, dead, impervious museum of my appetite. This is the brutal solitude of constipation, this is the way the world is lost. One is ready to stake everything on a river, a nude bath before Catherine Tekakwitha, and no promises.

14

Into the world of names with us. F. said: Of all the laws which bind us to the past, the names of things are the most severe. If what I sit in is my grandfather’s chair, and what I look out of is my grand -father’s window – then I’m deep in his world. F. said: Names preserve the dignity of Appearance. F. said: Science begins in coarse naming, a willingness to disregard the particular shape and destiny of each red life, and call them all Rose. To a more brutal, more active eye, all flowers look alike, like Negroes and Chinamen. F. never shut up. His voice has got into my ear like a trapped fly, incessantly buzzing. His style is colonizing me. His will provides me with his room downtown, the factory he bought, his treehouse, his soap collection, his papers. And I don’t like the discharge from my pecker. Too much, F.! I’ve got to hold on to myself. Next thing you know my ears will be transparent. F., why do I suddenly miss you so intensely? There are certain restaurants I can never go to again. But do I have to be your monument? Were we friends, after all? I remember the day you finally bought the factory, eight hundred thousand dollars, and I walked with you on those uneven wood floors, floors which as a boy you had swept so often. I believe you were actually weeping. It was the middle of the night and half the lights were gone. We walked between the rows of sewing machines, cutting tables, defunct steam pressers. There is nothing more quiet than a still factory. Every now and then we kicked a tangle of wire hangers, or brushed a rack where they hung, thick as vines, and a curious tinkling resounded, like a hundred bored men playing in their pockets, a curiously violent sound, as if the men were waiting among the grotesque shadows cast by the abandoned machines, men waiting for salaries, goons for the word to smash F.’s shut-down. I was vaguely frightened. Factories, like parks, are public places, and it was an offense to the democratic mind to see F. so deeply moved by his ownership. F. picked up an old heavy steam iron which was connected to a metal frame above by a thick spring. He swung it away from the table, dropped it, laughed while it bounced up and down like a dangerous yo-yo, shadows striping the dirty walls like a wild chalk eraser on a blackboard. Suddenly F. threw a switch, the lights flickered, and the central power belt which drove the sewing machines began to roll. F. began to orate. He loved to talk against mechanical noise.

– Larry! he cried, moving down the empty benches. Larry! Ben! Dave! I know you can hear me! Ben! I haven’t forgotten your hunched back! Sol! I’ve done what I promised! Little Margerie! You can eat your tattered slippers now! Jews, Jews, Jews! Thanks!

– F., this is disgusting.

– Every generation must thank its Jews, F. said, leaping away from me. And its Indians. The Indians must be thanked for building our bridges and skyscrapers. The world is made of races, you better learn that, my friend. People are different! Roses are different from each other! Larry! It’s me, F., boy goy, whose blond hair you ofttimes ruffled. I’ve done what I promised you in the dark stock room so many afternoons ago. It’s mine! It’s ours! I’m dancing on the scraps! I’ve turned it into a playground! I’m here with a friend!

When he had calmed down F. took my hand and led me to the stock room. Great empty spools and cardboard cylinders threw their precise shadows in the half light, temple columns. The respectable animal smell of wool still clung to the air. I sensed a layer of oil forming on my nose. Back on the factory floor the power belt still turned and a few spikeless machines pumped. F. and I stood very close.

– So you think I am disgusting, F. said.

– I would never believe you capable of such cheap sentimentality. Talking to little Jewish ghosts!

– I was playing as once I promised I would.

– You were slobbering.

– Isn’t this a beautiful place? Isn’t it peaceful? We’re standing in the future. Soon rich men will build places like this on their estates and visit them by moonlight. History has shown us how men love to muse and loaf and make love in places formerly the scene of much violent activity.

– What are you going to do with it?

– Come in, now and then. Sweep a little. Screw on the shiny tables. Play with the machines.

– You could have been a millionaire. The financial page talked about the brilliance of your manipulations. I must confess that this coup of yours lends a lot of weight to all the shit you’ve been spouting over the years.

– Vanity! cried F. I had to see if I could pull it off. I had to see if there was any comfort in it. In spite of what I knew! Larry didn’t expect it of me, it wasn’t binding. My boyhood promise was an alibi! Please don’t let this evening influence anything I’ve said to you.

– Don’t cry, F.

– Forgive me. I wanted to taste revenge. I wanted to be an American. I wanted to tie my life up with a visit. That isn’t what Larry meant.

My arm struck a rack of hangers as I seized F.’s shoulders. The jangling of coins was not so loud, what with the smaller room and the noise of the machinery beyond, and the thugs retreated as we stood in a forlorn embrace.

15

Catherine Tekakwitha in the shadows of the long house. Edith crouching in the stuffy room, covered with grease. F. pushing a broom through his new factory. Catherine Tekakwitha can’t go outside at noon. When she did get out she was swaddled in a blanket, a hobbling mummy. So she passed her girlhood, far from the sun and the noise of hunting, a constant witness to the tired Indians eating and fucking one another, and a picture of pure Mistress Mary rattling in her head louder than all the dancer’s instruments, shy as the deer she had heard about. What voices did she hear, louder than groans, sweeter than snoring? How well she must have learned the ground rules. She did not know how the hunter rode down his prey but she knew how he sprawled with a full belly, burping later at love. She saw all the preparations and all the conclusions, without the perspective set against a mountain. She saw the coupling but she didn’t hear the songs hummed in the forest and the little gifts made of grass. Confronted with this assault of human machinery, she must have developed elaborate and bright notions of heaven – and a hatred for finite shit. Still, it is a mystery how one loses the world. Dumque crescebat aetate, crescebat et prudentia, says P. Cholenec in 1715. Is it pain? Why didn’t her vision turn Rabelaisian? Tekakwitha was the name she was given, but the exact meaning of the word is not known. She who puts things in order, is the interpretation of l’abbé Marcoux, the old missionary at Caughnawaga. L’abbé Cuoq, the Sulpician Indianologist: Celle qui s’avance, qui meut quelquechose devant elle. Like someone who proceeds in shadows, her arms held before her, is the elaboration of P. Lecompte. Let us say that her name was some combination of these two notions: She who, advancing, arranges the shadows neatly. Perhaps, Catherine Tekakwitha, I come to you in the same fashion. A kind uncle took the orphan in. After the plague the whole village moved a mile up the Mohawk River, close to where it is joined by the Auries River. It was called Gandaouagué, another name which we know in many forms, Gandawagué, a Huron word used by missionaries to designate falls or rapids, Gahnawagué in the Mohawk dialect, Kaknawaké which developed into the current Caughnawaga. I’m paying my dues. Here she lived with her uncle, his wife, his sisters, in the long house which he established, one of the principal structures of the village. Iroquois women worked hard. A hunter never lugged his kill. He made an incision in the animal’s stomach, grabbed a handful of entrails, and, as he danced home, sprinkled the guts here and there, this dangled from a branch, that spiked on a bush. I’ve killed, he announced to his wife. She followed his slimy traces into the forest, and her prize for finding the slain beast was to get it back to her husband, who was sleeping beside the fire, his stomach rumbling. Women did most of the disagreeable things. War, hunting, and fishing were the only occupations a man’s dignity allowed. The rest of the time he smoked, gossiped, played games, ate, and slept. Catherine Tekakwitha liked work. All the other girls rushed through it so they could get out there and dance, flirt, comb their hair, paint their faces, put on their earrings, and ornament themselves with colored porcelain. They wore rich pelts, embroidered leggings worked with beads and porcupine quills. Beautiful! Couldn’t I love one of these? Can Catherine hear them dance? Oh, I’d like one of the dancers. I don’t want to disturb Catherine, working in the long house, the muffled thud of leaping feet tracing perfect burning circles in her heart. The girls aren’t spending too much time on tomorrow, but Catherine is gathering her days into a chain, linking the shadows. Her aunts insist. Here’s a necklace, put it on dear, and why don’t you paint your lousy complexion? She was very young, she allowed herself to be adorned, and never forgave herself. Twenty years later she wept over what she considered one of her gravest sins. What am I getting into? Is this my kind of woman? After a while her aunts took the pressure off and she got back to total work, grinding, hauling water, gathering firewood, preparing the pelts for trade – all done in a remarkable spirit of willingness. “Douce, patiente, chaste, et innocente,” says P. Chauchetière. “Sage comme une fille française bien élevée,” he continues. Like a well-raised French girl! O Sinister Church! F., is this what you want from me? Is this my punishment for not sliding with Edith? She was waiting for me all covered in red grease and I was thinking of my white shirt. I have since applied the tube to myself, out of curiosity, a single gleaming column, useless to me as F.’s akropolis that morning. Now I read that Catherine Tekakwitha had a great gift for embroidery and handicraft, and that she made beautiful embroidered leggings, tobacco pouches, moccasins, and wampums. Hour after hour she worked on these, roots and eelskins, shells, porcelain, quills. To be worn by anyone but her! Whom was her mind adorning? Her wampums were especially cherished. Was this the way she mocked money? Perhaps her contempt freed her to invent elaborate designs and color arrangements just as F.’s contempt for commerce enabled him to buy a factory. Or do I misread them both? I’m tired of facts, I’m tired of speculations, I want to be consumed by unreason. I want to be swept along. Right now I don’t care what goes on under her blanket. I want to be covered with unspecific kisses. I want my pamphlets praised. Why is my work so lonely? It is past midnight, the elevator is at rest. The linoleum is new, the faucets tight, thanks to F.’s bequest. I want all the comes I did not demand. I want a new career. What have I done to Edith, that I can’t even get her ghost to stiffen me? I hate this apartment. Why did I have it redecorated? I thought the table would look nice yellow. O God, please terrify me. The two who loved me, why are they so powerless tonight? The belly button useless. Even F.’s final horror meaningless. I wonder if it’s raining. I want F.’s experiences, his emotional extravagance. I can’t think of a single thing F. said. I can only remember the way he used his handkerchief, the meticulous folding to keep his nose away from snot, his high-pitched sneezes and the pleasure they gave him. High-pitched and metallic, positively instrumental, a sideways snap of the bony head, then the look of surprise, as if he’d just received an unexpected gift, and the raised eyebrows which said, Fancy that. People sneeze, F., that’s all, don’t make such a damn miracle out of it, it only depresses me, it’s a depressing habit you have of loving to sneeze and of eating apples as if they were juicier for you and being the first one to exclaim how good the movie is. You depress people. We like apples too. I hate to think of the things you told Edith, probably sounding as if hers were the first body you ever touched. Was she delighted? Her new nipples. You’re both dead. Never stare too long at an empty glass of milk. I don’t like what’s happening to Montréal architecture. What happened to the tents? I would like to accuse the Church. I accuse the Roman Catholic Church of Québec of ruining my sex life and of shoving my member up a relic box meant for a finger, I accuse the R.C.C. of Q. of making me commit queer horrible acts with F., another victim of the system, I accuse the Church of killing Indians, I accuse the Church of refusing to let Edith go down on me properly, I accuse the Church of covering Edith with red grease and of depriving Catherine Tekakwitha of red grease, I accuse the Church of haunting automobiles and of causing pimples, I accuse the Church of building green masturbation toilets, I accuse the Church of squashing Mohawk dances and of not collecting folk songs, I accuse the Church of stealing my sun tan and of promoting dandruff, I accuse the Church of sending people with dirty toenails into streetcars where they work against Science, I accuse the Church of female circumcision in French Canada.

16

It was a lovely day in Canada, a poignant summer day; so brief, so brief. It was 1664, sunny, dragonflies investigating the plash of paddles, porcupines sleeping on their soft noses, black-braided girls in the meadow plaiting grass into aromatic baskets, deer and braves sniffing the pine wind, dreaming of luck, two boys wrestling beside the palisade, embrace after embrace. The world was about two billion years old but the mountains of Canada were very young. Strange doves wheeled over Gandaouagué.

– Boo-hoo, wept the eight-year-old heart.

The Heart listened, the Heart which was neither new nor old, nor, indeed, a prisoner of description, and Thomas sang for all the children, Facienti quod in se est, Dens non denegat gratiam.

– Today you must shine,

Quills of porcupine;

Like summer rain

Beads of porcelain;

Eternal wreath

This necklace of teeth, sang the Aunts as they dressed the child for the simple wedding, according to their custom, for the Iroquois married children.

– No, no, cried one heart in a village.

Strange doves wheeled over Gandaouagué.

– Go over to him, Catherine, oh, he’s a strong little man! clucked the Aunts.

– Ha, ha, laughed the sturdy boy.

Suddenly his laughter ceased, for the boy was frightened, and it was not a fear he knew, not a fear of being whipped or of losing the game, but once, when a Medicine Man had died …

– What’s the matter with them? asked the family of each child, for the families wished to secure an advantageous union between themselves.

– Roo roo, sang the wheeling doves.

Eternal wreath, this necklace of teeth, her Aunts’ song pierced her heart with arrows, No, no, she wept, that is wrong, that is wrong, and her eyes rolled up into her head. How strange she must have appeared to the little savage, her ravished face, her swoon, for he ran away.

– Not to worry, the Aunts agreed among themselves. Soon she will be older, the juices will start to flow, for even the Algonquin women are human! joked the Aunts. We will have no trouble then!

And so the child returned to her life of obedience, hard work, and cheerful shyness, a source of pleasure to all who knew her. Nor had the Aunts any reason to suspect that the orphan would not follow the ancient course of the Iroquois. Soon she was no longer a child, and once again the Aunts plotted.

– We will set a trap for the Shy One. We will tell her nothing!

It was a lovely night for the simple ceremony, which involved nothing more than a young man entering his bride’s cabin, sitting beside her, and then receiving from her a gift of food. This was the complete ceremony, the participants having been chosen without consultation by an agreement between their respective families.

– Sit still, Catherine, all the chores are done, darling, we don’t need any more water, winked the Aunts.

– How cold it is tonight, Aunts.

The autumn moon sailed over Indian Canada, and the Three-Whistle Bird discharged his song like aimless vertical arrows from the black branches. Tcheue! Chireue! Tzeuere! A woman drew a wooden comb through her thick hair, stroke after stroke, as she mumbled phrases of a monotonous mourning chant.

– … walk with me, sit beside me on a mountain….

The world moved closer to its little fires and pots of soup. A fish leaped out of the Mohawk River, and hovered above its splash till the splash sank away, and still the fish hovered.

– Well, look who’s here!

The great shoulders of a young hunter filled the doorway. Catherine looked up from her wampum, blushed, and returned to her work. A smile played on the sensual lips of the handsome brave. He licked his lips with a long red tongue, tasting traces of the meat he had killed and on which he had but lately feasted. Such a tongue! wondered the Aunts, digging their knuckles into their crotches under their sewing. Blood rushed into the young man’s groin. He inserted one hand under the leather and seized himself, warm handful, thick as a swan’s neck. He was here, the man awaited! He crossed like a cat to where the girl squatted, shivering, working the tiny shells, and he sat beside her, deliberately stretching his body so that thigh and hard buttock were presented to her view.

– Heh-heh, said one Aunt.

A strange fish hovered above the waters of the Mohawk River, luminous. All at once, and for the first time, Catherine Tekakwitha knew that she lived in a body, a female body! She felt the presence of her thighs and knew what they could squeeze, she felt the flower life of her nipples, she felt the sucking hollowness of her belly, the loneliness of her buttocks, the door ache of her little cunt, a cry for stretching, and she felt the existence of each cunt hair, they were not numerous and so short they did not even curl! She lived in a body, a woman’s body, and it worked! She sat on juices.

– I’ll bet he’s hungry, said another Aunt.

So bright! the fish which rose over the river. She felt in her imagination the circle of this hunter’s strong brown arms, the circles he would force through the lips of her cunt, the circles of her breasts pressed flat under him, the circle of her bite marks on his shoulder, the circle of her mouth lips in blowing kisses!

– Yeah, I’m starving.

The circles were made of whips and knotted thongs. They bound her, they choked her, they tore her skin, they were shrinking necklaces of fangs. Her tits were bleeding. She was sitting on blood. The circles of love tightened like a noose, squeezing, ripping, slicing. Little hairs were caught in knots. Agony! A burning circle attacked her cunt and severed it from her crotch like the top of a tin can. She lived in a woman’s body but – it did not belong to her! It was not hers to offer! With a desperate slingshot thought she hurled her cunt forever into the night. It was not hers to offer to the handsome fellow, though his arms were strong and his own forest magic not inconsiderable. And as she thus disclaimed the ownership of her flesh she sensed a minute knowledge of his innocence, a tiny awareness of the beauty of all the faces circled round the crackling fires of the village. Ah, the pain eased, the torn flesh she finally did not own healed in its freedom, and a new description of herself, so brutally earned, forced itself into her heart: she was Virgin.

– Get the man some food, commanded one beautiful Aunt ferociously.

The ceremony must not be completed, the old magic must not be honored! Catherine Tekakwitha stood up. The hunter smiled, the Aunts smiled, Catherine Tekakwitha smiled sadly, the hunter thought she smiled shyly, the Aunts thought she smiled slyly, the hunter thought the Aunts smiled greedily, the Aunts thought the hunter smiled greedily, the hunter even thought that the little slit in the head of his cock smiled, and maybe Catherine thought her cunt was smiling in its new old home. A strange luminous fish smiled.

– Smack, smack, yum, said the hunter inarticulately.

Catherine Tekakwitha fled the squatting hungry people. Past the fires, the bones, the excrement, she rushed through the door, past the palisade, through the smoky village, into the vaults of the birch trees standing palely in the moonlight.

– After her!

– Don’t let her get away!

– Fuck her in the bushes!

– Give her one for me!

– Hoo hoo hoo!

– Eat hair pie!

– All the way!

– Turn her over and do it for me!

– Cover her face with a flag!

– Drive it home!

– Hurry!

– The Shy One flies!

– Screw her in the ass!

– She needs it bad!

– Tcheue! Chireue! Tzeuere!

– Up to the hilt!

– In the armpit!

– … walk with me, sit beside me on a mountain….

– Puff! Puff!

– Do her a favor!

– Screw the pimples off her!

– Gobble it!

– Deus non denegat gratiam!

– Piss in it!

– Come back!

– Algonquin hussy!

– Stuck-up Frenchie!

– Shit in her ear!

– Make her say uncle!

– That way!

The hunter entered the woods. He would have no trouble finding her, the Shy One, the One Who Hobbled. He had followed swifter game than she. He knew every trail. But where was she? He plunged forward. He knew a hundred soft places, beds of pine needle, couches of moss. He stepped on a twig and cracked it, the first time in his life! This was turning into a very expensive fuck. Where are you? I won’t hurt you. A branch struck him in the face.

– Ho ho, the voices of the village drifted on the wind.

Above the Mohawk River a fish hovered in a halo of blond mist, a fish that longed for nets and capture and many eaters at the feast, a smiling luminous fish.

– Deus non denegat gratiam.

When Catherine Tekakwitha got home the next morning the Aunts punished her. The young hunter had returned home hours ago, humiliated. His family was enraged.

– Lousy Algonquin! Take that! And that!

– Pow! Sock!

– You’ll sleep beside the shit from now on!

– You’re not part of the family any more, you’re just a slave!

– Your mother was no good!

– You’ll do what we say! Slap!

Catherine Tekakwitha smiled cheerfully. It wasn’t her body they were kicking around, not her belly the old ladies jumped on in the moccasins she had embroidered. She looked up through the smoke hole while they tormented her. As le P. Lecompte remarks, Dieu lui avait donné une âme que Tertullien dirait “naturellement chrétienne.”

17

O God, Your Morning Is Perfect. People Are Alive In Your World. I Can Hear The Little Children In The Elevator. The Airplane Is Flying Through The Original Blue Air. Mouths Are Eating Breakfast. The Radio Is Filled With Electricity. The Trees Are Excellent. You Are Listening To The Voices Of The Faithless Who Tarry On The Bridge of Spikes. I Have Let Your Spirit Into The Kitchen. The Westclock Is Also Your Idea. The Government Is Meek. The Dead Do Not Have To Wait. You Comprehend Why Someone Must Drink Blood. O God, This Is Your Morning. There Is Music Even From A Human Thigh-Bone Trumpet. The Ice-Box Will Be Forgiven. I Cannot Think Of Anything Which Is Not Yours. The Hospitals Have Drawers Of Cancer Which They Do Not Own. The Mesozoic Waters Abounded With Marine Reptiles Which Seemed Eternal. You Know The Details Of The Kangaroo. Place Ville Marie Grows And Falls Like A Flower In Your Binoculars. There Are Old Eggs In The Gobi Desert. Nausea Is An Earthquake In Your Eye. Even The World Has A Body. We Are Watched Forever. In The Midst Of Molecular Violence The Yellow Table Clings To Its Shape. I Am Surrounded By Members Of Your Court. I Am Frightened That My Prayer Will Fall Into My Mind. Somewhere This Morning Agony Is Explained. The Newspaper Says That A Human Embryo Was Found Wrapped In A Newspaper And That A Doctor Is Suspected. I Am Trying To Know You In The Kitchen Where I Sit. I Fear My Small Heart. I Cannot Understand Why My Arm Is Not A Lilac Tree. I Am Frightened Because Death Is Your Idea. Now I Do Not Think It Behooves Me To Describe Your World. The Bathroom Door Is Opening By Itself And I Am Shivering With So Much Fear. O God, I Believe Your Morning Is Perfect. Nothing Will Happen Incompletely. O God, I Am Alone In The Desire Of My Education But A Greater Desire Must Be Lodged With You. I Am A Creature In Your Morning Writing A Lot Of Words Beginning With Capitals. Seven-Thirty In The Ruin Of My Prayer. I Sit Still In Your Morning While Cars Drive Away. O God, If There Are Fiery Journeys Be With Edith As She Climbs. Be With F. If He Has Earned Himself Agony. Be With Catherine Who Is Dead Three Hundred Years. Be With Us In Our Ignorance And Our Wretched Doctrines. We Are All Of Us Tormented With Your Glory. You Have Caused Us To Live On The Crust Of A Star. F. Suffered Horribly In His Last Days. Catherine Was Mangled Every Hour In Mysterious Machinery. Edith Cried In Pain. Be With Us This Morning Of Your Time. Be With Us At Eight O’Clock Now. Be With Me As I Lose The Crumbs Of Grace. Be With Me As The Kitchen Comes Back. Please Be With Me Especially While I Poke Around The Radio For Religious Music. Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President’s Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.

18

What is most original in a man’s nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn’t have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the painful arrangement of things as they are. Jesus probably designed his system so that it would fail in the hands of other men, that is the way with the greatest creators: they guarantee the desperate power of their own originality by projecting their systems into an abrasive future. These are F.’s ideas, of course. I don’t think he believed them. I wish I knew why he took so much interest in me. Now that I look back he seemed to be training me for something, and he was ready to use any damn method to keep me hysterical. Hysteria is my classroom, F. said once. The occasion of the remark is interesting. We had been to a double feature and had then eaten a huge Greek meal in one of his friends’ restaurants. The jukebox was playing a melancholy tune currently on the Athenian Hit Parade. It was snowing on St. Lawrence Boulevard and the two or three customers left in the place were staring out at the weather. F. was eating black olives in a disinterested fashion. A couple of the waiters were drinking coffee, after which they would begin to stack the chairs, leaving our table, as usual, to the very end. If there was an unpressurized place in the whole world, this was it. F. was yawning and playing with his olive pits. He made his remark out of the blue and I could have killed him. As we walked through the rainbow haze of the neon-colored snow he pressed a small book into my hand.

– I received this for an oral favor I happen to have performed for a restaurateur friend. It’s a prayer book. Your need is greater than mine.

– You filthy liar! I cried when we had reached the streetlamp and read the cover, EΛΛHNO-AΓΓΛIKOI ΔIAΛOΓOI. It’s an English-Greek phrase book, badly printed in Salonica!

– Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered. Study the book.

– And the English is execrable. F., you torture me purposefully.

– Ah, he said blithely sniffing the night, ah, it’s soon Christmas in India. Families gathered round the Christmas curry, carols before the blazing Yule corpse, children waiting for the bells of Bhagavad-Santa.

– You soil everything, don’t you?

– Study the book. Comb it for prayers and guidance. It will teach you how to breathe.

– Sniff. Sniff.

– No, that’s wrong.

19

Now it is time for Edith to run, run between the old Canadian trees. But where are the doves today? Where is the smiling luminous fish? Why are the hiding places hiding? Where is Grace today? Why isn’t candy being fed to History? Where is the Latin music?

– Help!

Edith ran through the woods, thirteen years old, the men after her. She was wearing a dress made from flour sacks. A certain Flour Company packed their product in sacks printed with flowers. There is a thirteen-year-old girl running through needle pine. Have you ever seen such a thing? Follow her young young bum, Eternal Cock of the Brain. Edith told me this story, or part of it, years later, and I’ve been pursuing her little body through the forest ever since, I confess. Here I am an old scholar, wild with unspecific grief, compulsive detective of gonad shadows. Edith, forgive me, it was the thirteen-year-old victim I always fucked. Forgive yourself, F. said. Thirteen-year-old skin is very beautiful. What other food besides brandy is good after thirteen years in the world? The Chinese eat old eggs but that is no comfort. O Catherine Tekakwitha, send me thirteen-year-olds today! I am not cured. I will never be cured. I do not want to write this History. I do not want to mate with Thee. I do not want to be as facile as F. I do not want to be the leading Canadian authority on the A——s. I do not want a new yellow table. I do not want astral knowledge. I do not want to do the Telephone Dance. I do not want to conquer the Plague. I want thirteen-year-olds in my life. Bible King David had one to warm his dying bed. Why shouldn’t we associate with beautiful people? Tight, tight, tight, oh, I want to be trapped in a thirteen-year-old life. I know, I know about war and business. I am aware of shit. Thirteen-year-old electricity is very sweet to suck, and I am (or let me be) tender as a hummingbird. Don’t I have some hummingbird in my soul? Isn’t there something timeless and unutterably light in my lust hovering over a young wet crack in a blur of blond air? Oh come, hardy darlings, there is nothing of King Midas in my touch, I freeze nothing into money. I merely graze your hopeless nipples as they grow away from me into business problems. I change nothing as I float and sip under the first bra.

– Help!

Four men followed Edith. Damn every one of them. I can’t blame them. The village was behind them, filled with families and business. These men had watched her for years. French Canadian schoolbooks do not encourage respect for the Indians. Some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church’s victory over the Medicine Man. No wonder the forests of Québec are mutilated and sold to America. Magic trees sawed with a crucifix. Murder the saplings. Bittersweet is the cunt sap of a thirteen-year-old. O Tongue of the Nation! Why don’t you speak for yourself? Can’t you see what is behind all this teen-age advertising? Is it only money? What does “wooing the teen-age market” really mean? Eh? Look at all the thirteen-year-old legs on the floor spread in front of the TV screen. Is it only to sell them cereals and cosmetics? Madison Avenue is thronged with hummingbirds who want to drink from those little barely haired crevices. Woo them, woo them, suited writers of commercial poems. Dying America wants a thirteen-year-old Abishag to warm its bed. Men who shave want little girls to ravish but sell them high heels instead. The sexual Hit Parade is written by fathers who shave. O suffering child-lust offices of the business world, I feel your blue-balled pain everywhere! There is a thirteen-year-old blonde lying on the back seat of a parked car, one nyloned toe playing with the armrest ashtray, the other foot on the rich interior carpet, dimples on her cheeks and only a hint of innocent acne, and her garter belt is correctly uncomfortable: far away roam the moon and a few police flashlights: her Beethoven panties are damp from the Prom. She alone of all the world believes that fucking is holy, dirty, and beautiful. And who is this making his way through the bushes? It is her Chemistry Teacher, who smiled all night while she danced with the football star because it is the foam rubber of his car she lies dreaming upon. Charity begins alone, F. used to say. Many long nights have taught me that the Chemistry Teacher is not merely a sneak. He loves youth truly. Advertising courts lovely things. Nobody wants to make life hell. In the hardest hard sell exists a thirsty love-torn hummingbird. F. wouldn’t want me to hate forever the men who pursued Edith.

– Sob. Sob. Whimper. Oh, oh!

They caught up with her in a stone quarry or an abandoned mine, someplace very mineral and hard, owned indirectly by U.S. interests. Edith was a beautiful thirteen-year-old Indian orphan living with foster Indian parents because her father and mother had been killed in an avalanche. She had been abused by schoolmates who didn’t think she was Christian. Even at thirteen she had lovely freakishly long nipples, she told me. Perhaps this news had leaked out of the school shower room. Perhaps that was the underground rumor which had inflamed the root of the whole town. Perhaps the business and religion of the town kept operating as usual but every single person is secretly obsessed with this nipple information. The Mass is undermined with nipple dream. The picket line of strikers at the local asbestos factory is not wholly devoted to Labor. There is something absent in the blows and tear gas of the Provincial Police, for all minds are pursing for extraordinary nipple. Daily life cannot tolerate this fantastic intrusion. Edith’s nipples are an absolute pearl irritating the workable monotonous protoplasm of village existence. Who can trace the subtle mechanics of the Collective Will to which we all contribute? I believe that in some way the village delegated these four men to pursue Edith into the forest. Get Edith! commanded the Collective Will. Get her magic nipples off Our Mind!

– Help me, Mother Mary!

They ran her to the ground. They ripped off the dress with the Company’s raspberry pattern. It was a summer afternoon. Blackflies ate her. The men were drunk on beer. They laughed and called her sauvagesse, ha, ha! They pulled off her underwear, rolling it down her long brown legs, and when they tossed it aside they did not notice that it looked like a big pink pretzel. They were surprised that her underwear was so clean: a heathen’s underwear should be limp and smeared. They were not frightened by the police, somehow they knew the police wished them well, one of their brothers-in-law was a policeman, and he had balls like everyone. They dragged her into the shadows because each man wanted to be somewhat alone. They turned her over to see if the dragging had scraped her buttocks. Blackflies ate her buttocks, which were dazzlingly round. They twisted her over again and pulled her deeper into the shadows because now they were ready to remove her underwear top. The shadows were so thick and deep at the corner of the quarry that they could hardly see, and this is what they wanted. Edith peed in fear and they heard the noise of it louder than their laughter and hard breathing. It was a steady sound and it seemed to go on forever, steady and forceful, louder than their thoughts, louder than the crickets who were grinding out an elegy for the end of the afternoon. The fall of urine on last year’s leaves and pine needles developed to a monolithic tumult in eight ears. It was the pure sound of impregnable nature and it ate like acid at their plot. It was a sound so majestic and simple, a holy symbol of frailty which nothing could violate. They froze, each of them suddenly lonely, their erections collapsing like closed accordions as their blood poured upward like flowers out of a root. But the men refused to cooperate with the miracle (as F. called it). They could not bear to learn that Edith was no longer Other, that she was indeed, Sister. Natural Law they felt, but Collective Law they obeyed. They fell on the child with index fingers, pipe stems, ballpoint pens, and twigs. I would like to know what kind of miracle that is, F. The blood streamed down her legs. The men made coarse jests. Edith screamed.

– Help me, Saint Kateri!

F. urged me to make nothing of this connection. I can’t go on with this. Everything has been taken from me. I just had a daydream: I saw the thirteen-year-old Edith suffering under the impotent attack of these four men. As the youngest kneeled down to examine better the progress of his sharp twig, Edith seized his head in her arms and drew him to her bosom, and there he lay weeping like that man on Old Orchard Beach. F., it’s too late for the double feature. My stomach is jammed again. I want to begin my fast.

20

I see it so clearly now! The night of Edith’s death, that long night of talk with F., he left a whole side of his chicken and barely touched the barbecue sauce. I see now that it was deliberate. I remember a saying of Kung’s he was fond of: When eating beside a man of mourning the Master never ate his fill. Uncles! uncles! how dare any of us eat?

21

Among the curious items I inherited from F. is a box of fireworks packed by Rich Brothers Fireworks Co., Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It contains 64 sparklers, eight 12-and 8-ball roman candles, large pinwheels, red and green fire cones, vesuvius fountains, golden jewel, silver cascade, oriental and radiant fountains, 6 giant parade sparklers, silver wheels, skyrockets, comets, handle lawn fountains, snakes, torches, red white and blue cones. I wept as I unpacked the pieces, wept for the American boyhood I never had, for my invisible New England parents, for a long green lawn and an iron deer, for college romance with Zelda.

22

I am frightened and alone. I lit one of the snakes. From the little cone a writhing ribbon of gray ash bubbled in coils on a corner of the yellow table until all the cone was consumed in its own extension – a hideous little pile of skin, gray and black like a blob of birdshit squeezed like icing. Carcasses! Carcasses! I want to swallow dynamite.

23

Dear God, It Is Three In The Morning. Aimless Cloudy Semen Becomes Transparent. Is The Church Mad At Me? Please Let Me Work. I Lit Five Of The 8-Ball Roman Candles And Four Of Them Delivered Less Than 8 Balls. The Firecrackers Are Dying. The Newly Painted Ceiling Is Burned. Korean Starvation Hurts Me In The Heart. Is This A Sin To Say? Pain Is Stored In Animal Skins. I Solemnly Declare That I Renounce Interest In How Many Times Edith and F. Fucked In Happiness. Are You So Cruel As To Compel Me To Begin My Fast With A Stuffed Belly?

24

Burned my hand badly while holding a red and green fire cone. The smoldering hull of a skyrocket ignited a sheaf of Indian notes. The sharp fragrance of gunpowder has cleared my sinuses. Lucky there was butter in the icebox because I refuse to go into the bathroom. I never liked my hair but I am not fond of the blisters bestowed by the silver cascade. Cinders float and stick like blasted bats in whose torn wings I detect exact gray-blue replicas of candy-stripe and comet-tail designs. I’ve handled so much charred cardboard that I leave my fingerprints on everything. I look around at this mess of a kitchen and I know that my life is coming true. I care more about my red watery throbbing thumb than your whole foul universe of orphans. I salute my monsterhood. I urinate anywhere on the linoleum and I am pleased that nothing happens. Every creep for himself!

25

Pigskin crackling on my thumb, nummy, nummy, I hate pain. The way I hate pain is most monumentally extraordinary, much more significant than the way you hate pain, but my body is so much more central, I am the Moscow of pain, you are the mere provincial weather station. Gunpowder and semen is the only research I intend from now on, and look how harmless I be: no bullets after hearts, no sperms after destiny: nothing but the radiance of exhaustion: the gay little cylinders collapsing in ordinary fire after multiple belches of shooting stars, rainbows: the viscous blob of come in my palm thinning and clearing, like the end of Creation when all matter returns to water. Gunpowder, ball-sweat, the yellow table starts to look like me, ugh, the kitchen looks like me, me has sneaked outside into furniture, inside smells are outside, bad to be so big, I have occupied the stove, isn’t there somewhere fresh where I can tuck my eyes in a clean bed and dream new bodies, oh I’ve got to get to a movie and take my eyes out for a pee, a movie will put me back in my skin because I’ve leaked all over the kitchen from all my holes, movie will stuff pores with white splinters and stop my invasion of the world, missed movies will kill me tonight, I am scared of F.’s firecrackers, I hurt too much in my burns, what could you know about burns? All you’ve ever done is merely burn yourself. Steady, old scholar! I’ll turn off the light and write in the dark a résumé of tomorrow’s Indian chapter that I must get to work on. Discipline. Click! “Triompher du mal par le bien.” St. Paul. That will begin the chapter. I feel better already. Foreign languages are a good corset. Get your hand off yourself. Edith Edith Edith long things forever Edith Edie cuntie Edith where your little Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith stretchy on E E E octopus complexion purse Edith lips lips area thy panties Edith Edith Edith Edith knew you your wet rivulets Eeeeddddiiiittthhhh yug yug sniffle truffle deep bulb bud button sweet soup pea spit rub hood rubber knob girl come head bup bup one bloom pug pig yum one tip tongue lug from end of bed of lips multiple lost sunk gone rise girl head small come knob splash sunk lost-lick search nose help wobble hard once more lurk up girl knob bob bubble sunk in normal skin folds lab drowned lady labia up up appear pea bean brain jewel where where hurt hiding bruised? come up hard as brass bubble from hair swamp little leather love pimple form solid lump for tongue mess mess message oh unhood unhide unhair undrown or teeth hounds I warn you tooth spade teeth dogs unleashed unloved lashed form form you bead you small blunt boywise girlcock form command tiny periscope from foreign female lost sub no man can fathom ever come up come up from women ocean period mecca egg farm mystery beds come up come up from where I don’t ever go from profound clam stretches from breathless gill yards from gray broadloom oyster floors of girlsoul far far amazon sex control rise rise here clity clity clity from amazing forbidden protoplasmic amoeba fulfilled woman gla gla galaxy please appear in small helmet of hope lap lap oh pearl pink precious radio crystal marvelous fruit pit of whole bumcunt harvest appear form develop unfold unshell unskin look into cocklove lead dykeplug prickgirl nrrr grrr bridge entre men woman so I can do you pleasure my lady deliver unto me thy downtown brain un -puzzled from cunt labyrinth for I may never join you in the seaweed nets in the sunk hotels in the spongey jungles passive womb tubed mudlined herbal cast closet vast as Mrs. God what? you no come up? splash splash hidden for a newer tongue? for a nobler tongue? for dirtier tongue? for F. tongue? for stranger? any stranger doing this to you would be more honored any stranger how strange therefore therefore I go down maybe where I meant to go like a snail this automatic tongue slides down the aquarium moss shoot there is a ridge tender and yielding as the casting join of a hollow chocolate bunny I ride it down don’t be ashamed all smells are alchemized tongue goes ring around a rosy lifesaver flavor mud candy this is a better common button we both have we must kiss assholes because we each poor one of us has one we cannot kiss it is ringed with minnie bills they Bible dance it is ringed with stunted petals tongue dives petals open shiver petals tighten in a rubber knot I talk stiff now dig dig dig bump bump bump thud on hills of petal knot get in there hands pull cheeks apart pull apart cheeks of Edith’s fabulous private hers hers they give squeeze they yield like halves of ripe peach like very cooked chicken perfectly lovely blood balloons this is Edith its virgin pink brown hairy same as mine same same as us all poor charmen who flood the world on our knees this is solid prose this is mystery of everyday thus I insert cuneiform face mouth to sphinx for my tongue was only a test game on rosy sphinx hole I focus my mouth for pure talk gnawing suck adoration shit danger love bravery open close open close goes the surface petals closing to feel its own little cliffs of muscle opening in terrible abandon red desperate as baby robin throat oh Edith ass membrane gasping all my flock of mouth bathing pruning fluttering in the sunny bird bath on a pillar of charity bowel where am I now now don’t go way here I am simply with my face between her buttocks which hands have drawn apart my chin does automatic good to cunt now I let cheeks go they squeeze me in I squeeze me in I squash my nose sealing juice infant shit games in my brain listen Edith listen to me smother listen darling love it is thy hairy hole I suck are we not joined Edith are we not proved Edith are we not breathing Edith are we not awesome lovers Edith are we not filthy postcards are we not good meals Edith are we not conversing miraculously darling pink evil fartrisk terror position darling I swear I loved you Edith grab grab jumps the little crater kiss kiss kiss kiss Edith Edith do the same to me do the same to me pull my withered bum on your face I make it easy do the same to me do the same to me do the same to me Edith lilacs Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith Edith turning in our sleep making spoons of ourselves Edith Edith Edith Edith please appear as mushrooming dream from this poor Aladdin cock Edith Edith Edith Edith in your sweet skin envelope Edith Edith thy lonely husband Edith thy lonely husband thy lonely husband thy apples thy run thy creases thy dark lonely husband

26

Somewhere in my research I learned about Tekakwitha’s Spring. It was a Jesuit speaking sweetly of it in a schoolbook. Ily a longtemps que je t’aime. I must have paused in the library. Out of the dust I hummed the old running tune. I thought of icy streams and clear pools. Christ spoke through the priest for half a paragraph. He speaks about a spring called Tekakwitha’s Spring. The priest is our Edouard Lecompte, and because of this half paragraph I know he loved the girl. He died December 20, 1929, le 20 décembre 1929. You died, Father. This priest I take into my heart whom I did not like at the beginning because he seemed to write for the Church and not the Lily How It Grows. The spring refreshed me that night as did the snows of another. I felt its clear crystal. It brought the created world into my cubicle, the cold and radiant outlines of the things that be. Entre le village, he writes, Entre le village et le ruisseau Cayudetta, Between the village and the brook Cayudetta, au creux d’un bosquet solitaire, in the hollow of a lonely grove, sortant de dessous un vieux tronc d’arbre couvert de mousse, ensuing from beneath an old moss-covered tree trunk, chantait et chante encore de nos jours, sang and in our own day still sings, une petite source limpide, a small clear spring…. It was here the girl drew water, each day, for nine years. How much you must know, Katerine Tekakwitha. What a dream of sobriety, glorious sobriety, glorious as the shine of facts, feel of skin, what a hunger for sobriety assaults me here found among ripped firecracker carcasses, selfish burns, spilled personal multitudes. 3285 times you came to this old tree. Long live History for telling us. I want to know you as you knew the path. How tiny the path of your deer shoes. The fragrance of forests is in the world. It clings to our leather clothes wherever we go, even to the whip hidden in our wallet. I believe in Gregory’s sky, crowded with saints, yes, Unlettered Pope. The path is crowded with facts. The cold pine river is still there. Let the facts drag me out of the kitchen. Let them keep me from playing myself like a roulette wheel. How good to know something she did.

27

The twenty-seventh day since I began because of a promise to F. Nothing works. I keep sleeping the wrong times and missing movie schedules. Many more burns. Many less shit. Gone are all the 12-ball roman candles, most of the 64 sparklers, the fraudulent whistling bomb, the so-called cosmic fountains. Come is much dirty underwear, real and dirty underwear, which once, sealed in polyethylene packages, promised me such marble flanks. There is hair under my fingernails.

28

If Edith saw this room she would vomit. Why did you kill her for me, F.?

29

I will explain how F. got his extraordinary body. Once again I will explain it to myself. HOW JOE’S BODY BROUGHT HIM FAME INSTEAD OF SHAME: headline on the back of an American comic which we both read one afternoon when we were thirteen. We were sitting on some trunks in an unused solarium on the third floor of the orphanage, a glass-roofed room dark as any other because of the soot deposited by a badly placed chimney – we often hid here. JOE’S BODY was the concern of an ad for a muscle-building course. His triumph is traced in seven cartoon panels. Can I recall?

1. Joe is skeletal. His legs are piteous sticks. His red bathing suit is the baggy boxer type. His voluptuous girl friend is with him. Her thighs are thicker than his. The calm sea beyond contrasts with Joe’s ordeal. A man with a grand physique is humiliating him. We cannot see the torturer’s face, but the girl informs Joe that the man is a well-known local nuisance.

2. A tiny sail has appeared on the horizon. We see the bully’s face. We appreciate his beery chest. The girl friend has drawn up her knees and is wondering why she ever dated this no-assed weakling. Joe has been pulled to his feet by the bully and now must sustain a further insult.

3. The sail is gone. Some minuscule figures play ball at the edge of the sea. Seagulls appear. An anguished Joe stands beside the girl he is losing. She has put on her white sunhat and has turned her tits from him. She answers him over her right shoulder. Her body is assive and maternal, low-breasted. Somehow we have an impression of stretched muscles in her abdomen.

JOE: The big bully! I’ll get even some day.

HER: Oh, don’t let it bother you, little boy!

4. Joe’s room, or the remains of it. A cracked picture hangs askew on the green wall. A broken lamp is in motion. He is kicking a chair over. He wears a blue blazer, tie, white ducks. He clenches his fist, a clawlike articulation from a wrist thin as a bird leg. The girl friend lies in some panel of the imagination snuggling in the bully’s armpit, winking out a thousand shameful anecdotes about Joe’s body.

JOE: Darn it! I’m sick and tired of being a scarecrow! Charles Axis says he can give me a REAL body. All right! I’ll gamble a stamp and get his FREE book.

5. LATER. Could this be Joe? He flexes a whole map of jigsaw muscles before his dresser mirror.

JOE: Boy! It didn’t take Axis long to do this for me! What MUSCLES! That bully won’t shove me around again!

Is this the same red bathing suit?

6. The beach. The girl has come back. She is having a good time. Her body is relaxed and hips have appeared. Her left hand is raised in a gesture of surprised delight as her vision of Joe under goes a radical transformation. Joe has just thrown a punch which lands in an electrical blaze on the bully’s chin, knocking him off balance, knitting his eyebrows with amazed pain. Beyond we have the same white strand, the same calm sea.

JOE: What! You here again? Here’s something I owe you!

7. The girl touches Joe’s memorable biceps with her right hand. Her left shoulder and left arm are obscured by Joe’s massive chest but we know that she has shoved it down the back of his tight red bathing suit and is working with his testicles.

HER: Oh, Joe! You ARE a real man after all!

AN ATTRACTIVE GIRL SITTING ON THE SAND NEARBY: GOSH! What a build!

THE ENVIOUS MAN BESIDE HER: He’s already famous for it!

Joe stands there in silence, thumbs hooked in the front of his bathing suit, looking at his girl, who leans lasciviously against him. Four thick black words appear in the sky and they radiate spears of light. None of the characters in the panel seems aware of the celestial manifestation exploding in terrific silence above the old marine landscape. HERO OF THE BEACH is the sky’s announcement.

F. studied the ad for a long time. I wanted to get on with what we had come for, the scuffling, the dusty caresses, the comparison of hair, the beauty of facing a friend and binding two cocks in my hand, one familiar and hungry, one warm and strange, the flash along the whole length. But F.’s eyes were wet, his lips trembling as he whispered:

– Those words are always in the sky. Sometimes you can see them, like a daytime moon.

The afternoon darkened over the soot-layered glass roof. I waited silently for F.’s mood to change and I suppose I fell asleep, for I started at the sound of scissors.

– What are you clipping out there, F.?

– Charles Axis thing.

– You going to send away?

– Bet your fucking life.

– But it’s for thin guys. We’re fat.

– Shut your fucking face.

– We’re fat, F.

– Smack! Wham! Pow!

– Fat.

– Socko! Sok! Bash!

– Fat fat fat fat fat fat fat!

I lit a stolen match and we both huddled over the comic which had fallen to the floor. At the right-hand side of the ad there is an actual photo of the man who holds the title “The World’s Most Flawlessly Formed Man.” Oh! I remember! In a flawless bathing suit he stands on the clip-away coupon.

– But look at him, F., the guy’s got no hair.

– But I have hair. I have hair.

His hands are fists, his smile is Florida, he does not look serious, he doesn’t really care about us, maybe he is even a little fat.

– Just inspect this photo, F. The guy is soft in the gut.

– He’s fat, all right.

– But –

– He’s fat. He understands the fat. Use your eyes! Look at his face. Now look at Plastic Man’s face. Charles Axis wants to be our uncle. He is one of us slobs who dwells pages behind Plastic Man. But can’t you see that he has made his peace with Plastic Man? With Blue Beetle? With Captain Marvel? Can’t you see that he believes in the super-world?

– F., I don’t like it when your eyes get shiny like that.

– The Fat! The Fat! He’s one of us! Charles Axis is on our side! He’s with us against Blue Beetle and Ibis and Wonder Woman!

– F., you’re talking funny again.

– Charles Axis has an address in New York, look, 405 West 34th St., New York 1! Don’t you think he knows about Krypton? Don’t you see him suffering on the outer limits of the Bat Cave? Has anyone ever lived so close to fantastic imaginary muscles?

– F. !

– Charles Axis is all compassion, he’s our sacrifice! He calls the thin but he means both the fat and the thin; he calls the thin because it is worse to be fat than thin; he calls the thin so that the fat can hear and come and not be named!

– Get away from that window!

– Charles! Charles! Charlie! I’m coming, I’m coming to be with you at the sad edge of the spirit world!

– F.! Uppercut! Sok! Thud!

– Puff! *##! Sob! Thank you, my friend, I guess you kinda saved my life.

That was the last time I ever equaled F. in a physical contest. He gave Charles Axis fifteen minutes a day in the privacy of his room. Fat fell away or turned to muscle, he increased his chest measurement, he was not ashamed to strip for sports. Once on the beach a huge man in a very white bathing suit kicked sand in his face as we sat sunbathing on a small towel. F. merely smiled. The huge man stood there, hands on hips, then he performed a little hop and jump, like a soccer kickoff, and kicked sand in his face once again.

– Hey! I cried: Quit kicking that sand in our faces! F., I whispered: That man is the worst nuisance on the beach.

The bully ignored me completely. He seized F.’s thick hard wrist in his own massive fist and yanked F. to a standing position.

– Listen here, he snarled, I’d smash your face … only you’re so skinny you might dry up and blow away.

– Why did you let him shove you around?

F. sat down meekly as the man strode away.

– That was Charles Axis.

– But that man is the worst nuisance on the beach.

30

A note! At the bottom of the box of firecrackers I find a note.

Dear Friend

Turn on the radio

your dear dead friend

F.

At the bottom. How well he knew me. I held the message (written on a telegraph form) against my cheek. Oh, F., help me, for a grave divides me from all that I love.

RADIO:

…. to Mrs. T. R. Voubouski, 56784 Clanranald, to the three nurses in the Barclay dormitory from you-know-who, a real climbing disk by Gavin Gate and the Goddesses – and don’t forget, during this hour of the Early Morning Record Gal you can phone your dedications in –

DRUMS SHUFFLING:

SHNN shnn shnn SHNN shnn

ELECTRIC INSTRUMENTS:

Zunga zunga zunga (a promise of incessant regular sex pumping)

GAVIN GATE:

I could have left zunga zunga zunga (he’s got all the time in the world – he’s traveled a long path to tell this cruel story)

and said (electric pulse breathing)

I told you so

GODDESSES:

told you so (a battalion of black girls, his officers recruited from bombed gospel altars, they ambush me with unspecific hatred and white teeth)

GAVIN GATE:

I could have told

the whole wide world

he leave you sad and blue

GODDESSES:

sad and blue

GAVIN GATE:

Shaid I coov ran

GODDESSES:   Ahhhhhhhh

and said     ahhhhhhhh

it good for you     ahhhhhhhh

to geh now     ahhhhhhhh (STOP!)

GAVIN GATE:

But I know when it hurt you

DRUM:

Smack!

GAVIN GATE:

don’t you know it hurt me too?

GODDESSES:

hurt me too (they had soared away into universal love suffering but now they are back in uniform, more precise now, as if they had vowed to guard themselves against a fatal emotional excess, chop/chop/chop/)

DRUMS CLIMB FIVE STEPS. GAVIN GATE WHEELS OUT OF HIS CORNER FOR THE SECOND ROUND. THIS WILL BE TO THE DEATH. THE GODDESSES ARE READY TO SUCK-MURDER THE VICTOR.

GAVIN GATE:

I could have said

that you had

it coming to you (Who are you Gavin Gate? You have a strange command. I think you have been through some ordeal and have learned too much. You are the king of some slum block and you have handed down Laws)

GODDESSES:

coming to you (they take off their luminous bras and drive to fearful heart like a squadron of kamikaze)

GAVIN GATE:

When you walked out

and turned

your back on me

GODDESSES:

back on me

GAVIN GATE:

I pleaded Baby (his strength is established, his troops are in razor order, now he can weep over us)

Ohh No!

Please Plea Please!

GODDESSES:   Ahhhhhhhhhhh

Baby don’t go!

Cause I knew he would hurt you (back to superior narrative style)

DIDACTIC DRUM THUMP

Don’t you know it hurt me too?

GODDESSES:

hurt me too

Ah

Ah

Ah (step down the marble stairs to lift his head)

GAVIN GATE:

He said he had you

dancing on a string (in some sad locker-room where all male lovers recreate, Gavin has heard the details of the lay)

GODDESSES:

Ahhhhhhhh (Revenge! revenge! but don’t we still bleed, Sisters?)

GAVIN GATE:

As far as love goes

you were

GODDESSES:

Hah! (they purge their hatred with this exclamation)

GAVIN GATE:

just another fling

Oh I oh oh oh

may be a fool (but we know you’re not, nor am I, for we deal with sacred material. Oh, God! All states of love give power!)

to love you the way I do

GODDESSES:

the way I do (a sweet punctuation. Now they are women waiting for their men, soft and wet they squat on balconies looking for our smoke signals, touching themselves)

GAVIN GATE:

Don’t you realize

even fools have feelings too?

So baby

GODDESSES:

Ahhhhhhhhh

GAVIN GATE:

C’mon back (a command)

and let me dry (a hope)

the tears (the real life of pity)

from your eye (one eye, darling, one eye at a time)

GAVIN AND THE GODDESSES WHIP THEMSELVES WITH ELECTRIC BRAIDS

Cause I would never hurt you

GODDESSES:

I would never hurt you

GAVIN GATE:

No no I would never hurt you

GODDESSES:

I would never hurt you

GAVIN GATE:

Cause Baby when it hurt you

DRUM:

Swak!

GAVIN GATE:

Don’t you know it hurts me too?

GODDESSES:

hurt me too

GAVIN GATE:

It hurts me so bad

GODDESSES:

hurt me too

GAVIN GATE:

I never desert you

GODDESSES:

hurt me too

THEY FADE, THE ELECTRIC OPERATORS, GAVIN, THE GODDESSES, THEIR BACKS BLEEDING, THEIR GENITALIA RED AND SORE. THE GREAT STORY HAS BEEN TOLD, IN THE DICTATORSHIP OF TIME, A COME HAS RENT THE FLAG, TROOPS ARE MASTURBATING WITH 1948 PIN-UPS IN THEIR TEARS, A PROMISE HAS BEEN RENEWED.

RADIO:

That was Gavin Gate and the Goddesses….

I ran for the telephone. I called the station. Is that the Early Morning Record Gal, I shouted into the mouthpiece. Is it? Is it really you? Thank you, thank you. A dedication? Oh, my love. Don’t you understand how long I’ve been in the kitchen alone? I’m irregular. I suffer from irregularity. I’m burnt bad in the thumb. Don’t Sir me, you Early Morning Record Gal. I have to talk to someone such as you because –

TELEPHONE:   Click click.

What are you doing? Hey! Hey! Hello, hello, oh, no. I remembered that there was a telephone booth a few blocks down. I had to talk to her. My shoes stuck in the semen as I walked across the linoleum. I gained the door. I commanded the elevator. I had so much to tell her, her with her blue voice and city knowledge. Then I was out on the street, 4 a.m. in the morning, the streets damp and dark as newly poured cement, the streetlamps nearly merely decoration; the moon given speed by flying scarves of cloud, the thick walled warehouses with gold family names, the cold blue air filled with smells of burlap and the river, the sound of trucks with country vegetables, the creaks of a train unloading skinned animals from beds of ice, and men in overalls with great armfuls of traveling food, great wrestling embraces in the front-line war of survival, and men would win, and men would tell the grief in victory – I was outside in the cold ordinary world, F. had led me here by many compassionate tricks, a gasp in praise of existence blasted my chest and unfolded my lungs like a newspaper in the wind.

31

The King of France was a man. I was a man. Therefore I was the King of France. F.! I’m sinking again.

32

Canada became a royal colony of France in 1663. Here come the troops led by le marquis de Tracy, lieutenant-general of the armies of the king, here they come marching through the snow, twelve hundred tall men, the famous régiment de Carignan. The news travels down the icy banks of the Mohawk: the King of France has touched the map with his white finger. The Intendant Talon, the Governor M. de Courcelle, and Tracy, they gaze over the infested wilderness. My brothers, let us be masters of the Richelieu! Voices spoken over maps, voices spoken into windows, and the forts rise along shore, Sorel, Chambly, Sainte-Thérèse, Saint-Jean, Sainte-Anne on an island in Lake Champlain. My brothers, the Iroquois live in too many trees. January 1666, M. de Courcelle led a column of men deep into Mohawk country, a Napoleonic blunder. He went without his Algonquin scouts, who did not happen to show up on time. The Indians marked the aimless trail of his retreat with many bristling corpses. Tracy waited until September of the same year. Out of Québec, into the scarlet forests, marched six hundred of the Carignan, another six hundred of the Militia, and one hundred friendly Indians. Four priests accompanied the expedition. After a three-week march they reached the first Mohawk village, Gandaouagué. The fires were cold, the village was deserted, as were all the villages they would come to. Tracy planted a Cross, a Mass was celebrated, and over the empty long houses rose the solemn music of the Te Deum. Then they burned the village to the ground, Gandaouagué and all those they came to, they devastated the countryside, destroyed provisions of corn and bean, into the fire went every harvest. The Iroquois sued for peace, and as in 1653 priests were dispatched to every village. The truce of 1666 lasted eighteen years. Mgr. de Laval blessed his Fathers before they left Québec in the search for souls. The priests entered the rebuilt village of Gandaouagué in the summer of 1667. The Mohawks sounded their great shell trumpets as the Robes-Noires, they of the long black dresses, settled among them. They stayed three days at the village we have studied, but here we may note a delicate attention of Providence. They were billeted in the cabin of Catherine Tekakwitha, and she served them, she followed them as they visited the captives of the village, Christian Hurons and Algonquins, watched as they baptized their young, wondered as they isolated the old in far-off cabins. After three days the priests moved on to Gandarago, then to Tionnontoguen, where they were greeted by two hundred braves, a chief’s eloquent welcome, and the cheers of the people who preferred the intrusion of foreign magic to the wrath of the Carignan. Five missions were established throughout the Iroquois confederation: Sainte-Marie at Tionnontoguen, Saint-François-Xavier at Onneyout, Saint-Jean-Baptiste at Onnontagué, Saint-Joseph at Tsonnontouan – from lac Saint-Sacrement to Erie, the work of only six evangelists, but a story of fire behind them. In 1668 our village Gandaouagué moved again. From the south bank of the Mohawk they crossed the river, built their long houses once again a few miles to the west, where the Mohawk meets the Cayudetta. They called the new village Kahnawaké, which means at the rapids. Close by was a small clear spring where she came each day for water. She kneeled on the moss. The water sang in her ears. The fountain rose from the heart of the forest, crystal and green were the tiny orchards of the moss. She drew a wet hand across her forehead. She longed for a deep brotherhood with the water, she longed for the spring to guarantee the gift she had made of her body, she longed to kneel wet before black robes. She swooned, collapsed beside the upturned bucket, weeping like Jill.

33

Be with me, religious medals of all kinds, those suspended on silver chains, those pinned to the underwear with a safety pin, those nestling in black chest hair, those which run like tram cars on the creases between the breasts of old happy women, those that by mistake dig into the skin while love is made, those that lie abandoned with cufflinks, those that are fingered like coins and inspected for silver hallmark, those that are lost in clothes by necking fifteen-year-olds, those that are put in the mouth while thinking, those very expensive ones that only thin small girl children are permitted to wear, those hanging in a junk closet along with unknotted neckties, those that are kissed for luck, those that are torn from the neck in anger, those that are stamped, those that are engraved, those that are placed on streetcar tracks for curious alterations, those that are fastened to the felt on the roofs of taxis, be with me as I witness the ordeal of Catherine Tekakwitha.

34

– Take your fingers out of your ears, said le P. Jean Pierron, first permanent missionary at Kahnawaké. You won’t be able to hear me if you keep your fingers in your ears.

– Ha, ha, chuckled the ancient members of the village, who were too old to learn new tricks. You can lead us to water but you can’t make us drink, us old dogs and horses.

– Remove those fingers immediately!

– Dribble, dribble, went the foam and spit between toothless jaws as the old ones squatted around the priest.

The priest went back to his cabin and took out his paints, for he was a skilled artist. A few days later he emerged with his picture, a bright mandala of the torments of hell. All the damned had been portrayed as Mohawk Indians. The mocking aged Indians squatted around him, finger-eared still, as he uncovered his work. Gasps escaped from their rotting mouths.

– Now, my children, this is what awaits you. Oh, you can keep your fingers where they are. See. A demon will place round your neck a rope and drag you along. A demon will cut off your head, extract your heart, pull out your intestines, lick up your brain, drink your blood, eat your flesh, and nibble your bones. But you will be incapable of dying. Though your body be hacked to pieces it will revive again. The repeated hacking will cause intense pain and torture.

– Arghhh!

The colors of the picture were red, white, black, orange, green, yellow, and blue. In the very center was the representation of a very old Iroquois woman, bent and wrinkled. She was enclosed in her own personal frame of finely drawn skulls. Leaning over the oval skulls is a Jesuit priest who is trying to instruct her. Her arthritic fingers are stuffed in her ears. A demon twists corkscrews of fire into her ears, perhaps jamming the fingers in there forever. A demon hurls a javelin of flame at her deplorable breasts. Two demons apply a fiery two-handled saw to her crotch. A demon encourages several burning snakes to twist around her bleeding ankles. Her mouth is a burnt black hole seared in an eternal screech for attention. As Marie de l’Incarnation wrote her son, On ne peut pas les voir sans frémir.

– Arghhh!

Il a baptisé un grand nombre de personnes, writes Marie de l’Incarnation.

– That’s right, pull them right out, the priest invited them. And don’t put them back. You must never put them back again. Old as you are, you must forget forever the Telephone Dance.

– Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

– That’s better, isn’t it?

As those waxy digits were withdrawn a wall of silence was thrown up between the forest and the hearth, and the old people gathered at the priest’s hem shivered with a new kind of loneliness. They could not hear the raspberries breaking into domes, they could not smell the numberless pine needles combing out the wind, they could not remember the last moment of a trout as it lived between a flat white pebble on the streaked bed of a stream and the fast shadow of a bear claw. Like children who listen in vain to the sea in plastic sea shells they sat bewildered. Like children at the end of a long bedtime story they were suddenly thirsty.

35

Catherine’s uncle was happy to see le P. Pierron leave in 1670 for a post at the Iroquois mission on the St. Lawrence. Many of his brethren had been converted to the new faith, and many had left the village to live and worship at the new missions. The new priest, le P. Boniface, was not any less effective than his predecessor. He spoke the language. Perceiving how the Indians loved music, he formed a choir of seven-and eight-year-olds. Their pure rough voices drifted through the village like the news of a good meal, and many were lured to the little wooden chapel. In 1673 this village of less than four hundred souls witnessed the salvation of thirty of them. These were adult souls – the number does not include infant souls or moribund souls. Kryn, the chief of the Mohawks, converted and established himself as a preacher at the new mission. Of all the Iroquois, the Mohawks were the most susceptible to the new doctrines, they who had been most ferocious in their original resistance. Le P. Dablon, Superior General of the Missions of Canada, could write in 1673: La foi y a été plus constamment embrassée qu’en aucun autre pays d’Agniers. In 1674 le P. Boniface led a group of neophytes to the mission at Saint-François-Xavier. Shortly after he returned to Kahnawaké he died during a December snowfall. Le P. Jacques de Lamberville replaced him.

36

The cabins of the village were empty. It was spring. It was 1675. Somewhere Spinoza was making sunglasses. In England, Hugh Chamberlen was pulling babies out with a secret instrument, obstetrical forceps, the only man in Europe to deliver women with this revolutionary technique which had been developed by his grandfather. Marquis de Laplace was looking at the sun prior to his assumption that the sun rotated at the very beginning of existence, which he would develop in his book, Exposition du Système du Monde. The fifth reincarnation of Tsong Khapa achieved temporal supremacy: the regency of Tibet was handed to him by Mongolia, with the title Dalai Lama. There were Jesuits in Korea. A group of colonial doctors interested in anatomy but frustrated by the laws against human dissection managed to obtain “the middle-most part of an Indian executed the day before.” Thirty years before the Jews re-entered France. Twenty years before we remark the first outbreak of syphilis in Boston. Frederick William was the Great Elector. Friars of the Order of Minims, according to a regulation of 1668, should not be excommunicated if, “when about to yield to the temptations of the flesh … they prudently laid aside the monastic habit.” Corelli, the forerunner of Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, Couperin, and J. S. Bach, was, in 1675, the third violin in the church orchestra of St. Louis of France, which was in Rome in 1675. Thus the moon of the seventeenth century waned into its last quarter. In the next century 60,000,000 Europeans would die of smallpox. F. often said: Think of the world without Bach. Think of the Hittites without Christ. To discover the truth in anything that is alien, first dispense with the indispensable in your own vision. Thank you, F. Thank you, my lover. When will I be able to see the world without you, my dear? O Death, we are your Court Angels, hospitals are your Church! My friends have died. People I know have died. O Death, why do you make Halloween out of every night? I am scared. If it’s not one thing it’s another: if I’m not constipated I’m scared. O Death, let the firecracker burns heal once more. The trees around F.’s treehouse (where I am writing this), they are dark. I can’t smell the apples. O Death, why do you do so much acting and so little talking? The cocoons are soft and creepy. I am afraid of worms with a butterfly heaven. Is Catherine a flower in the sky? Is F. an orchid? Is Edith a branch of hay? Does Death chase the cobwebs? Has Death anything to do with Pain, or is Pain working on the other side? O F., how I loved this treehouse when you lent it to me and Edith for our honeymoon!

37

The cabins of Kahnawaké were empty. The fields around were filled with workers, men and women with handfuls of kernels. They were planting the corn in the spring of 1675.

– Yuh yuh, went the strains of the Corn-Planting Song.

Catherine’s uncle squeezed his fist over the heap of yellow cradled in his palm. He could feel the powers of the seeds, their longing to be covered with earth and explode. They seemed to force his fingers open. He tipped his hand like a cup and one kernel dropped into a hole.

– Ah, he mused, in such a way did Our Female Ancestress fall from heaven into the waste of primeval waters. Some are of the opinion that various amphibious animals, such as the otter, beaver, and muskrat, noticed her fall, and hastened to break it by shoveling up earth from the mud beneath the waters.

Suddenly he stiffened. In his mind’s heart he felt the sinister presence of le P. Jacques de Lamberville. Yes, he could feel the priest as he walked through the village, more than a mile away. Catherine’s uncle released a Shadow to greet the priest.

Le P. Jacques de Lamberville paused outside Tekakwitha’s cabin. They were all in the fields, he thought, so there’s no point trying even if they let me in this time.

– La ha la ha, came a tinkle of laughter from within.

The priest wheeled around and made toward the door. The Shadow greeted him and they wrestled. The Shadow was naked and easily tripped his heavily robed opponent. The Shadow threw himself on the priest, who was struggling to extricate himself from the coils of his robe. The Shadow in his ferocity managed to entangle himself in the very same robes. The priest quickly perceived his advantage. He lay perfectly still while the Shadow suffocated in the prison of a fortunate pocket. He got up and threw the door open.

– Catherine!

– At last!

– What are you doing inside, Catherine? All of your family is in the field planting corn.

– I stubbed my toe.

– Let me look.

– No. Let it go on hurting.

– What a lovely thing to say, child.

– I’m nineteen. Everyone hates me here, but I don’t mind. My aunts kick me all the time, not that I hold anything against them. I have to carry the shit, well, someone has to do it. But, Father, they want me to fuck – but I have given my fuck away.

– Don’t be an Indian Giver.

– What should I do, Father?

– Let me have a look at that toe.

– Yes!

– I’ll have to take off your moccasin.

– Yes!

– Here?

– Yes!

– What about here?

– Yes!

– Your toes are cold, Catherine. I’ll have to rub them between my palms.

– Yes!

– Now I’ll blow them, you know, as one blows one’s fingers in the winter.

– Yes!

The priest breathed heavily on her tiny brown toes. What a lovely little cushion her big toe had. The bottoms of her five toes looked like the faces of small children sleeping tucked up under a blanket up to their chins. He started to kiss them good night.

– Tosy rosy tosy rosy.

– Yes!

He nibbled at a cushion, which felt like a rubber grape. He was kneeling as Jesus had kneeled before a naked foot. In an orderly fashion, he inserted his tongue between each toe, four thrusts, so smooth the skin between, and white! He gave his attention to each toe, mouthing it, covering it with saliva, evaporating the saliva by blowing, biting it playfully. It was a shame that four toes should always suffer from loneliness. He forced all her tiny toes into his mouth, his tongue going like a windshield wiper. Francis had done the same for lepers.

– Father!

– Libalobaglobawoganummynummy.

– Father!

– Gobblegobblegogglewoggle. Slurp.

– Baptize me!

– Although some find our reluctance excessive we Jesuits do not rush Indian adults along the path to Baptism.

– I have two feet.

– Indians are fickle. We must protect ourselves from the catastrophe of producing more apostates than Christians.

– Wiggle.

– Comme nous nous défions de l’inconstance des Iroquois, j’en ai peu baptisé hors du danger de mort.

The girl slipped her foot into the moccasin and sat on it.

– Baptize me.

– Il n’y a pas grand nombre d’adultes, parce qu’on ne des baptise qu’avec beaucoup de précautions.

Thus the argument progressed in the shadows on the long house. A mile away Uncle sank to his knees, exhausted. There would be no harvest! But he was not thinking of the kernels he had just sown, he was thinking about the life of his people. All the years, all the hunts, all the wars – it would all come to nothing. There would be no harvest! Even his soul when it ripened would not be gathered to the warm southwest, whence blows the wind which brings sunny days and the bursting corn. The world was unfinished! A deep pain seized his chest. The great wrestling match between Ioskeha, the White one, and Tawiscara, the Dark one, the eternal fight would fizzle out like two passionate lovers falling asleep in a tight embrace. There would be no harvest! Each day the village was growing smaller as more of his brethren left for the new missions. He fumbled for a small wolf he had carved of wood. In the autumn past he had placed the whittled nostrils to his own, inhaling the animal’s courage. Then he had breathed out deeply in order to spread the breath of the animal over a wide area in the forest, and so paralyze all the game in the neighborhood. When he had killed his deer that day he cut out the liver and smeared blood on the mouth of the carved wood wolf. And he prayed: Great Deer, First and Perfect Deer, ancestor of the carcass at my feet, we are hungry. Please do not seek vengeance against me for taking the life of one of your children. Uncle collapsed on the cornfield, gasping for breath. The Great Deer was dancing on his chest, crushing his ribs. They carried him back to the cabin. His niece wept when she saw his face. After a while, when they were alone, the old man spoke.

– He came in, the Black Dress?

– Yes, Father Tekakwitha.

– And you want to be baptized?

– Yes, Father Tekakwitha.

– I will allow you to on one condition: that you promise never to leave Kahnawaké.

– I promise.

– There will be no harvest, my daughter. Our heaven is dying. From every hill, a spirit cries out in pain, for it is being forgotten.

– Sleep.

– Bring me my pipe and open the door.

– What are you doing?

– I am blowing the breath of the tobacco at them, at all of them.

It was F.’s theory that White America has been punished by lung cancer for having destroyed the Red Man and stolen his pleasures.

– Try to forgive them, Father Tekakwitha.

– I can’t.

As he blew the smoke weakly at the open door Uncle told himself the story he had heard as a little boy, how Kuloskap had abandoned the world because of the evil in it. He made a great feast to say goodbye, then he paddled off in his great canoe. Now he lives in a splendid long house, making arrows. When the cabin is filled with them he will make war on all mankind.

38

Is All The World A Prayer To Some Star? Are All The Years Of The World A Catalogue Of The Events Of Some Holiday? Do All Things Happen At Once? Is There A Needle In The Haystack? Do We Perform In The Twilight Before A Vast Theater Of Empty Stone Benches? Do We Hold Hands With Our Grandfathers? Are They Warm And Royal, The Rags Of Death? Are All The People Living At This Very Second Fingerprinted? Is Beauty The Pulley? How Are The Dead Received In The Expanding Army? Is It True That There Are No Wallflowers At The Dance? May I Suck Cunts For My Gift? May I Love The Forms Of Girls Instead Of Licking Labels? May I Die A Little At The Uncovering Of Unfamiliar Breasts? May I Raise A Path Of Goosepimples With My Tongue? May I Hug My Friend Instead Of Working? Are Sailors Naturally Religious? May I Squeeze A Golden-Haired Thigh Between My Legs And Feel Blood Flowing And Hear The Holy Tick Of The Fainting Clock? May I See If Someone Is Alive By Gobbling His Come? Could It Be Recorded In The Books Of Some Law That Shit Is Kosher? Is There A Difference In Dreaming Geometry And Bizarre Sex Positions? Is The Epileptic Always Graceful? Is There Such A Thing As Waste? Is It Wonderful To Think About An Eighteen-Year-Old Girl Wearing Tight Jelly Underwear? Does Love Visit Me When I Pump Myself? O God, There Is A Scream, All The Systems Are Screaming. I Am Locked In A Fur Store But I Believe You Want To Steal Me. Does Gabriel Trip A Burglar Alarm? Why Was I Sewn Into Bed With The Nymphomaniac? Am I As Easy To Pluck As A Spear Of Grass? Can I Be Torn Away From The Roulette Wheel? By How Many Billion Cables Is The Zeppelin Secured? O God, I Love So Many Things It Will Need Years To Take Them Away One By One. I Adore Thy Details. Why Have You Let Me See The Bare Ankle Tonight In The Treehouse? Why Did You Vouchsafe Unto Me A Minute Flash Of Desire? May I Unfasten My Loneliness And Collide Once Again With A Beautiful Greedy Body? May I Fall Asleep After A Soft Happy Kiss? May I Have A Dog For A Pet? May I Teach Myself To Be Handsome? May I Pray At All?

39

I remember one night with F. as he drove down the highway to Ottawa where he was to make his Maiden Speech in Parliament the next day. There was no moon. The headlights flowed over the white posts like a perfect liquid eraser, and behind us we abandoned a blank blueprint of vanished roads and fields. He had pushed it up to eighty. The St. Christopher’s medal pinned to the felt above the windshield was involved in a tiny orbit lately initiated by a sharp curve.

– Take it easy, F.

– It’s my night! My night!

– Yes it is, F. You finally made it: you’re a Member of Parliament.

– I’m in the world of men.

– F., put it back. Enough is enough.

– Never put it back when it gets like this.

– My God! I’ve never seen you so big! What’s going on in your mind? What are you thinking of? Please teach me how to do it. Can I hold it?

– No! This is between me and God.

– Let’s stop the car. F., I love you, I love your power. Teach me everything.

– Shut up. There is a tube of sun cream in the glove compartment. Open the glove compartment by depressing the button with your thumb. Dig into the tangle of maps and gloves and string and extract the tube. Screw off the cap and squeeze a couple of inches of cream into my palm.

– Like this, F.?

– Yeah.

– Don’t shut your eyes, F. Do you want me to drive?

Oh, what a greasy tower he there massaged! I might as well have addressed myself to the missing landscape we flung in our wake, farm houses and oil signs bouncing like sparks off our fenders as we cut open the painted white line at ninety, fast as an acetylene saw. His right hand beneath the steering wheel, urging, urging, he seemed to be pulling himself into the far black harbor like a reflexive stevedore. What beautiful hair poked out of his underwear. His cufflink gleamed in the maplight, which I had switched on the better to witness the delicious operation. As his cupped hand bobbed faster the needle tickled ninety-eight. How I was torn between the fear for my safety and the hunger to jam my head between his knees and the dashboard! Whish! went an orchard. A Main Street flared up in our headlights – we left it in cinders. I longed for the little wrinkles of his tightening scrotum to trap the tatters of my lips. F.’s eyes closed suddenly as if they had been squirted with lemon. His fist closed hard around the pale slippery shaft and he commenced to throttle himself madly. I feared for the organ, feared and coveted it, so hard it gleamed, streamlined as a Brancusi, the swelled head red and hot as a radioactive fireman’s helmet. I wanted an anteater’s tongue to whip off the wet pearl which F. himself now noticed and with a happy violent motion incorporated into the general lubrication. I could bear my loneliness no longer. I ripped the buttons of my old-fashioned European trousers in my frenzy to touch myself as a lover. What a handful of blood I was. Zoom! A parking lot blazed and expired. The warmth spread through leather gloves which I had not time to remove. Kamikaze insects splashed against the glass. My life was in my hands, all the messages I longed to deliver to the Zodiac gathered to begin their journey and I moaned with the intolerable pressure of pleasure. F. was screaming gibberish, his spit flying in all directions.

– Face me, face me, face me, suck bright, suck bright, F. wailed (if I remember the sounds correctly).

Thus we existed in some eye for a second: two men in a hurtling steel shell aimed at Ottawa, blinded by a mechanical mounting ecstasy, the old Indian land sunk in soot behind us, two swelling pricks pointing at eternity, two naked capsules filled with lonely tear gas to stop the riot in our brains, two fierce cocks separate as the gargoyles on different corners of a tower, two sacrificial lollipops (orange in the map light) offered to the ruptured highway.

– Ay ay ay ay ay! cried F. from the very top of his ladder.

– Slof tlif, sounded the geysers of his semen as they hit the dashboard (surely the sound of upstream salmon smashing their skulls on underwater cliffs).

As for me, I knew that one more stroke would deliver me – I hovered on the edge of my orgasm like a parachutist in the whistling doorway – I was suddenly forlorn – I was suddenly without desire – I was suddenly more awake (for this fraction of a second) than ever before in my whole life –

– The wall!

The wall occupied the whole windshield, first as a blur, then focused precisely as if an expert had adjusted the microscope – every pimple of the concrete three-dimensional – bright! precise! – fast film of the moon’s hide – then the windshield blurred again as the wall rushed into the glass of the headlights – I saw F.’s cufflink skimming the edge of the steering wheel like a surfboard –

– Darling! Ehhhffff….

– Rrrrriiiiippppp, went the wall.

We passed through the wall because the wall was made of a scrim of painted silk. The car bumped over an empty field, the torn fabric clinging to the chrome Mercedes hood emblem. The undamaged headlights illumined a boarded-up hot-dog stand as F. applied the brake. On the wood counter I noticed an empty bottle with a perforated cap. I stared blankly at it.

– Did you come? asked F.

My prick hung out of my fly like a stray thread.

– Too bad, said F.

I started to shiver.

– You missed a great come.

I placed my clenched fists on the top of the dashboard and laid my forehead on them, weeping in spasms.

– We went to a lot of trouble rigging the thing up, renting the parking lot and all.

I jerked my face toward him.

– We? What do you mean “we”?

– Edith and I.

– Edith was in on it?

– How about that second just before you were about to shoot? Did you sense the emptiness? Did you get the freedom?

– Edith knows about our filthy activities?

– You should have kept on with it, my friend. You weren’t driving. There was nothing you could do. The wall was on top of you. You missed a great come.

– Edith knows we’re fairies?

I threw my hands at his neck with a murderous intention. F. smiled. How thin and puny my wrists looked in the dim orange light. F. removed my fingers like a necklace.

– Easy. Easy. Dry your eyes.

– F., why do you torture me?

– O my friend, you are so lonely. Each day you get lonelier. What will happen when we are gone?

– None of your fucking business! How dare you presume to teach me anything? You’re a fake. You’re a menace! You’re a disgrace to Canada! You’ve ruined my life!

– All these things may be true.

– You filthy bastard! How dare you admit they’re true?

He leaned forward to switch on the ignition and looked at my lap.

– Button up. It’s a long cold drive to Parliament.

40

I have been writing these true happenings for some time now. Am I any closer to Kateri Tekakwitha? The sky is very foreign. I do not think I will ever tarry with the stars. I do not think I will ever have a garland. I do not think ghosts will whisper erotic messages in my warm hair. I will never find a graceful way to carry a brown lunch bag on a bus ride. I’ll go to funerals and they won’t remind me of anything. It was years and years ago that F. said: Each day you get lonelier. That was years and years ago. What did F. mean by advising me to go down on a saint? What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love. It makes me think that the numbers in the bag actually correspond to the numbers on the raffles we have bought so dearly, and so the prize is not an illusion. But why fuck one? I remember once slobbering over Edith’s thigh. I sucked, I kissed the long brown thing, and it was Thigh, Thigh, Thigh – Thigh softening and spreading as it flowed in a perfume of bacon to the mound of Cunt – Thigh sharpening and hardening as I followed the direction of its tiny hairs and bounced into Kneecap. I don’t know what Edith did (maybe one of her magnificent lubrication squirts) or what I did (maybe one of my mysterious sprays of salivation) but all at once my face was wet and my mouth slid on skin; it wasn’t Thigh or Cunt or any chalk schoolboy slogan (nor was I Fucking): it was just a shape of Edith: then it was just a humanoid shape: then it was just a shape – and for a blessed second truly I was not alone, I was part of a family. That was the first time we made love. It never happened again. Is that what you will cause me to feel, Catherine Tekakwitha? But aren’t you dead? How do I get close to a dead saint? The pursuit seems like such nonsense. I’m not happy here in F.’s old treehouse. It’s long past the end of summer. My brain is ruined. My career is in tatters. O F., is this the training you planned for me?

41

Catherine Tekakwitha was baptized on the eighteenth of April (the Month of Bright Leaves) in the year 1676.

Please come back to me, Edith. Kiss me, darling. I love you, Edith. Come back to life. I can’t be alone any more. I think I have wrinkles and bad breath. Edith!

42

A few days after her baptism Catherine Tekakwitha was invited to a great feast in Québec. Present were the Marquis de Tracy, the intendant Talon, the Governor M. de Courcelle, the Mohawk Chief Kryn, who was one of the fiercest converts Christianity has ever commanded, and many handsome ladies and gentlemen. Perfume rose out of their hair. They were elegant in the manner only citizens two thousand miles from Paris can be. Wit flourished in every conversation. Butter was not passed without an aphorism. They discussed the activities of the French Academy of Sciences, which was only ten years old. Some of the guests had spring pocket watches, a new timepiece invention which was sweeping Europe. Someone explained another recently developed device used to regulate clocks, the pendulum. Catherine Tekakwitha listened quietly to everything that was said. With a bowed head she received the compliments which the quillwork on her deerskin gown evoked. The long white table shone with the pride of silver and crystal and early spring flowers, and for a minor second her eyes swam in the splendor of the occasion. Handsome servants poured wine into glasses that resembled long-stem roses. A hundred candle flames echoed and re-echoed in a hundred pieces of silver cutlery as the fragrant guests worked over their slabs of meat, and for a minor second the flashing multiple suns hurt her eyes, burned away her appetite. With a tiny abrupt movement which she did not command, she knocked over her glass of wine. She stared at the whale-shaped stain, frozen with shame.

– It is nothing, said the Marquis. It is nothing, child.

Catherine Tekakwitha sat motionless. The Marquis returned to his conversation. It concerned a new military invention which was being developed in France, the bayonet. The stain spread quickly.

– Even the tablecloth is thirsty for this good wine, joked the Marquis. Don’t be frightened, child. There are no punishments for spilling a glass of wine.

Despite the suave activity of several servants the stain continued to discolor larger and larger areas of the tablecloth. Conversation dwindled as the diners directed their attention to its remarkable progress. It now claimed the entire tablecloth. Talk ceased altogether as a silver vase turned purple and the pink flowers it contained succumbed to the same influence. A beautiful lady gave out a cry of pain as her fine hand turned purple. A total chromatic metamorphosis took place in a matter of minutes. Wails and oaths resounded through the purple hall as faces, clothes, tapestries, and furniture displayed the same deep shade. Beyond the high windows there were islands of snow glinting in the moonlight. The entire company, servants and masters, had directed its gaze outside, as if to find beyond the contaminated hall some reassurance of a multicolored universe. Before their eyes these drifts of spring snow darkened into shades of spilled wine, and the moon itself absorbed the imperial hue. Catherine stood up slowly.

– I guess I owe you all an apology.

43

It is my impression that the above is apocalyptic. The word apocalyptic has interesting origins. It comes from the Greek apokalupsis, which means revelation. This derives from the Greek apokaluptein, meaning uncover or disclose. Apo is a Greek prefix meaning from, derived from. Kaluptein means to cover. This is cognate with kalube which is cabin, and kalumma which means woman’s veil. Therefore apocalyptic describes that which is revealed when the woman’s veil is lifted. What have I done, what have I not done, to lift your veil, to get under your blanket, Kateri Tekakwitha? I find no mention of this feast in any of the standard biographers. The two principal sources of her life are the Jesuit Fathers Pierre Cholenec and Claude Chauchetière. Both were her confessors at the mission Sault Saint-Louis to which Catherine Tekakwitha came in the autumn of 1677 (breaking her promise to Uncle). Of P. Cholenec we have Vie de Catherine Tegakouita, Première Vierge Irokoise, in manuscript. Another Vie, written in Latin, was sent to P. Général de la Compagnie de Jésus in 1715. Of P. Chauchetière we have La Vie de la B. Catherine Tekakouita, dite à présent la Saincte Sauvegesse, written in 1695, the manuscript of which is at present preserved in the archives of Collège Sainte-Marie. In those archives rests another important document written by Remy (Abbé, P.S.S.), entitled Certificat de M. Remy, curé de la Chine, des miracles faits en sa paroisse par l’intercession de la B. Cath. Tekakwita, written in 1696. I love the Jesuits because they saw miracles. Homage to the Jesuit who has done so much to conquer the frontier between the natural and the supernatural. Under countless disguises, now as a Cabinet Minister, now as a Christian priest, now as a soldier, a Brahmin, an astrologer, now as the Confessor to a monarch, now as a math-ematician, now as a Mandarin – by a thousand arts, luring, persuading, compelling men to acknowledge, under the weight of recorded miracles, that the earth is a province of Eternity. Homage to Ignatius Loyola, struck down by a French Protestant bullet in the breach of Pampeluna, for in his sick room, in the cave of Manresa, this proud soldier saw the Mysteries of heaven, and these visions brought forth the mighty Society of Jesus. This Society has made bold to assert that the marble face of Caesar is only a mask of God, and in the imperial appetite for worldly power the Jesuit has understood the divine thirst for souls. Homage to my teachers in the orphanage of downtown Montréal who smelled of semen and incense. Homage to the priests of crutch-filled rooms who have penetrated an illusion, who know that lameness is only an aspect of perfection, just as weeds are flowers which no one collects. Homage to the walls of crutches which are weed museums. Homage to the alchemical stench of burning wax which bespeaks an intimacy with ghouls. Homage to the vaulted halls where we knelt face to face with the shit-enhaloed Accuser of the World. Homage to those who prepared me for the freezing vigil tonight, the only material sardine in a can of ghosts. Homage to those old torturers who did not doubt the souls of their victims, and, like the Indians, allowed the power of the Enemy to nourish the strength of the community. Homage to those who believed in the Adversary and could therefore flourish in the manly style of the warrior. Homage to desks in our old classroom, that little brave armada which, year after year, attempts the Flood with a green crew. Homage to our soiled books which were municipal gifts, especially the Catechism which invited marginal obscenity and contributed to the maintenance of the lavatory as a thrilling temple of the Profane. Homage to the great slabs of marble with which the cubicles were constructed, to which no smear of shit could ever adhere. Here was enshrined the anti-Lutheran possibility of matter which succumbed easily to washing. Homage to marble in the Halls of Excrement, Maginot Line against the invasion of Papal Fallibility. Homage to the parables of the orphans’ lavatory, the yellow failure of the porcelain proving a single drop of water was as powerful as the Ice Age. Oh somewhere, let something remember us strong orphans lined up in single file to use one cake of soap for our finger warts on sixty hands in order to appease Inspection. Homage to the brave boy who bit off his warts who was my friend F. Homage to the one who couldn’t sink his teeth into himself who was the coward me, who was the author of this history, and who is frightened at this moment in his booth above the drifts of Canada, whose digit wart has been distorted by years of pencil erosion. May I get warm with homage? I have offended everyone, and I see that I am frozen by everyone’s automatic magic.

– F.! Don’t eat your warts!

– I will eat my warts in front of the whole world. You better too.

– I’m waiting for mine to clear up.

– What?

– Waiting for them to clear up.

– Clear up?

F. struck his forehead and ran from cubicle to cubicle like a man waking up a village, opening each door and addressing each squatting machine.

– Come out, come out, F. shouted. He’s waiting for them to clear up. Come and see the poor fish who’s waiting for them to clear up.

Stumbling over their lowered ankle-chain trousers my classmates poured out of the cubicles, shuffling awkwardly in the rubberless loci of their underwear. Out they rushed, some in the midst of masturbation, comics sliding from their kneecaps, romantic information scratched in the varnished door half-read. They closed around us in a circle, pressing in to see F.’s freak. F. swung my hand into the air like a boxing gesture, and I dangled beneath his grip, my whole body withering like a sheaf of tobacco to be auctioned off by the Liggett and Myers midget bellboy.

– Don’t humiliate me, F., I pleaded.

– Step right up, folks. Look at the man who can wait. Look at the man who has a thousand years on his hands.

They shook their clustered faces in disbelief.

– I wouldn’t have missed this for anything, one of them said.

– Ha ha ha.

F. flung down my hand without letting go and I fell in a heap at his feet. He placed his Charity Shoe heel on my thumb with just enough pressure to make me give up any notion of escape.

– Under my foot is the hand that will merely wave goodbye to a number of warts.

– Ho ho.

– That’s rich.

O Reader, do you know that a man is writing this? A man like you who longed for a hero’s heart. In arctic isolation a man is writing this, a man who hates his memory and remembers everything, who was once as proud as you, who loved society as only an orphan can, who loved it as a spy in the milk and honey. A man like you writes this most daring passage, who dreamed like you of leader ship and gratitude. No no please, not the cramps, not the cramps. Take away the cramps and I promise never to interrupt, I swear, O you Gods and Goddesses of the Pure Event.

– Ho ho.

– Priceless.

Early morning as this takes place. There wasn’t much sun behind the barred opaque windows of the lavatory but we weren’t allowed to use the lights in the morning except during winter. Dirty aquarium light in which things supposed to sparkle only gleam like a half-dollar hidden in a small jar of petroleum jelly. Each white sink, every spike on the walls between the cubicles (so you couldn’t climb) had its jar of Vaseline. Shiniest of all were the bare kneecaps of my scornful audience, whitest of all were the slum-white shins of the older pituitary boys who were beginning to hair. With an intake of breath F. hushed their derision. I tried to catch his eye so I could beg him. I lay waiting for punishment on the Vaseline-colored marble tiles. He began his harangue in an objective tone, but I knew what was to follow.

– Some believe that the wart will clear up. Some are of the opinion that the wart will vanish with time. Some are reluctant to consider the wart at all. There are even those who deny the existence of warts. There are those who claim that the wart is beautiful and encourage it wherever it occurs. Some argue that warts are useful, are susceptible to education, and can learn to speak. Experts have arisen on this question. Theories developed concerning techniques. At first the methods were brutal. A school arose around the idea that the wart should not be coerced. A radical wing believes that the wart can master only languages of the Sinotic group. A lunatic fringe holds it error to force any human language on the wart since there is a unique wart tongue which the instructors themselves must first comprehend. A very few certifiable individuals insist that the wart is already voluble, has been so forever, and we have only to learn the way to listen.

– Get to the point, F.

– So what?

– How long before the torture?

Having bored them with great daring, F. now launched the dramatic phase of the credo. He drove down on his heel to get a shriek from me. Suddenly it was used Vaseline, and the light was like the holes in dead floating minnows, and one had a sensation that all the toilets were blocked and the teachers would have to come now and learn too much about us.

– I do not believe that the wart will “clear up.” To me the wart is ugly. I’m a simple man. There’s enough talking as it is, far as I see. To me a wart is a secret I don’t want to keep. When I see wart I think scalpel.

– Ahhh!

As he said his last word he had shot his hand out in a salute. The salute ended in a penknife, just as a bayonet illumines unmistakenly the use of a rifle. The orphans gasped.

– When I see wart I think Speedy Removal. I think Before and After. I think Miracle Drugs. I think In Just Ten Days.

– Go. Go.

– I think Yours For Only. I think Try This SCIENTIFIC HOME Method. I think RUSH ME MY FREE. Grab him, men!

They swarmed over me and pulled me to my feet. My arm was seized and stretched out straight. They lined up along my arm like sailors hauling a rope. Their backs were in the way and I could not see my hand. Someone flattened my palm against the porcelain and spread my fingers.

– Yes, F. cried above the clamor, I think Act Now. I think Don’t Delay. I think This Offer Expires.

– Help!

– Stuff his mouth.

– Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmm.

– Now! Slice! R-i-i-i-p!

I tried to imagine that I was just one of those backs tugging at the arm, just one of the sailors, and that a long way off they were carving butter.

44

The story of Catherine Tekakwitha’s feast is apocalyptic, as I started to say. In fact, it was my wife Edith who told me the story. I remember the evening perfectly. I had just returned from a weekend in Ottawa, where F. had arranged for me to have access to the Archives. The three of us were using the sunlamp in our basement apartment. F. said that I was the only one who could lie naked because both he and Edith had already seen my prick, but they had not seen each other’s parts (a lie). F.’s logic was infallible but still I felt queer about taking down my pants in front of them, and it was true I would never have let Edith get nude or let F. strut around.

– But I’d rather not, I said weakly.

– Nonsense, darling.

– At least one of us should get a proper tan.

They stared at me as I rolled them down over my knees, worried that I had wiped myself imperfectly maybe and there was tell-tale. Truth was, I felt that F. was using me like an advertisement for his own body. I was the tattered billboard for his reality. His expression seemed to say to Edith: If a thing like that can breathe and get up every morning, think of the fuck you can get off of me.

– Lie between us.

– Uncross your legs.

– Take your hands away.

And when Edith rubbed on the Sun and Ski I didn’t know whether to get an erection. On Sunday nights, such as this was, Edith and F. used to inject themselves with a little heroin, which is harmless and safer than alcohol. I was still of the old school in those days and considered it a killer drug, so I always passed up their offers to include me. That night it struck me that they were extremely ritualistic while preparing the hypodermic syringe and “toasting” the “horse.”

– Why are you both so solemn?

– Oh, nothing.

Edith rushed over to me and hugged tight, and then F. joined her, and I felt like some Maidenform dream in an airport for Kamikaze pilots saying farewell.

– Get off! You don’t have to suck up to me. I won’t squeal.

– Goodbye, my darling.

– Goodbye, old friend.

– Oh, get on with it, both of you. Go on, you degenerates, fly off to your crutch-supported Paradise.

– Goodbye, Edith said sadly once more, and I should have known that this was not an ordinary Sunday night.

They rustled among their veins for one that still carried blood, tapped the needles under the flesh, waited for the red signal of a “hit,” and then squirted the solution into circulation. Withdrawing the needles abruptly, they fell back onto the couch. After minutes of stupor Edith said:

– Darling?

– What is it?

– Don’t answer so quickly.

– Yes, F. added. Do us a favor.

– I can’t watch this, my wife and my friend.

Angrily I stalked into the bedroom, slamming the door. I suppose they saw my buttocks in a blur as I left. One of the reasons I had left was because watching them use the needles always gives me a hard-on and, since I had chosen not to get one when the Sun and Ski was rubbed, I considered that getting one now would put me in an abnormal light. Secondly I wanted to sneak in Edith’s drawers which I did every Sunday night while they were senseless in their narcotic world, and this illegal inspection, because of many failures which this chronicle has made clear, had become my chief amusement. But this was not your usual Sunday night. I loved her cosmetic drawer best of all, because it was bright and fragrant, and little bottles fell over when you pulled it out, and a solitary white-root woman’s whisker might still adhere to the tweezers, or her thumbprint on an oily pancake cap – it was strange, but with this evidence I somehow got closer to her beauty, just as a thousand pilgrims cherish a relic, a formaldehyde organ of a saint few of them would have acclaimed in the flesh. I pulled the drawer knob, anticipating the lovely tinkle, when! There was nothing in the drawer but smashed glass, two cheap-looking rosaries, several ampules of colorless liquid, and some scraps of paper. The wooden bottom of the drawer was wet. Carefully I extracted one of the scraps of paper which turned out to be a coupon.

But Edith’s legs were beautiful! And here was another:

THIN LEGS

Add Shapely Curves at Angles, Calves, Knees, Thighs, Hipsl

Skinny legs rob the rest of your figure of attractiveness. Now at last you too can help yourself improve underdeveloped legs, due to normal causes, and fill out any part of the leg you wish, or your legs all over as many women have by following this new scientific method. Well-known authority on legs with years of experience offers you this tested and proven scientific course—only 15 minutes a day—in the privacy of your homel Contains step-by-step illustrations of the easy SCIENTIFIC LEG technique with simple instructions: gaining shapely, stronger legs, improving skin color and circulation of legs.

Limited Time FREE OFFERI

For your free book on the Home Method of Developing Skinny Legs mailed in plain wrapper, without obligation, just send name and address.

SCIENTIFIC METHODS Dept SL-418

134 E. 92nd St., New York City 28

What was going on here? What could Edith want with these pathetic invitations? What went on at 134 East 92nd Street? Was it an amputated-leg pool? In a corner of the drawer, half-soaked, was the beginning of the explanation. I can still see it. I can still reproduce it in my brain, word for word.

The paper in my fist, I ran from the bedroom. Edith and F. were asleep on the couch, respectably apart. On the coffee table were strewn the gruesome appliances of their habit, the needles, the eyedroppers, the belt, and – a dozen empty Perpetual Lourdes Water Ampules. I shook them both by their clothes.

– How long has this been going on?

I visited each of them with a close-up of the ad.

– How long have you been putting this into your bodies?

– Tell him, Edith, F. whispered.

– This is the first time we’ve used it.

– Tell him everything, Edith.

– Yes, I demand to know everything.

– We made a mixture.

– We mixed two different types of water.

– I’m listening.

– Well, some of the water was from the Lourdes Ampules and some of it was from –

– Yes?

– Tell him, Edith.

– Was from Tekakwitha’s Spring.

– So you’re not drug addicts any more?

– Is that all you want to ask? F. said wearily.

– Leave him alone, F. Come sit between us.

– I don’t like sitting between you naked.

– We won’t look.

– All right.

I checked their eyes with a match, I threw punches that didn’t land, and when I was sure they weren’t peeking I sat down.

– Well, what does it do?

– We don’t know.

– Tell him the truth, Edith.

– We do know.

And, as if she were about to begin an explanation with an anecdote, Edith fumbled for my hand and told me the story of Catherine Tekakwitha’s Feast long ago in Québec. F. took my other hand as she spoke. I think they were both weeping, for there was mucus in her voice, and F. seemed to tremble like someone falling off to sleep. That night in the bedroom Edith did whatever I wanted. I used not one radio command for her busy mouth. A week later she was under the elevator, a “suicide.”

45

I’m freezing to death in this damn treehouse. I thought Nature would be better than my little semen basement kitchen. I thought the noise of bird would be more sweet than the noise of elevator. Experts with tape recorders say that what we hear as a single bird note is really ten or twelve tones with which the animal weaves many various beautiful liquid harmonies. This he proves by slowing down his tape. I demand National Health! I demand an operation! I want a slow transistor machine sewn in my head. Otherwise let Science keep its insights out of the newspapers. The Canadian summer passed like a Halloween mask, now the cold countryside day after day. Is this all the candies we get? Where is the science-fiction world of tomorrow they promised us today? I demand a change of climate. What bravado impelled me to come here without my radio? Three months without my radio, humming the obsolete Top Ten, my Top Ten removed so abruptly from history, cut off from the dynamic changes of jukebox stock market, my poor Top Ten that no thirteen-year-olds energize by slippery necking on the carpet beside the hi-fi, my over-serious Top Ten goose-stepping through my head like the generals of a junta who do not know the coup d’état has been staged the very night of the formal ball, my dear old Top Ten like a battalion of gold-sleeved tramway conductors patiently steering for seniority and retirement while the subway has been decreed in a board room and all the streetcars are in museums, my awkward Top Ten of electric echoes and longing puberty voices crying down my heart like a squad of bare-thighed cheer-leaderettes turning cartwheels before the empty benches, their delicate bra-straps bunching the skin ever so sweetly, their shiny fluorescent underwear flashing out of little upside-down pleated skirts as they pivot on their friendship fingers, their school-spirit satin-clad gym-trained firm little rah-rah bums describing unutterably lovely and brief rainbow-shaped streaks of mauve and orange, the round metal mouthpieces of their megaphones warm with Alma Maters and smelling of white lipstick, and for whom these moist Technicolor acrobatics? for whom these inflammatory arcs of unskirted exhibition panties gleaming through the cheers like so many expertly peeled fresh figs, yes, a million seedy secrets in each sealed purse, wheeling down the damp sidelines into the stumpy mouth of time? for whom do you sail, little bums of the Top Ten? The Leader of the Pack lies mangled under his Honda in a wreck of job prospects, the ghostly Negro fullback floats down the wintry gridiron into Law School prizes, and the lucky football you autographed takes pictures of the moon. Oh, my poor Top Ten, longing to perish in popularity, I have forgotten my radio, so you languish with the other zombies in my memory, you whose only honor is hara-kiri with the blunt edge of returned identification bracelets, my weary Top Ten hoping to be forgotten like escaped balloons and kites, like theater stubs, like dry ball pens, like old batteries, like coiled sardine keys, like bent aluminum partitioned eaten TV dinner plates – I hoard you like the stuff of my chronic disease, I sentence you to National Anthem hard labor, I deny you martyrdom in tomorrow’s Hit Parade, I turn you into boomerangs, my little Kamikazes, you long to be the Lost Tribes but I burn arm numbers, I pour miracle drugs in the Death House, from bridges I hang suicide nets. Saints and friends, help me out of History and Constipation. Make the birds sing slower, make me listen faster. Remove yourself from this treehouse, Pain, you tree-climbing frog, large as industry.

46

– I am sick, but I am not too sick, said Catherine Tekakwitha’s uncle.

– Let me baptize you, said the Black-Robe.

– Do not let any of your water fall on me. I have seen many die after you have touched them with your water.

– They are in Heaven now.

– Heaven is a good place for Frenchmen, but I wish to be among Indians; for the French will give me nothing to eat when I get there, and the French women will not lie with us under the shadowy firs.

– We are all of the same Father.

– Ah, Black-Robe, were we of one Father we should know how to make knives and coats as well as you.

– Listen, old man, in the hollow of my hand I hold a mystic drop which can snatch you from an eternity of woe.

– Do they hunt in Heaven, or make war, or go to feasts?

– Oh, no!

– Then I will not go. It is not good to be lazy.

– Infernal fire and torturing demons await you.

– Why did you baptize our enemy the Huron? He will get to Heaven before us and drive us out when we come.

– There is room for all in Heaven.

– If there is so much room, Black-Robe, why do you guard the entrance so jealously?

– There is little time left. You will surely go to Hell.

– There is much time, Black-Robe. If you and I should talk until the weasel befriends the rabbit, we would not break the rope of days.

– Your eloquence is diabolic. Fire waits for you, old man.

– Yes, Black-Robe, a small shadowy fire, about which sit the shades of my relatives and ancestors.

When the Jesuit left him he called for Catherine Tekakwitha.

– Sit beside me.

– Yes, Uncle.

– Remove the blanket which covers me.

– Yes, Uncle.

– Look at this body. This is an old Mohawk body. Look closely.

– I am looking, Uncle.

– Do not weep, Kateri. We do not see well through tears, and although that which we see through tears is bright it is also bent.

– I will look at you without tears, Uncle.

– Remove all my garments and look at me closely.

– Yes, Uncle.

– Look for a long time. Look closely. Look and look.

– I will do as you say, Uncle.

– There is much time.

– Yes, Uncle.

– Your Aunts are spying through the spaces between the bark but do not distract yourself. Look and look.

– Yes, Uncle.

– What do you see, Kateri?

– I see an old Mohawk body.

– Look and look and I will tell you what will happen when the spirit begins to leave my body.

– I cannot listen, Uncle. I am a Christian now. Oh, do not hurt my hand.

– Listen and look. What I tell you cannot offend any god, yours or mine, the Mother of the Beard or the Great Hare.

– I will listen.

– When the wind is no longer in my nostrils my spirit body will begin a long journey homeward. Look at this wrinkled, scarred body as I speak to you. My beautiful spirit body will begin a hard, dangerous journey. Many do not complete this journey, but I will. I will cross a treacherous river standing on a log. Wild rapids will try to throw me against sharp rocks. A huge dog will bite my heels. Then I will follow a narrow path between dancing boulders which crash together, and many will be crushed, but I will dance with the boulders. Look at this old Mohawk body as I speak to you, Catherine. Beside the path there is a bark hut. In the hut lives Oscotarach, the Head-Piercer. I will stand beneath him and he will remove the brain from my skull. This he does to all the skulls which pass by. It is the necessary preparation for the Eternal Hunt. Look at this body and listen.

– Yes, Uncle.

– What do you see?

– An old Mohawk body.

– Good. Cover me now. Do not weep. I will not die now. I will dream my cure.

– Oh, Uncle, I am so happy.

As soon as smiling Catherine Tekakwitha left the long house her cruel Aunts fell on her with fists and curses. She fell beneath their blows. “Ce fut en cette occasion,” writes P. Cholenec, “qu’elle déclara ce qu’on aurait peut-être ignoré, si elle n’avait pas été mise à cette épreuve, que, par la miséricorde du Seigneur, elle ne se souvenait pas d’avoir jamais terni la pureté de son corps, et qu’elle n’appréhendait point de recevoir aucun reproche sur cet article au jour du jugement.”

– You fucked your Uncle! they cried.

– You uncovered his nakedness!

– You peeked at his tool!

They dragged her to the priest, le P. de Lamberville.

– Here’s a little Christian for you. Fucked her Uncle! The priest sent away the howling savages and examined the young girl stretched bleeding on the ground before him. When he was satisfied he drew her up.

– You live here like a flower among poison thorns.

– Thank you, my father.

47

Long ago (it seems) I awakened in my bed with F. pulling my hairs.

– Come with me, my friend.

– What time is it, F.?

– It is the summer of 1964.

He wore a curious smile on his face which I had not seen before. I cannot explain it, but it made me shy, and I crossed my legs.

– Get up. We’re going for a walk.

– Turn around while I get dressed.

– No.

– Please.

He pulled the sheet from my body, still heavy with sleep and the dreams of a lost wife. He shook his head slowly.

– Why didn’t you listen to Charles Axis?

– Please, F.

– Why didn’t you listen to Charles Axis?

I squeezed my thighs tighter and laid the nightcap across my pubic hair. F. stared at me relentlessly.

– Confess. Why didn’t you listen to Charles Axis? Why didn’t you send away the coupon on that distant afternoon in the orphanage?

– Leave me alone.

– Just look at your body.

– Edith had no complaints about my body.

– Ha!

– Did she ever say anything to you about my body?

– Plenty.

– Such as?

– She said you have an arrogant body.

– What the hell is that supposed to mean?

– Confess, my friend. Confess about Charles Axis. Confess your sin of pride.

– I have nothing to confess. Now turn around and I’ll get dressed. It’s too early for your cheap koans.

With a lightning flash he twisted my arm in a half-nelson, twisted me off the nostalgic bed, and forced me to confront the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Miraculously the nightcap had adhered to the wiry growth of my pubic hair. I shut my eyes.

– Ouch!

– Look. Look and confess. Confess why you ignored Charles Axis.

– No.

He tightened his expert grip.

– Oh, oh, oh, please! Help!

– The truth! You disdained the coupon because of the sin of pride, didn’t you. Charles Axis wasn’t enough for you. In your greedy brain you cherished an unspeakable desire. You wanted to be Blue Beetle. You wanted to be Captain Marvel. You wanted to be Plastic Man. Robin wasn’t even good enough for you, you wanted to be Batman.

– You’re breaking my back!

– You wanted to be the Superman who was never Clark Kent. You wanted to live at the front of the comic. You wanted to be Ibis the Invincible who never lost his Ibistick. You wanted SOCK! POW! SLAM! UGG! OOF! YULP! written in the air between you and all the world. To become a New Man in just fifteen minutes a day meant absolutely nothing to you. Confess!

– The pain! The pain! Yes, yes, I confess. I wanted miracles! I didn’t want to climb to success on a ladder of coupons! I wanted to wake up suddenly with X-ray Vision! I confess!

– Good.

He turned the half-nelson into an embrace and drew me to him. My fingers were very skillful there in the porcelain gloom of my prison bathroom. As I undid the top clasp of his beltless Slim Jim slacks, I flicked away the nightcap. It fell between my toes and his shoes like an autumn figleaf in a utopia of nudists. The curious smile hadn’t left his luscious mouth.

– Ah, my friend, I have waited a long time for that confession.

Arm in arm, we walked through the narrow harbor streets of Montréal. We watched great showers of wheat fall into the holds of Chinese cargo boats. We saw the geometry of the gulls as they drifted in perfect circles over center points of garbage. We watched great liners shrink as they hooted down the widening St. Lawrence, shrink into shining birch-bark canoes, then into whitecaps, then into the mauve haze of distant hills.

– Why do you smile like that all the time? Doesn’t your face get sore?

– I’m smiling because I think I’ve taught you enough.

Arm in arm, we climbed the streets that led to the mountain, Mont Royal, which gives its name to our city. Never before had the shops of Ste. Catherine Street bloomed so brightly, or the noon crowds thronged so gaily. I seemed to see it for the first time, the colors wild as those first splashes of paint on the white skin of the reindeer.

– Let’s buy steamed hot dogs in Woolworth’s.

– Let’s eat them with our arms crossed, taking risks with mustard.

We walked along Sherbrooke Street, west, toward the English section of the city. We felt the tension immediately. At the corner of Parc Lafontaine Park we heard the shouted slogans of a demonstration.

– Québec Libre!

– Québec Oui, Ottawa Non!

– Merde à la reine d’angleterre!

– Elizabeth Go Home!

The newspapers had just announced the intention of Queen Elizabeth to visit Canada, a state visit planned for October.

– This is an ugly crowd, F. Let’s walk faster.

– No, it is a beautiful crowd.

– Why?

– Because they think they are Negroes, and that is the best feeling a man can have in this century.

Arm in arm, F. pulled me to the scene of commotion. Many of the demonstrators wore sweatshirts inscribed with QUEBEC LIBRE. I noticed that everyone had a hard-on, including the women. From the base of a monument, a well-known young film maker addressed the cheering assembly. He wore the scholarly thin beard and violent leather jacket so commonly seen in the corridors of L’Office National du Film. His voice rang out clearly. F.’s judo pressure cautioned me to listen carefully.

– History! the young man called over our heads. What have we to do with History?

The question inflamed them.

– History! they shouted. Give us back our History! The English have stolen our History!

F. pressed deeper into the mass of bodies. They received us automatically, like quicksand swallowing up the laboratory monster. The echoes of the young man’s clear voice hung above us like skywriting.

– History! he continued. History decreed that in the battle for a continent the Indian should lose to the Frenchman. In 1760 History decreed that the Frenchman should lose to the Englishman!

– Booo! Hang the English!

I felt a pleasant sensation at the base of my spine and jiggled ever so slightly against the thin nylon dress of a fanatic, who cheered behind me.

– In 1964 History decrees, no, History commands that the English surrender this land, which they have loved so imperfectly, surrender it to the Frenchman, surrender it to us!

– Bravo! Mon pays malheureux! Québec Libre!

I felt a hand slip down the back of my baggy trousers, a female hand because it had long fingernails smooth and tapered as a fuselage.

– Fuck the English! I shouted unexpectedly.

– That’s it, F. whispered.

– History decrees that there are Losers and Winners. History cares nothing for cases, History cares only whose Turn it is. I ask you, my friends, I ask you a simple question: whose Turn is it today?

– Our Turn! rose in one deafening answer.

The crowd, of which I was now a joyful particle, pressed even closer about the monument, as if we were a nut on a screw to which the whole city we longed to possess wound us tighter and tighter like a wrench. I loosed my belt to let her hand go deeper. I did not dare turn around to face her. I did not want to know who she was – that seemed to me the highest irrelevance. I could feel her nylon-sheathed breasts squash against my back, making damp sweat circles on my shirt.

– Yesterday it was the Turn of the Anglo-Scottish banker to leave his name on the hills of Montréal. Today it is the Turn of the Québec Nationalist to leave his name on the passport of a new Laurentian Republic!

– Vive la République!

This was too much for us. Almost wordlessly we roared our approval. The cool hand turned so now her palm was cupped around me and had easy access to the hairy creases. Hats were jumping above us like popping corn, and no one cared whose hat he got back because we all owned each other’s hats.

– Yesterday it was the Turn of the English to have French maids from our villages in Gaspé. Yesterday it was the Turn of the French to have Aristotle and bad teeth.

– Booo! Shame! To the wall!

I smelled the perfume of her sweat and birthday presents, and that was more thrillingly personal than any exchange of names could be. She herself thrust her pelvic region hard against her own trouser-covered hand to reap, as it were, the by-products of her erotic entry. With my free hand I reached behind the both of us to grab like a football her flowery left cheek, and so we were locked together.

– Today it is the Turn of the English to have dirty houses and French bombs in their mailboxes!

F. had detached himself to get closer to the speaker. I snaked my other hand behind and fastened it on the right cheek. I swear that we were Plastic Man and Plastic Woman, because I seemed to be able to reach her everywhere, and she traveled through my underwear effortlessly. We began our rhythmical movements which corresponded to the very breathing of the mob, which was our family and the incubator of our desire.

– Kant said: If someone makes himself into an earthworm, can he complain if he is stepped on? Sekou Touré said: No matter what you say, Nationalism is psychologically inevitable and we all are nationalists! Napoleon said: A nation has lost everything if it has lost its independence. History chooses whether Napoleon shall speak these words from a throne to a throng, or from the window of a hut to a desolate sea!

This academic virtuosity was a little problematical for the crowd and provoked only a few exclamations. However, at that moment, out of the corner of my eye, I saw F. lifted on the shoulders of some young men. A wildcat cheer went up as he was recognized, and the speaker hastened to incorporate the spontaneous outburst into the intense orthodoxy of the whole crowd.

– We have among us a Patriot! A man the English could not disgrace even in their own Parliament!

F. slid back into the reverent knot which had hoisted him, his clenched fist raised above him like the periscope of a diving sub. And now, as if the presence of this veteran conferred a new mystic urgency, the speaker began to speak, almost to chant. His voice caressed us, just as my fingers her, just as her fingers me, his voice fell over our desire like a stream over a moaning water wheel, and I knew that all of us, not just the girl and me, all of us were going to come together. Our arms were tangled and squashed, and I did not know if it was I who held the root of my cock or she who greased the stiffening of her labia! Every one of us there had the arms of Plastic Man, and we held each other, all naked from the waist, all sealed in a frog jelly of sweat and juice, all bound in the sweetest bursting daisy chain!

– Blood! What does Blood mean to us?

– Blood! Give us back our Blood!

– Rub harder! I shouted, but some angry faces shushed me.

– From the earliest dawn of our race, this Blood, this shadowy stream of life, has been our nourishment and our destiny. Blood is the builder of the body, and Blood is the source of the spirit of the race. In Blood lurks our ancestral inheritance, in Blood is embodied the shape of our History, from Blood blooms the flower of our Glory, and Blood is the undercurrent which they can never divert, and which all their stolen money cannot dry up!

– Give us our Blood!

– We demand our History!

– Vive la République!

– Don’t stop! I shouted.

– Elizabeth Go Home!

– More! I pleaded. Bis! Bis! Encore!

The meeting began to break up, the daisy chain began to fray. The speaker had disappeared from the pedestal. Suddenly I was facing everyone. They were leaving. I grabbed lapels and hems.

– Don’t go! Get him to speak more!

– Patience, citoyen, the Revolution has begun.

– No! Make him speak more! Nobody leave this park!

The throng pushed past me, apparently satisfied. At first the men smiled when I seized their lapels, attributing my imprecations to revolutionary ardor. At first the women laughed when I took their hands and checked them for traces of my pubic hair, because I wanted her, the girl I’d come to the dance with, the girl whose round sweat fossils I still wore on the back of my shirt.

– Don’t go. Don’t leave! Seal the park!

– Let go of my hand!

– Stop hanging on my lapels!

– We’ve got to go back to work!

I implored three big men wearing QUEBEC LIBRE sweatshirts to hoist me on their shoulders. I tried to get my foot hooked on the top of a pair of trousers so I could scramble up their sweaters and address the disintegrating family from the height of a shoulder.

– Get this creep off me!

– He looks English!

– He looks Jewish!

– But you can’t leave! I haven’t come yet!

– This man is a sex pervert!

– Let’s beat the shit out of him. He’s probably a sex pervert.

– He’s smelling girls’ hands.

– He’s smelling his own hands!

– He’s an odd one.

Then F. was beside me, big F., certifying my pedigree, and he led me away from the park which was now nothing but an ordinary park with swans and candy wrappers. Arm in arm, he led me down the sunny street.

– F., I cried. I didn’t come. I failed again.

– No, darling, you passed.

– Passed what?

– The test.

– What test?

– The second-to-last test.

48

“Let the cold wind blow, as long as you love me, East or West, I can stand the test, as long as you love me.” That was number seven on the Western Hit Parade long, long ago. I think it was seven. There are six words in the title. 6 is ruled by Venus, planet of love and beauty. According to Iroquois astrology, the sixth day should be devoted to grooming, having your hair done, wearing ornate shell-woven robes, seeking romance, and games of chance and wrestling. “What’s the reason I’m not pleasing you?” Somewhere on the charts. Tonight is the freezing 6th of March. That is not spring in the Canadian forest. The moon has been in Aries for two days. Tomorrow the moon enters Taurus. The Iroquois would hate me right now if they saw me because I have a beard. When they captured Jogues, the missionary back in 16-something, one of the minor tortures (after having an Algonquin slave sever his thumb with a clam-shell) was to let the children pull out his beard with their hands. “Send me a picture of Christ without a beard,” wrote the Jesuit Garnier to a friend in France, showing an excellent knowledge of Indian peculiarities. F. once told me about a girl who was favored with such a luxuriant growth of pubic hair that, with daily brush training, she taught it to descend nearly six inches down her thighs. Just below the navel she painted (with black liquid eye liner) two eyes and nostrils. Separating the hair just above the clitoris she drew it apart in two symmetrical arcs, creating the impression of a mustache above pursed pink lips, from which the remaining growth appended like a beard. A piece of costume jewelry squeezed in the navel like a caste mark completed the comic picture of an exotic fortune teller or mystic. Hiding her body under sheets except for this section, she amused F. with humorous renditions of Eastern sayings so popular at the time, casting her voice from beneath the linen with the skill of a ventriloquist. Why can’t I have memories like that? What good are all your gifts, F., the soap collection, the phrase books, if I can’t inherit your memories, too, which would confer some meaning on your rusty bequests, just as tin cans and automobile crashes achieve high value when placed in the context of a plush art gallery? What use all your esoteric teaching without your particular experience? You were too exotique for me, you and all the other masters, with your special breathing and success disciplines. What about us with asthma? What about us failures? What about us who can’t shit properly? What about us who have no orgies and excessive fucking to become detached about? What about us who are broken when our friends fuck our wives? What about us such as me? What about us who aren’t in Parliament? What about us who are cold on March 6 for no apparent reason? You did the Telephone Dance. You heard the inside of Edith. What about us who poke in dead tissue? What about us Historians who have to read the dirty parts? What about us who have smelled up a treehouse? Why did you make everything so baffling? Why couldn’t you comfort me like St. Augustine, who sang: “Behold the ignorant arise and snatch heaven beneath our eyes”? Why couldn’t you say to me what the Blessed Virgin said to the peasant girl Catherine Labouré on an ordinary street, Rue du Bac, in 18-something: “Grace will be showered on all who ask for it with faith and fervor.” Why do I have to explore the pock marks on Catherine Tekakwitha’s face like the lens of a moon missile? What did you mean when you lay bleeding in my arms and said: “Now it’s up to you”? People who say that always imply that that which they have done is so much more the major part of the ordeal. Who wants to just tidy up? Who wants to slide into a warm empty driver’s seat? I want cool leather, too. I loved Montréal, too. I wasn’t always the Freak of the Forest. I was a citizen. I had a wife and books. On May 17, 1642, Maisonneuve’s little armada – a pinnace, a flat-bottomed sailboat, and two rowboats – approached Montréal. The next day they glided past the green, solitary shores, and landed at the spot which Champlain, thirty-one years before, had chosen for the site of a settlement. Early spring flowers were riding the young grass. Maisonneuve sprang ashore. Tents, baggage, arms, and stores followed him. An altar was raised on a pleasant spot. Now all the company stood before the shrine, tall Maisonneuve, his men clustering around him, rough men, and Mlle. Mance, M. de la Peltrie, her servant, and the artisans and laborers. And here stood le P. Vimont, Superior of the Missions, in the rich vesture of his office. They knelt in hush as the Host was raised aloft. Then the priest turned to the little band and said:

– You are a grain of mustard seed, that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you, and your children shall fill the land.

The afternoon darkened. The sun was lost in the western forest. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into shining bouquets, and hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents, built their bivouac fires, stationed guards, and lay down to rest. Such was the first Mass sung in Montréal. And, oh, from this shack I can see the lights of the great city prophesied, the city foretold to cast its shadow across the earth, I see them twinkling in great soft garlands, the fireflies of downtown Montréal. This is my mental comfort in the snow of March the 6th. And I recall a line from the Jew Cabala (Sixth Part of the Beard of Macroprosopus), “that every work existeth in order that it may procure increase for Mercy….” Move closer, corpse of Catherine Tekakwitha, it is 20 below, I do not know how to hug you. Do you smell in this refrigerator? St. Angela Merici died in 1540. She was dug up in 1672 (you were a child of six, Kateri Tekakwitha), and the body had a sweet scent, and in 1876 it was still intact. St. John Nepomucene was martyred in Prague in 1393 for refusing to reveal a secret of the confessional. His tongue has been entirely preserved. Experts examined it 332 years later in 1725, and testified that it was the shape, color, and length of the tongue of a living person, and that it was also soft and flexible. The body of St. Catherine of Bologna (1413-1463) was dug up three months after her burial and it gave off a sweet fragrant scent. Four years after the death of St. Pacificus di San Severino in 1721, his body was exhumed and found to be sweet and incorrupt. While the body was being moved, someone slipped, and the head of the corpse smashed against the stairway and the head fell off; fresh blood gushed from the neck! St. John Vianney was buried in 1859. His body was intact at the disinterment of 1905. Intact: but can intact support a love affair? St. Francis Xavier was dug up four years after his burial in 1552 and it still had its natural color. Is natural color enough? St. John of the Cross looked all right nine months after his death in 1591. When his fingers were cut they bled. Three hundred years later (almost), in 1859, the body was incorrupt. Merely incorrupt. St. Joseph Calasanticus died in 1649 (the same year that the Iroquois burned Lalemant across an ocean). His insides were removed although not embalmed. His heart and tongue are intact up to this day, but no news of the rest. My basement kitchen was very stuffy and the oven timer sometimes switched it on because of faulty mechanism. F., is this why you led me up the frozen trunk? I am frightened of no perfume. The Indians ascribed disease to an ungratified wish. Pots, skins, pipes, wampum, fishhooks, weapons were piled in front of the sick person, “in the hope that in their multiplicity the desideratum might be supplied.” It often happened that the patient dreamed his own cure, and his demands were never refused, “however extravagant, idle, nauseous, or abominable.” O sky, let me be sick Indian. World, let me be dreaming Mohawk. No wet dream died in laundry. I know sexual information about Indians which is heavenly psychiatry, and I would like to sell it to the part of my mind which buys solutions. If I sold this to Hollywood it would end Hollywood. I am angry now, and cold. I threaten to end Hollywood if I do not receive instantaneous ghost love, not merely incorrupt but overwhelmingly fragrant. I’m going to end Movies if I don’t feel better very soon. I will destroy your neighborhood theater in the near future. I will draw a billion blinds over the Late Show. I don’t like my predicament. Why do I have to be the one who cuts fingers? Must I do the Wassermann on skeletons? I want to be the only-child stiff carried by clumsy doctors, my young 300-yr. blood flushing away the concrete stairway. I want to be the light in the morgue. Why must I dissect F.’s old tongue? The Indians invented the steam bath. That is just a tidbit.

49

Catherine Tekakwitha’s uncle dreamed his cure. The village hastened to fulfill his specifications. His cure was not an unusual one, it was one of the recognized remedies, and both Sagard and our Lalemant describe the treatment in various Indian villages. Uncle said:

– Bring me all the young girls of the town.

The village hastened to obey. All the young girls stood around his bearskin, the starlets of the cornfields, the sweet weavers, girls in leisure, their hair half braided. “Toutes les filles d’vn bourg auprès d’vne malade, tant à sa prière.”

– Are you all here?

– Yes.

– Yes.

– Sure.

– Uh-huh.

– Yes.

– Here.

– Yes.

– I’m here.

– Yes.

– Of course.

– Here.

– Here.

– Yes.

– Present.

– Yes.

– I guess so.

– Yes.

– Looks like it.

– Yes.

Uncle smiled with satisfaction. Then to each one he asked an old question: “On leur demand à toute, les vnes apres les autres, celuy qu’elles veulent des ieunes hommes du bourg pour dormir auec elles la nuict prochaine.” I give the documentation out of duty, for I fear that sometimes my sorrow does violence to the facts, and I do not wish to alienate the fact, for the fact is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore. The fact is a crude spade but my fingernails are blue and bleeding. The fact is like a bright new coin, and you do not want to spend it until it has picked up scratches in your jewelry box, and it is always the final nostalgic gesture of bankruptcy. My fortune is gone.

– What young brave will you sleep with tonight?

Each girl gave the name of the that evening’s lover.

– What about you, Catherine?

– A thorn.

– That will be something to see, they all chuckled.

O God, help me get through this. I am corrupt in stomach. I am cold and ignorant. I am sick in window. I have taunted Hollywood which I love. Do you imagine what servant writes this? Old fashioned Cave-Jew yell of supplication, trembling with fear vomit at his first moon eclipse. Ara ara ara arrrooowwww. Fashion this prayer to Thee. I don’t know to get it with 1000-voice choir effect like “consider the lily.” Fashion this heap with gleaming snow-shovel facets, for I meant to build an altar. I meant to light a curious little highway shrine, but I drown in the ancient snake cistern. I meant to harness plastic butterflies with rubber-band motors and whisper: “Consider the plastic butterfly”: but I shiver under the shadow of the diving archaeopteryx.

The Masters of the Ceremony (les Maistres de la ceremonie) summoned the young men whom the girls had named, and, hand in hand, they came to the long house in the evening. The mats were spread. From one end of the cabin to the other they lay, two by two, “d’vn bout à l’autre de la Cabane,” and they began to kiss and fuck and suck and hug and moan and take off their skins and squeeze each other and nibble tits and tickle cocks with eagle feathers and turn over for other holes and lick the creases of each other and laugh when others were fucking funny or stop and clap when two screaming bodies went into a climax trance. At either end of the cabin two captains sang and rang their turtleshell rattles, “deux Capitaines aux deux bouts du logis chantent de leur Tortue.” Uncle felt better toward midnight and got off his mat and crawled slowly down the length of the cabin, stopping here and there to rest his head on a free buttock or leave his fingers in a dripping hole, taking chances with his nose between “bouncers” for the sake of microscopic perspectives, always with an eye for the unusual or a joke for the grotesque. From one sprawl to another he dragged himself, red-eyed as a movie addict on 42nd Street, now flicking a quivering cock with his thumb and forefinger, now slapping a stray brown flank. Each fuck was the same and each fuck was different, that is the glory of an old man’s cure. All his girls came back to him, all his ferny intercourse, all the feathery holes and gleaming dials, and as he crawled from pair to pair, from these lovers to those lovers, from sweet position to sweet position, from pump to pump, from gobble to gobble, from embrace to embrace – he suddenly knew the meaning of the greatest prayer he had ever learned, the first prayer in which Manitou had manifest himself, the greatest and truest sacred formula. As he crawled he began to sing the prayer:

– I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

He did not miss a syllable and he loved the words he sang because as he sang each sound he saw it change and every change was a return and every return was a change.

– I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

I change

I am the same

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over. When the morning came the captains shook their rattles slower. The clothes were gathered up as the dawn came on. The old man was on his knees proclaiming his faith, declaring his cure complete, as into the misty green morning all the lovers sauntered, arms about each other’s waists and shoulders, the end of night shift in a factory of lovers. Catherine had lain among them and left with them unnoticed. As she walked out in the sun the priest came running.

– How was it?

– It was acceptable, my father.

– Dieu veuille abolir vne si damnable et malheureuse ceremonie.

That last remark is from the letter of Sagard. This unique mode of cure was called Andacwandet by the Hurons.

50

And I listen for answers in the cold wind, for instruction, for comfort, but all I hear is the infallible promise of winter. Night after night I cry out for Edith.

– Edith! Edith!

– Ara ara ara arrroooowwww, cries the wolf silhouette on the hill.

– Help me, F. Explain the bombs!

– Ara ara ara arroooowwww….

Dream after dream we all lie in each other’s arms. Morning after morning the winter finds me alone among the frayed leaves, frozen snot and tears in my eyebrows.

– F.! Why did you lead me here?

And do I hear an answer? Is this treehouse the hut of Oscotarach? F., are you the Head-Piercer? I did not know the operation was so long and clumsy. Raise the blunt tomahawk and try once more. Poke the stone spoon among the cerebral porridge. Does the moonlight want to get into my skull? Do the sparkling alleys of the icy sky want to stream through my eyeholes? F., were you the Head-Piercer, who left his hut and applied to the public ward in pursuit of his own operation? Or are you still with me, and is the surgery deep in progress?

– F., you lousy wife-fucker, explain yourself!

I cry that question out tonight, as I cried it out many times before. I remember your annoying habit of looking over my shoulders as I studied, just on the off chance that you might pick up a phrase of cocktail information. You noticed a line from a letter le P. Lalemant wrote in 1640, “que le sang des Martyrs est la semence des Chrestiens.” Le P. Lalemant regretting that no priest had yet been put to death in Canada, and that this was a bad augury for the young Indian missions, for the blood of Martyrs is the seed of the Church.

– The Revolution in Québec needs the lubrication of a little blood.

– Why are you looking at me that way, F.?

– I’m wondering if I’ve taught you enough.

– I don’t want any of your filthy politics, F. You’re a thorn in the side of Parliament. You’ve smuggled dynamite into Québec disguised as firecrackers. You’ve turned Canada into a vast analyst’s couch from which we dream and redream nightmares of identity, and all your solutions are as dull as psychiatry. And you subjected Edith to many irregular fucks which broke her mind and body and left me the lonely bookworm whom you now torment.

– Oh my darling, what a hunchback History and the Past have made of your body, what a pitiful hunchback.

We stood close together, as we’d stood in so many rooms, this time in the sepia gloom of the library stacks, our hands in each other’s pockets. I always resented his superior expression.

– Hunchback! Edith had no complaints about my body.

– Edith! Ha! Don’t make me laugh. You know nothing about Edith.

– Keep your tongue off her, F.

– I cured Edith’s acne.

– Edith’s acne indeed! She had perfect skin.

– Ho ho.

– It was lovable to kiss and touch.

– Thanks to my famous soap collection. Listen, friend, when I first met Edith she was in an ugly mess.

– No more, F. I don’t want to hear any more.

– The time has come for you to learn just who it was whom you married, just who that girl was whom you discovered per -forming extraordinary manicures in the barber shop of the Mount Royal Hotel.

– No, F., please. Don’t destroy anything more. Leave me with her body. F.! What is happening to your eyes? What is happening to your cheeks? Are those tears? Are you weeping?

– I am wondering what will happen to you when I leave you alone.

– Where are you going?

– The Revolution needs a little blood. It will be my blood.

– Oh no!

– London has announced the Queen’s intention to visit French Canada in October 1964. It is not enough that she and Prince Philip will be greeted by police cordons, riot tanks, and the proud backs of hostile crowds. We must not make the mistake the Indians made. Her advisers in London must be made to understand that our dignity is fed with the same food as anyone’s: the happy exercise of the arbitrary.

– What do you intend to do, F.?

– There is a statue of Queen Victoria on the north side of Sherbrooke Street. We have passed it many times on our way to the darkness of the System Theatre. It is a pleasant statue of Queen Victoria in early womanhood before pain and loss had made her fat. It is cast in copper which is now green with age. Tomorrow night I will place a charge of dynamite on her metal lap. It is only the copper effigy of a dead Queen (who knew, incidentally, the meaning of love), it is only a symbol, but the State deals in symbols. Tomorrow night I will blow that symbol to smithereens – and myself with it.

– Don’t do it, F. Please.

– Why not?

I know nothing about love, but something like love tore the following words from my throat with a thousand fishhooks:

– BECAUSE I NEED YOU, F.

A sad smile spread on my friend’s face. He extracted his left hand from my warm pocket, and extending his arms as if in a benediction he crushed me to his Egyptian shirt in a warm bear hug.

– Thank you. Now I know that I have taught you enough.

– BECAUSE I NEED YOU, F.

– Stop whimpering.

– BECAUSE I NEED YOU, F.

– Hush.

– BECAUSE I NEED THEE, F.

– Goodbye.

I felt lonely and cold as he walked away, the brown books along the steel shelves rustling like windy heaps of fallen leaves, each with the same message of exhaustion and death. As I set this down I have a clear impression of F.’s pain. His pain! Oh yes, as I peel off this old scab of history, gleaming like one pure triumphant drop of red blood – his pain.

– Goodbye, he called to me over his muscular shoulder. Listen for the explosion tomorrow night. Keep your ear next to the ventilation shaft.

Like the frozen moonlight through the windows of this shack, his pain floods my recognition, altering the edge, color, and weight of each possession in my heart.

51

Kateri Tekakwitha

calling you, calling you, calling you, testing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 my poor unelectric head calling you loud and torn 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 lost in needles of pine, tenant of meat freezer, fallen on squeezed knees searching hair for antennae, rubbing blue Aladdin prick, calling you, testing sky cables, poking blood buttons, finger fucks in star porridge, dentist drill in forehead bone, broken like convict stone, calling you calling you, frightened of stew, signals filthy laundry of this mind rubber girls aside, wafer banana skins of vaudeville, black air filled with pies of humiliation, no AC outlet beneath scalped hair, testing, testing the last dance, rubber scorpion on pillow of tit, handfuls of milk flung at doctors, calling you to call me, calling you to pull me if only once, fake proof accepted, plastic birchbark accepted, calling, artificial limb accepted, Hong Kong sex auxiliaries accepted, money confessions accepted, wigs of celanese acetate accepted, come pills, postcards of old-fashioned uncle sucking accepted even as ideal brown Plato, movie seat rubbing accepted, fat stage tease accepted and lap hats hiding hairy windows of underwear accepted, gratefully accepted, astrology boredom accepted, wife limit accepted, cop-gun deaths, urban voodoo accepted, false harem smells accepted, dimes accepted, seance feels up lonely old lady thighs, criminal bridge sales accepted, Zabbatai vote buttons worn in stigmata places, market Moses horns, square earth theories accepted, microscope girdles for Tom that failed, cunt dictionaries illustrated deceptively in vellum fuzz, calling you now, all reasons accepted, rope buttock creases, luminous highway Mary houses, pharmacy visions un-revoked, Zen Ph.D. tolerated, unpolished enemas, no references required, academic fashion ecstasy believed, dirty cars, all my baffled unbelief calling you with bowed physical brain terror, testing 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, unelectric head calling.

52

Phrase-book on my knees, I beseech the Virgin everywhere.

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE WASH HOUSE

(hers the lovely italics)

I bring you linens for washing

I need them until to-morrow

what do you think? Can you get them ready until tomorrow?

they are absolutely necessary to me

especially my shirts

as for the others, I must have them the most late until the day after tomorrow

I want them entirely new and clear

a shirt is missing for me, a handkerchief and a pair of stockings, too

I want this back

I want this costume to be cleared

when can I get it?

I have, too, a dress, a coat, trousers, a tressed waistcoat, a blouse, underclothes, stockings, so forth.

I shall come back again after three days to get them

please, iron them for me

yes, sir. Come to get them

what do you think about the trousers?

I like it. That’s what I want

when will my suit be ready?

after a week

it takes a lot of work

I shall make you a wonderful suit

I shall come to take it myself

no, don’t come!

we shall send it ourselves to your house, sir

good. Then I shall be waiting for it on next Saturday

the suit is dear

the suit is cheap

you are a good tailor

thank you

goodbye.

later I shall get another one

as you like, sir

we shall satisfy you very much

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE TOBACCONISTS

(hers the lovely italics)

Can you, please, tell me where is a tovacconist-shop?

at the corner of the road on the right, sir

in front of you, sir

give me, please, a box of cigarettes

what kind of cigarettes have you?

We have excellent cigarettes

I want some tobacco for pipe

I want heavy cigarettes

I want light cigarettes

Give me a box of matches, too

I want a cigarette-case, a good lighter, cigarettes

how much do all these cost?

twenty shillings, sir

thank-you. Goot-bye

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE BARBER’S SHOP

(hers the lovely italics)

the hair-dresser

the hair

the beard

the moustache

the soap

the cold water

the comb

the brush

I want to shave myself

please, sit down!

please, come in!

please, shave me!

please, cut my hair very short behind

not very short

wash my hair!

please, brush me

I shall come back

I’m pleased

until when is the barber’s shop open?

until 8 o’clock in the evening

I shall come to shave myself regularly

thank-you, goodbye

we will treat you as well as we can, because you are our client

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE POST-OFFICE

(hers the lovely italics)

where is the Post-Office, sir?

I’m a foreign here, excuse me

ask that sir

he knows French, German

he will help you

please, show me the Post-Office

it’s there on the opposite side

I want to send a letter

give me some postage-stamps

I want to send something

I want to send a telegram

I want to send a package

I want to send an urgent letter

have you your passport?

have you your identity?

yes, sir

I want to send a check

give me a post card

how much will I pay for sending a package?

15 shillings, sir

thank-you goodbye

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE TELEGRAPHIC-OFFICE

(hers the lovely italics)

what do you want, sir?

I want to send a telegram

with a paid answer?

how much does the word cost?

fifty pence a word

a telegram for

it’s dear, but never mind

will the telegram be late to go?

how long does it take to go?

two days, sir

It isn’t a long time

I shall send a telegram to my parents to

I hope that they will take it tomorrow

there is a long time and I didn’t get any news from them

I think they will answer to me telegraphically

take, please, the money for the telegram

goodbye. Thanks.

KATERI TEKAKWITHA AT THE BOOKSELLER’S

(hers the lovely italics)

goodmornig, sir

may I choose any books?

with pleasure. What do you want? Choose!

I want to buy a journey book

I want to know England and Ireland

Do you want anything else?

I want a lot of books, but, as I see, they are dear

we shall do a little decline of prices for you if you get many books

we have books of every kind. Cheap and dear

do you want them bound or not bound?

I want bound books

those they aren’t destroyed

here they are

How much does it cost?

four dollars

have you any dictionary?

I have

please, envelop them

I shall take them with me

thank you very much goodbye!

O God, O God, I have asked for too much, I have asked for every thing! I hear myself asking for everything in every sound I make. I did not know, in my coldest terror, I did not know how much I needed. O God, I grow silent as I hear myself begin to pray:

My Dear Friend,

Five years with the length of five years. I do not know exactly where this letter finds you. I suppose you have thought often of me. You were always my favorite male orphan. Oh, much more than that, much more, but I do not choose, for this last written communication, to expend myself in easy affection.

If my lawyers have performed according to my instructions, you are now in possession of my worldly estate, my soap collection, my factory, my Masonic aprons, my treehouse. I imagine you have already appropriated my style. I wonder where my style has led you. As I stand on this last springy diving board I wonder where my style has led me.

I am writing this last letter in the Occupational Therapy Room. I have let women lead me anywhere, and I am not sorry. Convents, kitchens, perfumed telephone booths, poetry courses – I followed women anywhere. I followed women into Parliament because I know how they love power. I followed women into the beds of men so that I could learn what they found there. The air is streaked with the smoke of their perfume. The world is clawed with their amorous laughter. I followed women into the world, because I loved the world. Breasts, buttocks, everywhere I followed the soft balloons. When women hissed at me from brothel windows, when they softly hissed at me over the shoulders of their dancing husbands, I followed them and I sank down with them, and sometimes when I listened to their hissing I knew it was nothing but the sound of the withering and collapse of their soft balloons.

This is the sound, this hissing, which hovers over every woman. There is one exception. I knew one woman who surrounded herself with a very different noise, maybe it was music, maybe it was silence. I am speaking, of course, about our Edith. It is five years now that I have been buried. Surely you know by now that Edith could not belong to you alone.

I followed the young nurses to Occupational Therapy. They have covered the soft balloons with starched linen, a pleasant tantalizing cover which my old lust breaks as easily as an eggshell. I have followed their dusty white legs.

Men also give off a sound. Do you know what our sound is, dear frayed friend? It is the sound you hear in male sea shells. Guess what it is. I will give you three guesses. You must fill in the lines. The nurses like to see me use my ruler.

The nurses like to lean over my shoulder and watch me use my red plastic ruler. They hiss through my hair and their hisses have the aroma of alcohol and sandalwood, and their starched clothes crackle like the white tissue paper and artificial straw which creamy chocolate Easter eggs come in.

Oh, I am happy today. I know that these pages will be filled with happiness. Surely you did not think that I would leave you with a melancholy gift.

Well, what are your answers? Isn’t it remarkable that I have extended your training over this wide gulf?

It is the very opposite of a hiss, the sound men make. It is Shhh, the sound made around the index finger raised to the lips. Shhh, and the roofs are raised against the storm. Shhh, the forests are cleared so the wind will not rattle the trees. Shhh, the hydrogen rockets go off to silence dissent and variety. It is not an unpleasant noise. It is indeed a perky tune, like the bubbles above a clam. Shhh, will everybody listen, please. Will the animals stop howling, please. Will the belly stop rumbling, please. Will Time call off its ultrasonic dogs, please.

It is the sound my ball pen makes on the hospital paper as I run it down the edge of the red ruler. Shhh, it says to the billion unlines of whiteness. Shhh, it whispers to the white chaos, lie down in dormitory rows. Shhh, it implores the dancing molecules, I love dances but I do not love foreign dances, I love dances that have rules, my rules.

Did you fill in the lines, old friend? Are you sitting in a restaurant or a monastery as I lie underground? Did you fill in the lines? You didn’t have to, you know. Did I trick you again?

Now what about this silence we are so desperate to clear in the wilderness? Have we labored, plowed, muzzled, fenced so that we might hear a Voice? Fat chance. The Voice comes out of the whirlwind, and long ago we hushed the whirlwind. I wish that you would remember that the Voice comes out of the whirlwind. Some men, some of the time, have remembered. Was I one?

I will tell you why we nailed up the cork. I am a born teacher and it is not my nature to keep things to myself. Surely five years have tortured and tickled you into that understanding. I always intended to tell you everything, the complete gift. How is your constipation, darling?

I imagine they are about twenty-four years old, these soft balloons that are floating beside me this very second, these Easter candies swaddled in official laundry. Twenty-four years of journey, almost a quarter of a century, but still youth for breasts. They have come a long way to graze shyly at my shoulder as I gaily wield my ruler to serve someone’s definition of sanity. They are still young, they are barely young, but they hiss fiercely, and they dispense a heady perfume of alcohol and sandalwood. Her face gives nothing away, it is a scrubbed nurse’s face, family lines mercifully washed away, a face prepared to be a screen for our blue home movies as we sink in disease. A compassionate sphinx’s face to drip our riddles on, and, like paws buried in the sand, her round breasts claw and scratch against the uniform. Familiar? Yes, it is a face such as Edith often wore, our perfect nurse.

– Those are very nice lines you’ve drawn.

– I’m quite fond of them.

Hiss, hiss, run for your lives, the bombs are dying.

– Would you like some colored pencils?

– As long as they don’t marry our erasers.

Wit, invention, shhh, shhh, now do you see why we’ve soundproofed the forest, carved benches round the wild arena? To hear the hissing, to hear wrinkles squeezing out the bounce, to attend the death of our worlds. Memorize this and forget it. It deserves a circuit, but a very tiny circuit, in the brain. I might as well tell you that I exempt myself, as of now, from all these categories.

Play with me, old friend.

Take my spirit hand. You have been dipped in the air of our planet, you have been baptized with fire, shit, history, love, and loss. Memorize this. It explains the Golden Rule.

See me at this moment of my curious little history, nurse leaning over my work, my prick rotten and black, you saw my worldly prick decayed, but now see my visionary prick, cover your head and see my visionary prick which I do not own and never owned, which owned me, which was me, which bore me as a broom bears a witch, bore me from world to world, from sky to sky. Forget this.

Like many teachers, a lot of the stuff I gave away was simply a burden I couldn’t carry any longer. I feel my store of garbage giving out. Soon I’ll have nothing left to leave around but stories. Maybe I’ll attain the plane of spreading gossip, and thus finish my prayers to the world.

Edith was a promoter of sex orgies and a purveyor of narcotics. Once she had lice. Twice she had crabs. I’ve written crabs very small because there is a time and a place for everything, and a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity. I appear to be engrossed in my therapeutic exercises, she in the duties of supervision, but shhh, hiss, the noise of steam spreads through O.T., it mixes with the sunlight, it bestows a rainbow halo on each bowed head of sufferer, doctor, nurse, volunteer. You ought to look up this nurse sometime. She will be twenty-nine when my lawyers locate you and complete my material bequest.

Down some green corridor, in a large closet among pails, squeegees, antiseptic mops, Mary Voolnd from Nova Scotia will peel down her dusty white stockings and present an old man with the freedom of her knees, and we will leave nothing behind us but our false ears with which to pick up the steps of the approaching orderly.

Steam coming off the planet, clouds of fleecy steam as boy and girl populations clash in religious riots, hot and whistling like a graveyard sodomist our little planet embraces its fragile yo-yo destiny, tuned in the secular mind like a dying engine. But some do not hear it this way, some flying successful moon-shot eyes do not see it this way. They do not hear the individual noises shhh, hiss, they hear the sound of the sounds together, they behold the interstices flashing up and down the cone of the flowering whirlwind.

Do I listen to the Rolling Stones? Ceaselessly.

Am I hurt enough?

The old hat evades me. I don’t know if I can wait. The river that I’ll walk beside – I seem to miss it by a coin toss every year. Did I have to buy that factory? Was I obliged to run for Parliament? Was Edith such a good lay? My café table, my small room, my drugged true friends from whom I don’t expect too much – I seem to abandon them almost by mistake, for promises, phone calls casually made. The old hat, the rosy ugly old face that won’t waste time in mirrors, the uncombed face that will laugh amazed at the manifold traffic. Where is my old hat? I tell myself I can wait. I argue that my path was correct. Is it only the argument that is incorrect? Is it Pride that tempts me with intimations of a new style? Is it Cowardice that keeps me from an old ordeal? I tell myself: wait. I listen to the rain, to the scientific noises of the hospital. I get happy because of many small things. I go to sleep with the earplug of the transistor stuck in. Even my Parliamentary disgrace begins to evade me. My name appears more and more frequently among the nationalist heroes. Even my hospitalization has been described as an English trick to muzzle me. I fear I will lead a government yet, rotten prick and all. I lead men too easily: my fatal facility.

My dear friend, go beyond my style.

Something in your eyes, old lover, described me as the man I wanted to be. Only you and Edith extended that generosity to me, perhaps only you. Your baffled cries as I tormented you, you were the good animal I wanted to be, or failing that, the good animal I wanted to exist. It was I who feared the rational mind, therefore I tried to make you a little mad. I was desperate to learn from your bewilderment. You were the wall which I, batlike, bounced my screams off of, so I might have direction in this long nocturnal flight.

I cannot stop teaching. Have I taught you anything?

I must smell better with this confession, because Mary Voolnd has just awarded me a distinct signal of cooperation.

– Would you like to touch my cunt with one of your old hands?

– Which hand are you thinking of?

– Would you like to depress a nipple with a forefinger and make it disappear?

– And make it reappear too?

– If it reappears I will hate you forever. I will inscribe you in the Book of Fumblers.

– That’s better.

– Ummmm.

—— ——— —— ——— —— ——— ——

– I’m dripping.

Do you see how I cannot stop teaching? All my arabesques are for publication. Can you imagine how I envied you, whose suffering was so traditional?

From time to time, I will confess, I hated you. The teacher of composition is not always gratified to listen to the Valedictorian Address delivered in his own style, especially if he has never been Valedictorian himself. Times I felt depleted: you with all that torment, me with nothing but a System.

When I worked among the Jews (you own the factory), regularly I saw a curious expression of pain cross the boss’s Levantine face. This I observed as he ushered out a filthy coreligionist, bearded, shifty, and smelling of low Romanian cuisine, who visited the factory every second month begging on behalf of an obscure Yiddish physical-therapy university. Our boss always gave the creature a few groschen and hurried him through the shipping exit with awkward haste, as if his presence there might start something far worse than a strike. I was always kinder to the boss on those days, for he was strangely vulnerable and comfortless. We walked slowly between the great rolls of cashmere and Harris tweed and I let him have his way with me. (He, for one, did not resent my new muscles, achieved through Dynamic Tension. Why did you drive me away?)

– What is my factory today? A pile of rags and labels, a distraction, an insult to my spirit.

– A tomb of your ambition, sir?

– That’s right, boy.

– Dust in the mouth, cinders in the eye, sir?

– I don’t want that bum in here again, do you hear me? One of these days they’re going to walk out of here with him. And I’ll be at the head of the line. That poor wretch is happier than the whole caboodle.

But, of course, he never turned the loathsome beggar away, and suffered for it, regular as menstruation pain, which is how the female regrets life beyond the pale of lunar jurisdiction.

You plagued me like the moon. I knew you were bound by old laws of suffering and obscurity. I am fearful of the cripple’s wisdom. A pair of crutches, a grotesque limp can ruin a stroll which I begin in a new suit, clean-shaven, whistling. I envied you the certainty that you would amount to nothing. I coveted the magic of torn clothes. I was jealous of the terrors I constructed for you but could not tremble before myself. I was never drunk enough, never poor enough, never rich enough. All this hurts, perhaps it hurts enough. It makes me want to cry out for comfort. It makes me stretch my hands out horizontally. Yes, I long to be President of the new Republic. I love to hear the armed teen-agers chant my name outside the hospital gates. Long live the Revolution! Let me be President for my last thirty days.

Where are you walking tonight, dear friend? Did you give up meat? Are you disarmed and empty, an instrument of Grace? Can you stop talking? Has loneliness led you into ecstasy?

There was a deep charity in your suck. I hated it, I abused it. But I dare to hope that you embody the best of my longings. I dare to hope that you will produce the pearl and justify these poor secreted irritations.

This letter is written in the old language, and it has caused me no little discomfort to recall the obsolete usages. I’ve had to stretch my mind back into areas bordered with barbed wire, from which I spent a lifetime removing myself. However, I do not regret the effort.

Our love will never die, that I can promise you, I, who launch this letter like a kite among the winds of your desire. We were born together, and in our kisses we confessed our longing to be born again. We lay in each other’s arms, each of us the other’s teacher. We sought the peculiar tone of each peculiar night. We tried to clear away the static, suffering under the hint that the static was part of the tone. I was your adventure and you were my adventure. I was your journey and you were my journey, and Edith was our holy star. This letter rises out of our love like the sparks between dueling swords, like the shower of needles from flapping cymbals, like the bright seeds of sweat sliding through the center of our tight embrace, like the white feathers hung in the air by razored bushido cocks, like the shriek between two approaching puddles of mercury, like the atmosphere of secrets which twin children exude. I was your mystery and you were my mystery, and we rejoiced to learn that mystery was our home. Our love cannot die. Out of history I come to tell you this. Like two mammoths, tusk-locked in earnest sport at the edge of the advancing age of ice, we preserve each other. Our queer love keeps the lines of our manhood hard and clean, so that we bring nobody but our own self to our separate marriage beds, and our women finally know us.

Mary Voolnd has finally admitted my left hand into the creases of her uniform. She watched me compose the above paragraph, so I let it run on rather extravagantly. Women love excess in a man because it separates him from his fellows and makes him lonely. All that women know of the male world has been revealed to them by lonely, excessive refugees from it. Raging fairies they cannot resist because of their highly specialized intelligence.

– Keep writing, she hisses.

Mary has turned her back to me. The balloons are shrieking like whistles signaling the end of every labor. Mary pretends to inspect a large rug some patient wove, thus shielding our precious play. Slow as a snail I push my hand, palm down, up the tight rough stocking on the back of her thigh. The linen of her skirt is crisp and cool against my knuckles and nails, the stockinged thigh is warm, curved, a little damp like a loaf of fresh white bread.

– Higher, she hisses.

I am in no hurry. Old friend, I am in no hurry. I feel I shall be doing this throughout eternity. Her buttocks contract impatiently, like two boxing gloves touching before the match. My hand pauses to ride the quiver on the thigh.

– Hurry, she hisses.

Yes, I can tell by the tension in the stocking that I am approaching the peninsula which is hitched to the garter device. I will travel the whole peninsula, hot skin on either side, then I will leap off the nipple-shaped garter device. The threads of the stocking tighten. I bunch my fingers together so as not to make premature contact. Mary is jiggling, endangering the journey. My forefinger scouts out the garter device. It is warm. The little metal loop, the rubber button – warm right through.

– Please, please, she hisses.

Like angels on the head of a pin, my fingers dance on the rubber button. Which way shall I leap? Toward the outside thigh, hard, warm as the shell of a beached tropical turtle? Or toward the swampy mess in the middle? Or fasten like a bat on the huge soft overhanging boulder of her right buttock? It is very humid up her white starched skirt. It is like one of those airplane hangars wherein clouds form and it actually rains indoors. Mary is bouncing her bum like a piggy bank which is withholding a gold coin. The inundations are about to begin. I choose the middle.

– Yesssss.

Delicious soup stews my hand. Viscous geysers shower my wrist. Magnetic rain tests my Bulova. She jiggles for position, then drops over my fist like a gorilla net. I had been snaking through her wet hair, compressing it between my fingers like cotton candy. Now I am surrounded by artesian exuberance, nipply frills, numberless bulby brains, pumping constellations of mucous hearts. Moist Morse messages move up my arm, master my intellectual head, more, more, message dormant portions of dark brain, elect happy new kings for the exhausted pretenders of the mind. I am a seal inventing undulations in a vast electric aquacade, I am wires of tungsten burning in the seas of bulb, I am creature of Mary cave, I am froth of Mary wave, bums of nurse Mary applaud greedily as she maneuvers to plow her asshole on the edge of my arm bone, rose of rectum sliding up and down like the dream of banister fiend.

– Slish slosh slish slosh.

Are we not happy? Loud as we are, no one hears us, but this is a tiny miracle in the midst of all this bounty, so are the rainbow crowns hovering over every skull but tiny miracles. Mary looks at me over her shoulder, greeting me with rolled-up eyes white as eggshells, and an open goldfish mouth amazed smile. In the gold sunshine of O.T. everyone believes he is a stinking genius, offering baskets, ceramic ashtrays, thong-sewn wallets on the radiant altars of their perfect health.

Old friend, you may kneel as you read this, for now I come to the sweet burden of my argument. I did not know what I had to tell you, but now I know. I did not know what I wanted to proclaim, but now I am sure. All my speeches were preface to this, all my exercises but a clearing of my throat. I confess I tortured you but only to draw your attention to this. I confess I betrayed you but only to tap your shoulder. In our kisses and sucks, this, ancient darling, I meant to whisper.

God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is afoot. Magic is alive. Alive is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied. Magic never weakened. Magic never hid. Magic always ruled. God is afoot. God never died. God was ruler though his funeral lengthened. Though his mourners thickened Magic never fled. Though his shrouds were hoisted the naked God did live. Though his words were twisted the naked Magic thrived. Though his death was published round and round the world the heart did not believe. Many hurt men wondered. Many struck men bled. Magic never faltered. Magic always led. Many stones were rolled but God would not lie down. Many wild men lied. Many fat men listened. Though they offered stones Magic still was fed. Though they locked their coffers God was always served. Magic is afoot. God rules. Alive is afoot. Alive is in command. Many weak men hungered. Many strong men thrived. Though they boasted solitude God was at their side. Nor the dreamer in his cell, nor the captain on the bill. Magic is alive. Though his death was pardoned round and round the world the heart would not believe. Though laws were carved in marble they could not shelter men. Though altars built in parliaments they could not order men. Police arrested Magic and Magic went with them for Magic loves the hungry. But Magic would not tarry. It moves from arm to arm. It would not stay with them. Magic is afoot. It cannot come to harm. It rests in an empty palm. It spawns in an empty mind. But Magic is no instrument. Magic is the end. Many men drove Magic but Magic stayed behind. Many strong men lied. They only passed through Magic and out the other side. Many weak men lied. They came to God in secret and though they left him nourished they would not tell who healed. Though mountains danced before them they said that God was dead. Though his shrouds were hoisted the naked God did live. This I mean to whisper to my mind. This I mean to laugh with in my mind. This I mean my mind to serve till service is but Magic moving through the world, and mind itself is Magic coursing through the flesh, and flesh itself is Magic dancing on a clock, and time itself the Magic Length of God.

Old friend, aren’t you happy? You and Edith alone know how long I’ve waited for this instruction.

– Damn you, Mary Voolnd spits at me.

– What?

– Your hand’s gone limp. Grab!

How many times must I be slain, old friend? I do not understand the mystery, after all. I am an old man with one hand on a letter and one hand up a juicy cunt, and I understand nothing. If my instruction were gospel, would it wither up my hand? Certainly not. It doesn’t figure. I’m picking lies out of the air. They’re aiming lies at me. The truth should make me strong. I pray you, dear friend, interpret me, go beyond me. I know now that I am a hopeless case. Go forth, teach the world what I meant to be.

– Grab.

Mary wiggles and the hand comes to life, like those ancestral sea ferns which turned animal. Now the soft elbows of her cunt are nudging me somewhere. Now her asshole is rubbing the ridge of my arm, not like rosy banister reverie as before, but like an eraser removing dream evidence, and now, alas, the secular message appears.

– Grab, please, please. They’ll start to notice at any second.

That is true. The air in O.T. is restless, no longer golden sunshine, merely sunny and warm. Yes, I’ve let the magic die. The doctors remember that they are at work and refuse to yawn. A fat little lady issues a duchess command, poor thing. A teen-ager weeps because he has wet himself again. A former school principal farts hysterically, threatening us all with no gym. Lord of Life, is my pain sufficient?

– Hurry.

Mary bears down. My fingers brush something. It is not part of Mary. It is foreign matter.

– Grab it. Pull it out. It’s from our friends.

– Soon.

Dear Friend,

It comes back to me.

I sent you the wrong box of fireworks. I did not include the Pimple Cure in my famous soap and cosmetic collection. I cured Edith’s acne with it, you know. But of course you do not know, because you have no reason to believe that Edith’s complexion was ever anything but lovable to kiss and touch. When I found her her complexion was not lovable to kiss and touch, nor even to look at. She was in an ugly mess. In another part of this long letter I will tell you how we, Edith and I, constructed the lovely wife whom you discovered performing extraordinary manicures in the barber shop of the Mount Royal Hotel. Begin to prepare yourself.

The soap collection, though it includes transparent bars, ghosts of pine, lemon and sandalwood, Willy jelly, is useless without the Pimple Cure. All you will achieve is scrubbed, fragrant pimples. Perhaps that is enough for you – a demoralizing speculation.

You always resisted me. I had a body waiting for you, but you turned it down. I had a vision of you with 19-inch arms, but you walked away. I saw you with massive lower pecs and horseshoe triceps, with bulk and definition simultaneously. In certain intimate embraces I saw exactly how low your buttocks should descend. In no case, when you were squatting in front of me, should your buttocks have been lowered so far down that they sat on your heels, for once this occurs the thigh muscles are no longer engaged but the buttocks muscles are, ergo your rocky cheeks, a very selfish development that gave me no happiness and is a factor in your bowel predicament. I saw you oiled and shining, a classic midsection of washboard abdominals fluted with razor-edged obliques and serratus. I had a way to cut up the serratus. I had access to a Professional Greek Chair. I had the straps and stirrups to blitz your knob into a veritable sledgehammer, mouthful for a pelican. I had a Sphincter Kit that worked off the tap like washing machines and bosom aggrandizers. Had you a notion of my Yoga? Call it ruin, or call it creation, have you a notion of my work on Edith? Are you aware of the Ganges you insulted with a million mean portages?

Perhaps it is my own fault. I withheld certain vital items, an apparatus here, a fact there – but only because (yes, this is closer to truth) I dreamed you would be greater than me. I saw a king without dominion. I saw a gun bleeding. I saw the prince of Paradise Forgotten. I saw a pimpled movie star. I saw a racing hearse. I saw the New Jew. I saw popular lame storm troopers. I wanted you to bring pain to heaven. I saw fire curing headaches. I saw the triumph of election over discipline. I wanted your confusion to be a butterfly net for magic. I saw ecstasy without fun and vice versa. I saw all things change their nature by mere intensification of their properties. I wanted to discredit training for the sake of purer prayer. I held things back from you because I wished you greater than my Systems conceived. I saw wounds pulling oars without becoming muscles.

Who is the New Jew?

The New Jew loses his mind gracefully. He applies finance to abstraction resulting in successful messianic politics, colorful showers of meteorites and other symbolic weather. He has induced amnesia by a repetitious study of history, his very forgetfulness caressed by facts which he accepts with visible enthusiasm. He changes for a thousand years the value of stigma, causing men of all nations to pursue it as superior sexual talisman. The New Jew is the founder of Magic Canada, Magic French Québec, and Magic America. He demonstrates that yearning brings surprises. He uses regret as a bulwark of originality. He confuses nostalgic theories of Negro supremacy which were tending to the monolithic. He confirms tradition through amnesia, tempting the whole world with rebirth. He dissolves history and ritual by accepting unconditionally the complete heritage. He travels without passport because powers consider him harmless. His penetration into jails enforces his supra-nationality, and flatters his legalistic disposition. Sometimes he is Jewish but always he is American, and now and then, Québécois.

These were my dreams for you and me, vieux copain – New Jews, the two of us, queer, militant, invisible, part of a possible new tribe bound by gossip and rumors of divine evidence.

I sent you the wrong box of fireworks, and this was not entirely by mistake. You got the Rich Brothers’ All-American Assortment, which claims to be the largest selection offered at the price, over 550 pieces. Let us be charitable and say that I didn’t know exactly how long the ordeal should last. I could have sent you the Famous Banner Fireworks Display, same price as the other, with over a thousand pieces of noise and beauty. I denied you the rocking Electric Cannon Salutes, the good old-fashioned Cherry Bombs, the Silver Rain Torch, the 16-report Battle in Clouds, the suicidal Jap Pop-Bottle Night Rockets. Let charity record that I did this out of charity. The explosions might have drawn malicious attention. But how can I justify withholding the Big Colorful Family Lawn Display, a special package made up for those tuned to a minimum of noise? Musical Vesuvius Flitter Fountains I hid from you, Comet Star Shells, Flower Pots with Handles, Large Floral Shells, Triangle Spinning Wheels, Patriotic Colored Fire Flag. Stretch your heart, darling. Let charity argue that I spared you a domestic extravagance.

I am going to set you straight on everything: Edith, me, you, Tekakwitha, the A——s, the firecrackers.

I didn’t want you to burn yourself to suicide. On the other hand, I didn’t want the exodus to be too easy. This last from professional teacher’s pride, and also a subtle envy which I have previously exposed.

What is more sinister is the possibility that I may have contrived to immunize you against the ravages of ecstasy by regular inoculations of homeopathic doses of it. A diet of paradox fattens the ironist not the psalmist.

Perhaps I should have gone all the way and sent you the sub-machine guns which the firecrackers concealed in my brilliant smuggling operation. I suffer from the Virgo disease: nothing I did was pure enough. I was never sure whether I wanted disciples or partisans. I was never sure whether I wanted Parliament or a hermitage.

I will confess that I never saw the Québec Revolution clearly, even at the time of my parliamentary disgrace. I simply refused to support the War, not because I was French, or a pacifist (which of course I’m not), but because I was tired. I knew what they were doing to the Gypsies, I had a whiff of Zyklon B, but I was very, very tired. Do you remember the world at that time? A huge jukebox played a sleepy tune. The tune was a couple of thousand years old and we danced to it with our eyes closed. The tune was called History and we loved it, Nazis, Jews, everybody. We loved it because we made it up, because, like Thucydides, we knew that whatever happened to us was the most important thing that ever happened in the world. History made us feel good so we played it over and over, deep into the night. We smiled as our uncles went to bed, and we were glad to get rid of them, because they didn’t know how to do the H. in spite of all their boasts and old news -paper clippings. Good night, old frauds. Someone worked the rheostat and we squeezed the body in our arms, we inhaled the perfumed hair, we bumped into each other’s genitals. History was our song, History chose us to make History. We gave ourselves to it, caressed by events.

In perfect drowsy battalions we moved through the moonlight. Its will be done. In perfect sleep we took the soap and waited for the showers.

Never mind, never mind. I’ve gone too deep into the old language. It may trap me there.

I was tired. I was sick of the inevitable. I tried to slip out of History. Never mind, never mind. Just say I was tired. I said no.

– Leave Parliament this instant!

– Frogs!

– They can’t be trusted!

– Vote him dead!

I ran off with heavy heart. I loved the red chairs of Parliament. I cherished the fucks under the monument. I had cream in National Library. Too impure for empty future, I wept old jackpots.

Now my fat confession. I loved the magic of guns. I sneaked them in under the skin of firecrackers. My old monkey made me do it. I planted guns in Québec for I was hung between free and coward. Guns suck magic. I buried guns for future History. If History rule let me be Mr. History. The guns are green. The flowers poke. I let History back because I was lonely. Do not follow. Go beyond my style. I am nothing but a rotten hero.

Among the bars in my soap collection. Never mind.

Later.

Among the bars in my soap collection. I paid big cash for it. Argentine vacation hotel week-end shack-up with Edith. Never mind that. I paid equivalent U.S. $635. Waiter giving me the eye for days. He not cute little recent immigrant. Former Lord of few miserable European acres. Transaction beside swimming pool. I wanted it. I wanted it. My lust for secular gray magic. Human soap. A full bar, minus the wear of one bath in which I plunged myself, for better or for worse.

Mary, Mary, where are you, my little Abishag?

My dear friend, take my spirit hand.

I am going to show you everything happening. That is as far as I can take you. I cannot bring you into the middle of action. My hope is that I have prepared you for this pilgrimage. I didn’t suspect the pettiness of my dream. I believed that I had conceived the vastest dream of my generation: I wanted to be a magician. That was my idea of glory. Here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic.

That week end when I arranged for you to work in the Archives, Edith and I flew down to Argentine for a little sun and experiments. Edith was having trouble with her body: it kept changing sizes, she even feared that it might be dying.

We took a large air-conditioned room overlooking the sea, double-locking the door as soon as the porter had left with his hand full of tip.

Edith spread a large rubber sheet over the double bed, carefully moving from corner to corner to smooth it out. I loved to watch her bend over. Her buttocks were my masterpiece. Call her nipples an eccentric extravagance, but the bum was perfect. It’s true that from year to year it required electronic massage and applications of hormone mold, but the conception was perfect.

Edith took off her clothes and lay down on the rubber sheet. I stood over her. Her eyes blazed.

– I hate you, F. I hate you for what you’ve done to me and my husband. I was a fool to get mixed up with you. I wish he’d known me before you –

– Hush, Edith. We don’t want to go over all that again. You wanted to be beautiful.

– I can’t remember anything now. I’m all confused. Perhaps I was beautiful before.

– Perhaps, I echoed in a voice as sad as hers.

Edith shifted her brown hips to make herself comfortable, and a shaft of sunlight infiltrated her pubic hair, giving it a rust-colored tint. Yes, that was beauty beyond my craft.

Sun on Her Cunt

Wispy Rusty Hair

Her Tunnels Sunk in Animal

Her Kneecaps Round and Bare

I knelt beside the bed and lay one of my thin ears on the little sunlit orchard, listening to the tiny swamp machinery.

– You’ve meddled, F. You’ve gone against God.

– Hush, my little chicken. There is some cruelty even I cannot bear.

– You should have left me like you found me. I’m no good to anyone now.

– I could suck you forever, Edith.

She made the shaved hairs on the back of my neck tingle with the grazing of her lovely brown fingers.

– Sometimes I feel sorry for you, F. You might have been a great man.

– Stop talking, I bubbled.

– Stand up, F. Get your mouth off me. I’m pretending that you are someone else.

– Who?

– The waiter.

– Which one? I demanded.

– With the mustache and the raincoat.

– I thought so, I thought so.

– You noticed him, too, didn’t you, F.?

– Yes.

I stood up too suddenly. Dizziness twirled my brain like a dial and formerly happy chewed food in my stomach turned into vomit. I hated my life, I hated my meddling, I hated my ambition. For a second I wanted to be an ordinary bloke cloistered in a tropical hotel room with an Indian orphan.

Take from me my Camera

Take from me my Glass

The Sun the Wet Forever

Let the Doctors Pass

– Don’t cry, F. You knew it had to happen. You wanted me to go all the way. Now I’m no good to anyone and I’ll try anything.

I stumbled to the window but it was hermetically sealed. The ocean was deep green. The beach was polka-dotted with beach umbrellas. How I longed for my old teacher, Charles Axis. I strained my eyes for an immaculate white bathing suit, unshadowed by topography of genitalia.

– Oh, come here, F. I can’t stand watching a man vomit and cry.

She cradled my head between her bare breasts, stuffing a nipple into each ear.

– There now.

– Thankyou, thankyou, thankyou, thankyou.

– Listen, F. Listen the way you wanted us all to listen.

– I’m listening, Edith.

Let me let me follow

Down the Sticky Caves

Where embryonic Cities

Form Scum upon the Waves

– You’re not listening, F.

– I’m trying.

– I feel sorry for you, F.

– Help me, Edith.

– Then get back to work. That’s the only thing that can help you. Try to finish the work you began on all of us.

She was right. I was the Moses of our little exodus. I would never cross. My mountain might be very high but it rises from the desert. Let it suffice me.

I recovered my professional attitude. Her lower perfume was still in my nostrils but that was my business. I surveyed the nude girl from my Pisgah. Her soft lips smiled.

– That’s better, F. Your tongue was nice but you do better as a doctor.

– All right, Edith. What seems to be the trouble now?

– I can’t make myself come any more.

– Of course you can’t. If we’re going to perfect the pan-orgasmic body, extend the erogenous zone over the whole fleshy envelope, popularize the Telephone Dance, then we’ve got to begin by diminishing the tyranny of the nipples, lips, clitoris, and asshole.

– You’re going against God, F. You say dirty words.

– I’ll take my chances.

– I feel so lost since I can’t make myself come any more. I’m not ready for the other stuff yet. It makes me too lonely. I feel blurred. Sometimes I forget where my cunt is.

– You make me weary, Edith. To think I’ve pinned all my hopes on you and your wretched husband.

– Give it back to me, F.

– All right, Edith. It’s a very simple matter. We do it with books. I thought this might happen, so I brought the appropriate ones along. I also have in this trunk a number of artificial phalli (used by women), Vaginal Vibrators, the Rin-No-Tam and Godemiche or Dildo.

– Now you’re talking.

– Just lie back and listen. Sink into the rubber sheet. Spread your legs and let the air-conditioning do its filthy work.

– O.K., shoot.

I cleared my famous throat. I chose a swollen book, frankly written, which describes various Auto-Erotic practices as indulged in by humans and animals, flowers, children and adults, and women of all ages and cultures. The areas covered included: Why Wives Masturbate, What We Can Learn From the Anteater, Unsatisfied Women, Abnormalities and Eroticism, Techniques of Masturbation, Latitude of Females, Genital Shaving, Clitoral Discovery, Club Masturbation, Female Metal, Nine Rubber, Frame Caress, Urethral Masturbation, Individual Experiments, Masturbation in and of Children, Thigh-Friction Technique, Mammary Stimulation, Auto-Eroticism in Windows.

– Don’t stop, F. I feel it coming back.

Her lovely brown fingers inched down her silky rounded belly. I continued reading in my slow, tantalizing, weather-reporting tones. I read to my deep-breathing protégée of the unusual sex practices, when Sex Becomes “Different.” An “Unusual” sex practice is one where there is some greater pleasure than orgasm through intercourse. Most of these bizarre practices involve a measure of mutilation, shock, voyeurism, pain, or torture. The sex habits of the average person are relatively free of such sadistic or masochistic traits. NEVERTHELESS, the reader will be shocked to see how abnormal are the tastes of the so-called normal person. CASE HISTORIES and intensive field work. Filled with chapters detailing ALL ASPECTS of the sex act. SAMPLE HEADINGS: Rubbing, Seeing, Silk Rings, Satyriasis, Bestiality in Others. The average reader will be surprised to learn how “Unusual” practices are passed along by seemingly innocent, normal sex partners.

– It’s so good, F. It’s been so long.

Now it was late afternoon. The sky had darkened somewhat. Edith was touching herself everywhere, smelling herself shamelessly. I could hardly keep still myself. The texts had got to me. Goose pimples rose on her young form. I stared dumbly at Original drawings: male and female organs, both external and internal, drawings indicating correct and incorrect methods of penetration. Wives will benefit from seeing how the penis is received.

– Please, F. Don’t leave me like this.

My throat was burning with the hunger of it. Love fondled. Edith writhed under her squeezes. She flipped over on her stomach, wielding her small beautiful fists in anal stimulation. I threw myself into a Handbook of Semi-Impotence. There were important pieces woven into the theme: how to enlarge the erect penis, penis darkness, use of lubricants, satisfaction during menstruation, abusing the menopause, a wife’s manual assistance in overcoming semi-impotence.

– Don’t touch me, F. I’ll die.

I blurted out a piece on Fellatio and Cunnilingus Between Brother and Sister, and others. My hands were almost out of control. I stumbled through a new concept for an exciting sex life. I didn’t miss the section on longevity. Thrilling culminations possible for all. Lesbians by the hundreds interviewed and bluntly questioned. Some tortured for coy answers. Speak up, you cheap dyke. An outstanding work showing the sex offender at work. Chemicals to get hair off palms. Not models! Actual Photos of Male and Female Sex Organs and Excrement. Explored Kissing. The pages flew. Edith mumbling bad words through froth. Her fingers were bright and glistening, her tongue bruised from the taste of her waters. I spoke the books in everyday terms, the most sensitivity, cause of erection, Husband-Above 1-17, Wife-Above 18-29, Seated 30-34, On-The-Side 35-38, Standing & Kneeling Positions 39-53, Miscellaneous Squats 54-109, Coital Movement In All Directions, both for Husband and Wife.

– Edith! I cried. Let me have Foreplay.

– Never.

I sped through a glossary of Sexual Terms. In 1852, Richard Burton (d. aet. 69) submitted calmly to circumcision at the age of 31. “Milkers.” Detailed Library of Consummated Incest. Ten Steps on Miscegenation. Techniques of Notorious Photographers. The Evidence of Extreme Acts. Sadism, Mutilation, Cannibalism, Cannibalism of Oralists, How To Match Disproportionate Organs. See the vivid birth of the new American woman. I shouted the recorded facts. She will not be denied the pleasures of sex. CASE HISTORIES show the changing trends. Filled with accounts of college girls eager to be propositioned. Women no longer inhibited by oral intimacy. Men masturbated to death. Cannibalism during Foreplay. Skull Coition. Secrets of “Timing” the Climax. Foreskin, Pro, Con, and Indifferent. The Intimate Kiss. What are the benefits of sexual experimentation? Own and other’s sexual make-up. Sin has to be taught. Kissing Negroes on their Mouths. Thigh Documents. Styles of Manual Pressure in Volutary Indulgence. Death Rides a Camel. I gave her everything. My voice cried the Latex. I hid no laces, nor a pair of exciting open-front pants, nor soft elasticized bra instead of sagging, heavy wide bust, therefore youthful separation. O’er Edith’s separate nipples I blabbed the full record, Santa Pants, Fire Alarm Snow, Glamor Tip, plain wrapper Thick Bust Jelly, washable leather Kinsey Doll, Smegma Discipline, the LITTLE SQUIRT ash-tray. “SEND ME ANOTHER Rupture-Easer so I will have one to change off with. It is enabling me to work top speed at my press machine 8 hrs a day,” this I threw in for sadness, for melancholy soft flat groin pad which might lurk in Edith’s memory swamp as soiled lever, as stretched switch to bumpy apotheosis wet rocket come out of the fine print slum where the only trumpet solo is grandfather’s stringy cough and underwear money problems.

Edith was wiggling her saliva-covered kneecaps, bouncing on the rivulets of lubrication. Her thighs were aglow with froth, and her pale anus was excavated by cruel false fingernails. She screamed for deliverance, the flight her imagination commanded denied by a half-enlightened cunt.

– Do something, F. I beg you. But don’t touch me.

– Edith, darling! What have I done to you?

– Stand back, F.!

– What can I do?

– Try.

– Torture story?

– Anything, F. Hurry.

– The Jews?

– No. Too foreign.

– 1649? Brébeuf and Lalemant?

– Anything.

So I began to recite my schoolboy lesson of how the Iroquois killed the Jesuits Brébeuf and Lalemant, whose scorched and mangled relics were discovered the morning of the twentieth by a member of the Society and seven armed Frenchmen. “Ils y trouuerent vn spectacle d’horreur….”

On the afternoon of the sixteenth the Iroquois had bound Brébeuf to a stake. They commenced to scorch him from head to foot.

– Everlasting flames for those who persecute the worshipers of God, Brébeuf threatened them in the tone of a master.

As the priest spoke the Indians cut away his lower lip and forced a red-hot iron down his throat. He made no sign or sound of discomfort.

Then they led out Lalemant. Around his naked body they had fastened strips of bark, smeared with pitch. When Lalemant saw his Superior, the bleeding unnatural aperture exposing his teeth, the handle of the heated implement still protruding from the seared and ruined mouth, he cried out in the words of St. Paul:

– We are made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men.

Lalemant flung himself at Brébeuf’s feet. The Iroquois took him, bound him to a stake, and ignited the vegetation in which he was trussed. He screamed for heaven’s help, but he was not to die so quickly.

They brought a collar made of hatchets heated red-hot and conferred it on Brébeuf. He did not flinch.

An ex-convert, who had backslid, now shouldered forward and demanded that hot water be poured on their heads, since the missionaries had poured so much cold water on them. A kettle was slung, water boiled, and then poured slowly on the heads of the captive priests.

– We baptize you, they laughed, that you may be happy in heaven. You told us that the more one suffers on earth, the happier he is in heaven.

Brébeuf stood like a rock. After a number of revolting tortures they scalped him. He was still alive when they laid open his breast. A crowd came forward to drink the blood of so courageous an enemy and to devour his heart. His death astonished his murderers. His ordeal lasted four hours.

Lalemant, physically weak from childhood, was taken back to the house. There he was tortured all night, until, sometime after dawn, one Indian wearied of the extended entertainment and administered a fatal blow with his hatchet. There was no part of his body which was not burned, “even to his eyes, in the sockets of which these wretches had placed live coals.” His ordeal lasted seventeen hours.

– How do you feel, Edith?

There was no need for me to ask. My recitals had served only to bring her closer to a summit she could not achieve. She moaned in terrible hunger, her gooseflesh shining in supplication that she might be freed from the unbearable coils of secular pleasure, and soar into that blind realm, so like sleep, so like death, that journey of pleasure beyond pleasure, where each man travels as an orphan toward an atomic ancestry, more anonymous, more nourishing than the arms of blood or foster family.

I knew she would never make it.

– F., get me out of this, she moaned pitifully.

I plugged in the Danish Vibrator. A degrading spectacle followed. As soon as those delicious electric oscillations occupied my hand like an army of trained seaweed, weaving, swathing, caressing – I was reluctant to surrender the instrument to Edith. Somehow, in the midst of her juicy ordeal, she noticed me trying to slip the Perfected Suction Bracers down into the shadows of my underwear.

She lifted herself out of her pools and lunged at me.

– Give me that. You rat!

Bearlike (some ancestral memory?) she swung at me. I had not had the opportunity to fasten the Improved Wonder Straps, and the Vibrator flew out of my embrace. Thus the bear, with a swipe of his clawed paw, scoops the fish from the bosom of the stream. Crablike, the D.V. scuttled across the polished floor, humming like an overturned locomotive.

– You’re selfish, F., Edith snarled.

– That’s the observation of a liar and an ingrate, I said as gently as possible.

– Get out of my way.

– I love you, I said as I inched my way toward the D.V. I love you, Edith. My methods may have been wrong, but I never stopped loving you. Was it selfish of me to try to end your pain, yours and his (you, dear old comrade)? I saw pain everywhere. I could not bear to look into your eyes, so maggoty were they with pain and desire. I could not bear to kiss either of you, for each of your embraces disclosed a hopeless, mordant plea. In your laughter, though it were for money or for sunsets, I heard your throats ripped with greed. In the midst of the high jump, I saw the body wither. Between the spurts of come, you launched your tidings of regret. Thousands built, thousands lay squashed beneath tubes of highway. You were not happy to brush your teeth. I gave you breasts with nipples: could you nourish anyone? I gave you prick with separate memory: could you train a race? I took you to a complete movie of the Second World War: did you feel any lighter when we walked out? No, you threw yourselves upon the thorns of research. I sucked you, and you howled to dispense me something more than poison. With every handshake you wept for a lost garden. You found a cutting edge for every object. I couldn’t stand the racket of your pain. You were smeared with blood and tortured scabs. You needed bandages – there was no time to boil the germs out of them – I grabbed what was at hand. Caution was a luxury. There was no time for me to examine my motives. Self-purification would have been an alibi. Beholding such a spectacle of misery, I was free to try anything. I can’t answer for my own erection. I have no explanation for my own vile ambitions. Confronted with your pus, I could not stop to examine my direction, whether or not I was aimed at a star. As I limped down the street every window broadcast a command: Change! Purify! Experiment! Cauterize! Reverse! Burn! Preserve! Teach! Believe me, Edith, I had to act, and act fast. That was my nature. Call me Dr. Frankenstein with a deadline. I seemed to wake up in the middle of a car accident, limbs strewn everywhere, detached voices screaming for comfort, severed fingers pointing homeward, all the debris withering like sliced cheese out of Cellophane – and all I had in the wrecked world was a needle and thread, so I got down on my knees, I pulled pieces out of the mess and I started to stitch them together. I had an idea of what a man should look like, but it kept changing. I couldn’t devote a lifetime to discovering the ideal physique. All I heard was pain, all I saw was mutilation. My needle going so madly, sometimes I found I’d run the thread right through my own flesh and I was joined to one of my own grotesque creations – I’d rip us apart – and then I heard my own voice howling with the others, and I knew that I was also truly part of the disaster. But I also realized that I was not the only one on my knees sewing frantically. There were others like me, making the same monstrous mistakes, driven by the same impure urgency, stitching themselves into the ruined heap, painfully extracting themselves –

– F., you’re weeping.

– Forgive me.

– Stop blubbering. See, you’ve lost your hard-on.

– It’s all breaking down now. My discipline is collapsing. Have you any idea how much discipline I had to use in training the two of you?

We both leaped for the Vibrator at the same instant. Her fluids made her slippery. For a second in our struggle I wished we were making love, for all her nozzles were stiff and fragrant. I grabbed her around the waist, before I knew it her bum popped out of my bear hug like a wet watermelon seed, her thighs went by like a missed train, and there I was with empty lubricated arms, nose squashed against the expensive mahogany floor.

Old friend, are you still with me? Do not despair. I promised you that this would end in ecstasy. Yes, your wife was naked during this story. Somewhere in the dark room, draped over the back of a chair like a huge exhausted butterfly, her Gal panties, stiffened by the slightest masonry of sweat, dreamed of ragged fingernails, and I dreamed with them – large, fluttering, descending dreams crisscrossed with vertical scratches. For me it was the end of Action. I would keep on trying, but I knew I had failed the both of you, and that both of you had failed me. I had one trick left, but it was a dangerous one, and I’d never used it. Events, as I will show, would force me into it, and it would end with Edith’s suicide, my hospitalization, your cruel ordeal in the treehouse. How many times did I warn you that you would be whipped by loneliness?

So I lay there in Argentine. The Danish Vibrator hummed like a whittler as it rose and fell over Edith’s young contours. It was cold and black in the room. Occasionally one of her glistening kneecaps would catch a glint of moonlight as she jerked her box up and down in desperate supplication. She had stopped moaning; I assumed she had approached the area of intense breathless silence which the orgasm loves to flood with ventriloquist gasps and cosmic puppet plots.

– Thank God, she whispered at last.

– I’m glad you could come, Edith. I’m very happy for you.

– Thank God it’s off me. I had to blow it. It made me do oral intimacy.

– Wha–?

Before I could question her further it was upon my buttocks, its idiot hum revved up to a psychotic whine. The detachable crotch piece inserted itself between my hairy thighs, ingeniously providing soft support for my frightened testicles. I had heard of these things happening before, and I knew it would leave me bitter and full of self-loathing. Like a cyanide egg dropped into the gas chamber the D.V. released a glob of Formula Cream at the top of the muscular cleavage I had labored so hard to define. As my body heat melted it to the trickle which would grease its shameful entry, several comfortable Latex cups assumed exciting holds here and there. The elastic Developer seemed to have a life of its own, and the Fortune Straps spread everything apart, and I felt the air-conditioning coolly evaporating sweat and cream from tiny surfaces I hardly knew existed. I was ready to lie there for ten days. I was not even surprised. I knew it would be insatiable but I was ready to submit. I heard Edith faintly calling to me just as the Foam Pad rose the full length. After that I heard nothing. It was like a thousand Sex Philosophers working over me with perfect cooperation. I may have screamed at the first thrust of the White Club, but the Formula Cream kept coming, and I think a cup was converted to handle excreta. It hummed in my ears like alabaster lips.

I don’t know how long it swarmed among my private pieces.

Edith made it to a light switch. She couldn’t bear to look at me.

– Are you happy, F.?

I did not answer.

– Should I do something, F.?

Perhaps the D.V. answered with a sated whir. It pulled in the American Laces fast as an Italian eater, the suck went out of the cups, my scrotum dropped unceremoniously, and the machine slipped off my quivering body meat. I think I was happy….

– Should I pull out the plug, F.?

– Do what you want, Edith. I’m washed up.

Edith yanked at the electric cord. The D.V. shuddered, fell silent, and stopped. Edith sighed with relief, but too soon. The D.V. began to produce a shattering sonic whistle.

– Does it have batteries?

– No, Edith. It doesn’t have batteries.

She covered her breasts with crossed arms.

– You mean –?

– Yes. It’s learned to feed itself.

Edith backed into a corner as the Danish Vibrator advanced toward her. She stooped queerly, as if she were trying to hide her cunt behind her thighs. I could not stir from the puddle of jelly in which I had been buggered by countless improvements. It made its way across the hotel room in a leisurely fashion, straps and cups flowing behind it, like a Hawaiian skirt made of grass and brassières.

It had learned to feed itself.

(O Father, Nameless and Free of Description, lead me from the Desert of the Possible. Too long I have dealt with Events. Too long I labored to become an Angel. I chased Miracles with a bag of Power to salt their wild Tails. I tried to dominate Insanity so I could steal its Information. I tried to program the Computers with Insanity. I tried to create Grace to prove that Grace existed. Do not punish Charles Axis. We could not see the Evidence so we stretched our Memories. Dear Father, accept this confession: we did not train ourselves to Receive because we believed there wasn’t Anything to Receive and we could not endure with this Belief.)

– Help, help me, F.

But I was fastened to the floor with a tingling nail, the head of which was my anus.

It took its time getting to her. Edith, meanwhile, her back squeezed into the right angle, had sunk to a defenseless sitting position, her lovely legs spread apart. Numbed by horror and the prospect of disgusting thrills, she was ready to submit. I have stared at many orifices, but never have I seen one wear such an expression. The soft hairs were thrown back from the dripping lips like a Louis Quatorze sunburst. The layers of lip spread and gathered like someone playing with a lens opening. The Danish Vibrator mounted her slowly, and soon the child (Edith was twenty) was doing things with her mouth and fingers that no one, believe me, old friend, no one has ever done to you. Perhaps this was what you wanted from her. But you did not know how to encourage her, and this was not your fault. No one could. That is why I tried to lead the fuck away from mutual dialing.

The whole assault lasted maybe twenty-five minutes. Before the tenth minute passed she was begging the thing to perform in her armpits, specifying which nipple was hungriest, twisting her torso to offer it hidden pink terrain – until the Danish Vibrator began to command. Then Edith, quite happily, become nothing but a buffet of juice, flesh, excrement, muscle to serve its appetite.

Of course, the implications of her pleasure are enormous.

The Danish Vibrator slipped off her face, uncovering a bruised soft smile.

– Stay, she whispered.

It climbed onto the window sill, purring deeply, revved up to a sharp moan, and launched itself through the glass, which broke and fell over its exit like a fancy stage curtain.

– Make it stay.

– It’s gone.

We dragged our strange bodies to the window. The perfumed sticky tropical night wafted into the room as we leaned out to watch the Danish Vibrator move down the marble stories of the hotel. When it reached the ground it crossed the parking lot and soon achieved the beach.

– Oh, God, F., it was beautiful. Feel this.

– I know, Edith. Feel this.

A curious drama began to unfold beneath us on the deserted moonlit sand. As the D.V. made slowly toward the waves breaking in dark flowers on the bright shore, a figure emerged from a grove of ghostly palms. It was a man wearing an immaculate white bathing suit. I do not know whether he was running to intercept the Danish Vibrator with the intention of violently disabling it, or merely wished to observe at closer range its curiously graceful progress toward the Atlantic.

How soft the night seemed, like the last verse of a lullaby. With one hand on his hip and the other scratching his head, the tiny figure beneath us watched, as did we, the descent of the apparatus into the huge rolling sea, which closed over its luminous cups like the end of a civilization.

– Will it come back, F.? To us?

– It doesn’t matter. It’s in the world.

We stood close to each other in the window, two figures on a rung of a high marble ladder built into the vast cloudless night, leaning on nothing.

A small breeze detached a wisp of her hair and I felt its tiny fall across my cheek.

– I love you, Edith.

– I love you, F.

– And I love your husband.

– So do I.

– Nothing is as I planned it, but now I know what will happen.

– So do I, F.

– Oh, Edith, something is beginning in my heart, a whisper of rare love, but I will never be able to fulfill it. It is my prayer that your husband will.

– He will, F.

– But he will do it alone. He can only do it alone.

– I know, she said. We must not be with him.

A great sadness overtook us as we looked out over the miles of sea, an egoless sadness that we did not own or claim. Here and there the restless water kept an image of the shattered moon. We said goodbye to you, old lover. We did not know when or how the parting would be completed, but it began that moment.

There was a professional knock on the blond door.

– It must be him, I said.

– Should we put our clothes on?

– Why bother.

We did not even have to open the door. The waiter had a passkey. He was wearing the old raincoat and mustache, but underneath he was perfectly nude. We turned toward him.

– Do you like Argentine? I asked for the sake of civil conversation.

– I miss the newsreels, he said.

– And the parades? I offered.

– And the parades. But I can get everything else here. Ah!

He noticed our reddened organs and began to fondle them with great interest.

– Wonderful! Wonderful! I see you have been well prepared.

What followed was old hat. I have no intention of adding to any pain which might be remaindered to you, by a minute description of the excesses we performed with him. Lest you should worry for us, let me say that we had, indeed, been well prepared, and we hardly cared to resist his sordid exciting commands, even when he made us kiss the whip.

– I have a treat for you, he said at last.

– He has a treat for us, Edith.

– Shoot, she replied wearily.

From the pocket of his overcoat he withdrew a bar of soap.

– Three in a tub, he said merrily in his heavy accent.

So we splashed around with him. He lathered us from head to foot, proclaiming all the while the special qualities of the soap, which, as you must now understand, was derived from melted human flesh.

That bar is now in your hands. We were baptized by it, your wife and I. I wonder what you will do with it.

You see, I have shown you how it happens, from style to style, from kiss to kiss.

There is more, there is the history of Catherine Tekakwitha – you shall have all of it.

Wearily we dried each other with the opulent towels of the hotel. The waiter was very careful with our parts.

– I had millions of these at my disposal, he said without a trace of nostalgia.

He slipped into his raincoat and spent some time before the full-length mirror playing with his mustache and slanting his hair across his forehead in just the way he liked.

– And don’t forget to inform the Police Gazette. We’ll bargain over the soap later.

– Wait!

As he opened the door to go, Edith threw her arms about his neck, pulled him to the dry bed, and cradled his famous head against her breasts.

What did you do that for? I demanded of her after the waiter had made his stiff exit, and nothing remained of him but the vague stink of his sulphurous flatulence.

For a second I thought he was an A——.

Oh, Edith!

I sank to my knees before your wife and I laid my mouth on her toes. The room was a mess, the floor spotted with pools of fluid and suds, but she rose from it all like a lovely statue with epaulets and nipple tips of moonlight.

Oh, Edith! It doesn’t matter what I’ve done to you, the tits, the cunt, the hydraulic buttock failures, all my Pygmalion tampering, it means nothing, I know now. Acne and all, you were out of my reach, you were beyond my gadgetry Who are you?

You’re not joking? Then I’m only fit to suck your toes.

Wiggle.

Later and later.

I remember a story you once told me, old comrade, of how the Indians looked at death. The Indians believed that after physical death the spirit made a long journey heavenward. It was a hard, dangerous journey, and many did not complete it. A treacherous river had to be crossed on a log which bounced through wild rapids. A huge howling dog harassed the traveler. There was a narrow path between dancing boulders which crashed together, pulverizing the pilgrim who could not dance with them. The Hurons believed that there was a bark hut beside this path. Here lived Oscotarach, meaning the Head-Piercer. It was his function to remove the brains from the skulls of all who went by, “as a necessary preparation for immortality.”

Ask yourself. Perhaps the treehouse where you suffer is the hut of Oscotarach. You did not know the operation was so long and clumsy. Again and again the blunt tomahawk pokes among the porridge. The moonlight wants to get into your skull. The sparkling alleys of the icy sky want to stream through your eyeholes. The night winter air which seems like “diamonds held in solution,” it wants to flood the empty bowl.

Ask yourself. Was I your Oscotarach? I pray that I was. The surgery is deep in progress, darling. I am with you.

But who could perform the operation on Oscotarach? When you understand this question, you will understand my ordeal. I had to apply to public wards in pursuit of my own operation. The tree-house was too lonely for me: I had to apply to politics.

The thumb of my left hand was all that politics relieved me of. (Mary Voolnd does not mind.) The thumb of my left hand is probably rotting this very moment on some downtown Montréal roof, or splinters of it in the soot of a tin chimney. That is my relic case. Charity, old friend, charity for the secularists. The treehouse is very small and we are many with an appetite for the sky in our heads.

But with my thumb went the metal body of the statue of the Queen of England on Sherbrooke Street, or as I prefer, Rue Sherbrooke.

BOOM! WHOOSH!

All the parts of that hollow stately body which had sat for so long like a boulder in the pure stream of our blood and destiny – SPLATTER! – plus the thumb of one patriot.

What a rain there was that day! All the umbrellas of the English police could not protect the city from that change of climate.

QUEBEC LIBRE!

Alarmclock Bombs!

QUEBEC OUI OTTAWA NON.

Ten thousand voices that only knew how to cheer a rubber puck past a goalie’s pads, now singing: MERDE A LA REINE D’ANGLETERRE.

ELIZABETH GO HOME.

There is a hole on Rue Sherbrooke. Once upon a time it was plugged with the rump of a foreign queen. A seed of pure blood was planted in that hole, and from it there shall spring a mighty harvest.

I knew what I was doing when I wedged the bomb into the green copper folds of her imperial lap. I rather liked the statue, as a matter of fact. Not a few studious cunts I fingered under those shadowy royal auspices. So I ask your charity, friend. We who cannot dwell in the Clear Light, we must deal with symbols.

I have nothing against the Queen of England. Even in my heart I never resented her for not being Jackie Kennedy. She is, to my mind, a very gallant lady, victimized by whoever it is who designs the tops of her uniforms.

It was a lonely ride the Queen and Prince Philip took through the armored streets of Québec that October day in 1964. The real-estate tycoon of Atlantis couldn’t have been more lonely the day the wave rolled in. The feet of Ozymandias had more company in the sandstorm of ’89. They sat very straight in the bulletproof auto like children trying to read the subtitles of a foreign movie. The route was lined with yellow riot squads and the backs of a hostile crowd. I do not gloat over their solitude. And I try not to envy yours. After all, it was I who pointed you to a place where I cannot go. I point there now – with my lost thumb.

Charity!

Your teacher shows you how it happens.

They walk differently now, the young men and women of Montréal. Music floats out of manholes. Their clothes are different – no smelly pockets bulging with Kleenex bundles of illegal come. Shoulders are thrown back, organs signal merrily through transparent underwear. Good fucks, like a shipload of joyous swimming rats, have migrated from marble English banks to revolutionary cafés. There is love on Rue Ste. Catherine, patroness of spinsters. History ties the broken shoelaces of a people’s destiny and the march is on. Do not be deceived: a nation’s pride is a tangible thing: it is measured by how many hard-ons live beyond the solitary dream, by decibels of the female rocket moan.

First secular miracle: La Canadienne, hitherto victim of motel frost, hitherto beloved of nun’s democracy, hitherto upholstered by the black belts of Code Napoléon – revolution has done what only wet Hollywood did before.

Watch the words, watch how it happens.

It is not merely because I am French that I long for an independent Québec. It is not merely because I do not want our people to become a quaint drawing on the corner of a tourist map that I long for thick national borders. It is not merely because without independence we will be nothing but a Louisiana of the north, a few good restaurants and a Latin Quarter the only relics of our blood. It is not merely because I know that lofty things like destiny and a rare spirit must be guaranteed by dusty things like flags, armies, and passports.

I want to hammer a beautiful colored bruise on the whole American monolith. I want a breathing chimney on the corner of the continent. I want a country to break in half so men can learn to break their lives in half. I want History to jump on Canada’s spine with sharp skates. I want the edge of a tin can to drink America’s throat. I want two hundred million to know that everything can be different, any old different.

I want the State to doubt itself seriously. I want the Police to become a limited company and fall with the stock market. I want the Church to have divisions and fight on the both sides of Movies.

I confess! I confess!

Did you see how it happened?

Before my arrest and subsequent incarceration in this hospital for the criminally insane, I spent my days writing pamphlets against Anglo-Saxon imperialism, glueing clocks to bombs, the ordinary subversive program. I missed your big kisses but I couldn’t detain you from or follow on a trip I charted for you precisely because I couldn’t go myself.

But at night! Night spilled like gasoline on my most hopeless dreams.

The English did to us what we did to the Indians, and the Americans did to the English what the English did to us. I demanded revenge for everyone. I saw cities burning, I saw movies falling into blackness. I saw the maize on fire. I saw the Jesuits punished. I saw the trees taking back the long-house roofs. I saw the shy deer murdering to get their dresses back. I saw the Indians punished. I saw chaos eat the gold roof of Parliament. I saw water dissolve the hoofs of drinking animals. I saw the bonfires covered with urine, and the gas stations swallowed up entire, highway after highway falling into the wild swamps.

Then we were very close. I was not so far behind you then.

O Friend, take my spirit hand and remember me. You were loved by a man who read your heart very tenderly, who sought your unformed dreams as his resting place. Think of my body from time to time.

I promised you a joyous letter, didn’t I?

It is my intention to relieve you of your final burden: the useless History under which you suffer in such confusion. Men of your nature never get far beyond the Baptism.

Life chose me to be a man of facts: I accept the responsibility. You mustn’t meddle any longer in this shit. Avoid even the circumstances of Catherine Tekakwitha’s death and the ensuing documented miracles. Read it with that part of your mind which you delegate to watching out for blackflies and mosquitoes.

Say goodbye to constipation and loneliness.

F.’S INVOCATION TO HISTORY IN THE OLD STYLE

The miracle we all are waiting for

is waiting until Parliament falls down

and House of Archives is a house no more

and fathers are unpoisoned by renown.

The medals and the records of abuse

can’t help us on our pilgrimage to lust,

but like whips certain perverts never use,

compel our flesh in paralyzing trust.

I see an Orphan, lawless and serene,

standing in a corner of the sky,

body something like bodies that have been,

but not the flaw of naming in his eye.

Bred close to the ovens, he’s burnt inside.

Light, wind, cold, dark – they use him like a Bride!

F.’S INVOCATION TO HISTORY IN THE MIDDLE STYLE

History is a Scabbie[1] Point[2]

For putting Cash[3] to sleep

Shooting up[4] the Peanut[5] Shit[6]

Of all we need to keep.[7]

1. Dirty, germ-laden, infected, leading to the Scabbies or inflammation of puncture holes, blood poisoning and Hepatitis. Also blunt or rusty.

2. Drug addict’s argot for the hypodermic needle (No. 12).

3. Underworld argot for the conscience, the brain, or any kind of painful consciousness. I have not heard the word used outside of Montréal and environs, and there mainly on Blvd. St. Laurent and the now defunct Northeastern Lunch. It is popular among the criminal element of both French and English extraction. A long period without narcotics, an accidental encounter with a relative or former parish priest, an interview with a social worker or jazz anthropologist is known as “Cash-Work” or “Un job de cash.”

4. The introduction of the narcotic into a vein. The hypodermic needle is secured to a common eyedropper by means of a narrow cardboard “collar.”

5. Coprophagist’s[a][b] argot for anything fake or artificial. Originally a term of scorn, it is sometimes employed as an expression of surprised endearment, as in “Why, you little peanut!” or the more explicit French “Queue cacahuète!” The term originated among the orthodox when a splinter group of “Marranos” in Ontario began using peanut butter in cult rituals in a bid for respectability and community acceptance. In the addict’s vocabulary it describes a pure drug which has been adulterated with flour, milk sugar, or quinine so as to increase its volume and multiply its market value.

6. Originally heroin and the “hard drugs,” but now in general use for any euphorant from the harmless Indian hemp to the innocuous aspirin. It is interesting to note that users of heroin are chronically constipated,[c] the drug rendering the bowels inactive.

7. “To keep” or “to hold” can mean, in addicts’ argot, the condition of possessing narcotics with a view to selling them rather than consuming them oneself.

a. ĸοπρος (kopros) – Greek for dung, of course. But compare with the Sanskrit čakrt, meaning manure. Think of yourself as a sponge diver, darling. Do you comprehend how many fathoms crush your mossy fumbling?

b. φαγειν (phag-ein) – to eat, in Greek. But look at the Sanskrit: bhájati – to share, partake; bháksati – to enjoy, consume; bhágaš – happiness, wealth. The very words you use are shadows on the sunless ocean floor. None of them carries a lesson or a prayer.

c. Con-stipatum, Latin past participle of stipare – to pack, press, stuff, cram. Cognate with the Greek στîφος (stiphos) – “a heap firmly pressed together.” Today in modern Athens το στîφος means a thick crowd, a swarm, a horde. I’m feeding the cables down to you, friend, so that you can begin to breathe, and soon, because of me, you will grow your own lovely silver gills.

THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF TEKAKWITHA’S LIFE

AND THE ENSUING MIRACLES

1

There was a convert to Christianity named Okenratarihen, who was an Onneyout chief. He was very zealous in his new faith, just as he had been in his old life. His name means Cendre Chaude, or Hot Cinder, and this was a description of his nature. It was his dream that all the Mohawks would embrace the new pale God. In 1677 he organized an apostolic mission into the territory of the Iroquois. He took with him a Huron from Lorette, and another convert who, by “coincidence” (if we wish to diminish Providence by the term), was a relative of Catherine Tekakwitha. The first village they came to was Kahnawaké, the same village where lived our neophyte and her confessor, le P. de Lamberville. Okenratarihen was a superb orator. He held the village spellbound, and Catherine Tekakwitha listened as he told about his new life in the mission of Sault Saint-Louis.

– The spirit was not with me before. I lived like an animal. Then I heard about the Great Spirit, the true Master of the sky and the earth, and now I live like a man.

Catherine Tekakwitha wanted to go to this place which he described so vividly. Le P. de Lamberville wished to secure the remarkable child in a more hospitable Christian environment, so he listened sympathetically to her request. Happily, her uncle was at Fort Orange (Albany) trading with the English. The priest knew that her aunts would not resist any plan that removed the girl from their midst. Okenratarihen wished to continue his mission, so it was decided that Catherine should escape with his two companions. The preparations were brief and secret. Early in the morning they launched their canoe. Le P. de Lamberville blessed them as they paddled into the drifts of mist. In her hand Catherine held a letter to the Fathers at Sault. She whispered to herself.

– Goodbye, my village. Goodbye, my homeland.

They followed the Mohawk River in its eastern course, then north up the Hudson River, which was laced with vegetative obstacles, huge overhanging branches, tangled vines, impenetrable thickets. They entered Lac Saint-Sacrement, which today is called Lake George, grateful for its still waters. They continued due north, into Lake Champlain, up the Richelieu River to Fort Chambly. Here they abandoned the canoe and traveled by foot through the thick forests, which, even today, cover the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. In the autumn of 1677 the three reached the mission Saint-François-Xavier de Sault Saint-Louis. That is all you have to know. Do not ponder the promise to her uncle which Catherine Tekakwitha broke. It will soon come clear that Catherine Tekakwitha was not bound by secular vows. Do not worry about her old uncle humming a desolate love song, as he tried to pick her trail out of the falling leaves.

2

I’ve got to go fast because the organs of Mary Voolnd will not buzz forever in sexual surprise like an eternal pinball machine and maybe even my four-fingered hand will tire. But I will give you everything you have to know. The priests in charge of the mission were le P. Pierre Cholenec and le P. Claude Chauchetière, our old sources. They read the letter which the girl carried: “Catherine Tegakouita will live at Sault. Kindly assume responsibility for her direction. Soon you will know the treasure we have given you. Qu’entre vos mains, il profite à la gloire de Dieu and to the health of a soul which assuredly is dear to Him.” The girl was assigned to the cabin of Anastasie, an old woman who was one of the first converted Iroquois, and who, “coincidentally,” had known Catherine Tekakwitha’s Algonquin mother. The child loved the mission, it seemed. She knelt at the foot of the wooden cross on the shore of the Saint Lawrence, and there beyond the boiling water, the distant green horizon, and the mountain of Ville-Marie. Behind her was the tranquil Christian village, and all the meaningful tortures which I shall describe. The place of the cross by the river was her favorite spot, and I imagine she spoke to the fishes and raccoons and herons.

3

Here is the most important incident of her new life. In the winter of 1678-1679 another marriage project developed. Everybody, even Anastasie, wanted Catherine Tekakwitha to have her cunt opened. Here in this Christian village, or there among the heathens, it was all the same. Every community was, by its nature, ultimately secular. But she had sailed her cunt away and it did not matter who came to claim it, a Mohawk brave or a Christian hunter. There was a nice young fellow they had in mind. Not only that, but the relative who had rescued her and who provided for her sustenance hadn’t thought for a moment that misty morning that he was assuming a lifetime economic obligation.

– I won’t eat anything.

– It’s not the food, dear. It’s just unnatural.

She ran in tears to le P. Cholenec. He was a wise man who lived in the world, lived in the world, lived in the world.

– Well, my child, they have a point.

– Arrrrggghhhh!

– Think about the future. The future starves.

– I don’t care what happens to my body.

But you care about her body, don’t you, my old friend and disciple?

4

There was great fervor in the mission. Nobody liked his skin too much. Their pre-baptismal sins hung about their necks like the heavy tooth necklaces they had thrown away, and they sought to erase those old shadows with rigorous penitence. “Ils en faisaient une rigoureuse pénitence,” says le P. Cholenec. Here are some of the things they did. Think of the village as a mandala or a Brueghel game painting or a numbered diagram. Look down at the mission and see the bodies distributed here and there, look down from a hovering helicopter at the distribution of painful bodies in the snow. Surely this is a diagram to be memorized on the cushion of your thumb. I haven’t got time to make this description gory. Just read it through the prism of your personal blisters, and of those blisters choose the one you got by mistake. They liked to draw blood from their bodies, they liked to pull some of their blood outside. Some wore iron harnesses with spikes on the inside. Some wore iron harnesses to which they attached a load of wood which they dragged everywhere they went. Here is a naked woman rolling in the 40-below snow. Here is another woman buried up to her neck in a drift beside the frozen river, reciting her Rosary in this strange position, and let us remember that the Indian translation of this angelic salutation takes twice as long to say as the French one. Here is a naked man chopping a hole in the ice, and then he lowers himself in up to his waist, and then he recites “plusieurs dizaines de chapelet.” He pulls out his body like an ice mermaid, the erection perpetuated as it formed. Here is a woman who took her three-year-old daughter into the hole, because she wanted to expiate the child’s sins in advance. They waited for the winter, these converts, and they stretched their bodies before it, and it passed over them like a huge iron comb. Catherine Tekakwitha got an iron harness and she stumbled through her duties. Like St. Thérèse she could say, “Ou souffrir, ou mourir.” Catherine Tekakwitha came to Anastasie and asked:

– What do you think is the most horrible painful thing?

– My daughter, I don’t know anything worse than fire.

– Me neither.

This is a documented conversation. It took place on a Canadian winter across the solid river from Montréal in 1678. Catherine waited until everyone was asleep. She went down to the cross beside the river and built a fire. Then she spent several slow hours caressing her pathetic legs with hot coals, just as the Iroquois did to their slaves. She had seen it done and she always wanted to know what it felt like. Thus she branded herself a slave to Jesus. I refuse to make this interesting, old friend, it wouldn’t be good for you, and all my training might be for nothing. This is not an entertainment. This is play. Besides, you know what pain looks like, that kind of pain, you’ve been inside newsreel Belsen.

5

Kneeling at the root of the wood cross Catherine Tekakwitha prayed and fasted. She did not pray that her soul should be favored in heaven. She did not fast so that her marriage would never nourish history. She did not cut her stomach with stones so that the mission would prosper. She did not know why she prayed and fasted. These mortifications she performed in a poverty of spirit. Never believe that the stigmata do not hurt. Never make a decision when you have to pee. Never stay in the room when your mother has her fortune told. Never think that the Prime Minister envies you. You see, darling, I have to trap you on an altar before I can tell you anything, otherwise my instruction is just a headline, just a fashion.

6

She wandered through the leafy woods on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. She saw the deer start from the thicket, listening even in the arc of his leap. She saw the rabbit disappear into his burrow. She heard the squirrel rattling in his hoard of acorns. She watched a pigeon building a nest in a pine tree. In two hundred years the pigeons would sell out and loaf on statues in Dominion Square. She saw the flocks of geese shaped like unstable arrow heads. She fell to her knees and she cried, “O Master of Life, must our bodies depend on these things?” Very still, she sat on the shore of the river. She saw the leaping sturgeon scattering drops like beads of wampum. She saw the bony perch, fast as a single flute note in a wild song. She saw the long silver pike and below him she saw the crawfish, each on his separate layer of water. Letting her fingers drift, she cried, “O Master of Life, must our bodies depend on these things?” Slowly she walked back to the mission. She saw the field of corn, yellow and dry, plumes and tassels rustling in the wind like a crowd of aged sacrificial dancers. She saw the little blueberry bushes and strawberry bushes and made a tiny cross out of two pine needles and a drop of spruce gum and erected it beside a fallen gooseberry. A robin listened as she wept, a fucking robin stopped in his tracks and listened. I have to start you off with fiction, such is your heritage. Now it was night and the whippoorwill raised his melancholy song like a ghostly teepee over her weeping, a teepee or a pyramid, from a long way off it has three sides, the tune of the whippoorwill. Some men deal in teepees, some in pyramids, and it does not seem to matter, but in 1966, and in your predicament – it matters! “O Master of Life,” she cried, “must our bodies depend on these?” On Saturdays and Sundays Catherine Tekakwitha took no food at all. When they forced her to drink soup she would only do so after stirring ashes into it. “Elle se dédommageait en mêlant de la cendre à sa soupe.”

7

O God, forgive me, but I see it on my thumb, the whole wintry village looks like a Nazi medical experiment.

“On comparing five Iroquois heads, I find that they give an average internal capacity of eighty-eight cubic inches, which is within two inches of the Caucasian mean.” – Morton, Crania Americana, page 195. It is remarkable that the internal capacity of the skulls of the barbarous American tribes is greater than that of either the Mexicans or Peruvians. “The difference in volume is chiefly confined to the occipital and basal portions” – in other words, to the region of animal propensities. See J. S. Phillips, Admeasurements of Crania of the Principal Groups of Indians in the United States.

This is a footnote by Francis Parkman on page 32 of his book about the Jesuits in North America, published in 1867. I memorized it while looking over your shoulder in the library. Do you understand, now, that with my photographic memory it would have been disastrous to hover too long beside your ear?

8

Catherine Tekakwitha’s best friend at the mission was a young widow who had been baptized under the name Marie-Thérèse. She was an Onneyout, her original name being Tegaigenta. She was a very beautiful young woman. At the mission of la Prairie she was famous for her disorderly conduct. In the winter of 1676 she left with her husband on a hunting expedition along the Outaouais River. There were eleven in the party, including an infant. It was a bad winter. Wind blew away the paw prints. Heavy snows made the track impossible. One of the party was killed and eaten. The baby ate some amid jokes. Then there was famine. First of all they ate some little pieces of skin which they had brought to make shoes with. Then they ate bark. Tegaigenta’s husband became sick. She stood guard over him. Two hunters, a Mohawk and a Tsonnontouan, went after game. At the end of a week the Mohawk came back alone, empty-handed but burping. The party decided to press on. Tegaigenta refused to abandon her husband. The others left, winking. Two days later she rejoined the party. When she arrived the group was sitting around the widow of the Tsonnontouan and her two children. Before eating the three of them, one of the hunters asked Tegaigenta:

– How do the Christians regard anthropophagist meals? (repas d’anthropophage).

It didn’t matter what she answered. She ran into the snow. She would be roasted next, she knew. She looked back over her sweaty sex life. She had come on the hunt without confessing. She asked God to forgive her and promised to change her life if she got back to the mission. Of the eleven persons who comprised the hunting party only five returned to la Prairie. Marie-Thérèse was one of them. The mission of la Prairie moved to Sault Saint-Louis in the autumn of 1676. The girls met shortly after Easter in 1678 in front of the little church which was nearing completion. Catherine began the

– Let’s go inside, Marie-Thérèse.

– I don’t deserve to, Catherine.

– Neither do I. What did it taste like?

– What part?

– In general.

– Pork.

– Strawberries taste like pork too.

9

One always saw the girls together. They avoided the company of everyone else. They prayed together at the cross beside the river. They spoke only of God and things pertaining to God. Catherine looked at the young widow’s body very carefully. She inspected the nipples which had been chewed by men. They were lying on the soft moss.

– Turn over.

She looked down at the naked haunches, etched delicately with fern prints.

Then Catherine described to her friend exactly what she saw. Then it was her turn to lie face down.

– I can’t see anything different.

– I didn’t think so.

10

She gave up eating on Wednesdays. On Saturday they prepared for Confession by whipping each other with birch switches. Catherine always insisted on getting undressed first. “Catherine, toujours la première pour la pénitence, se mettait à genoux et recevait les coups de verges.” Why did she insist on being beaten first? Because, when it was her turn to whip, her effort would aggravate the lash opening she had received at the hand of her friend. Catherine always complained that Marie-Thérèse was not doing it hard enough, and permitted her to stop only when her shoulders were covered with blood, enough blood to drip onto leaves: that was the test of how much blood. Here is one of her prayers, as recorded by le P. Claude Chauchetière:

– My Jesus, I have to take chances with you. I love you but I have offended you. I am here to fulfill your law. Let me, my God, take the burden of your anger….

Here is the prayer in French, so that even in English translation this document will serve the Tongue:

– Mon Jésus, il faut que je risque avec vous: je vous aime, mais je vous ai offensé; c’est pour satisfaire à votre justice que je suis ici; déchargez, mon Dieu, sur moi votre colère….

Sometimes, le P. Chauchetière tells us, she could not finish the prayer, but the tears in her eyes could. This material has a power of its own, doesn’t it? So it wasn’t all work in the library, was it? I think this writing is going to ruin the baskets in O.T.

11

The war between the French and the Iroquois continued. The Indians asked some of their converted brethren at Sault to join them, promising them absolute freedom to practice their religion. When the converts refused the Iroquois kidnapped them and burnt them at the stake. One Christian named Etienne burned so bravely, crying the Gospel as he died, praying for the conversion of his tormentors, that the Indians were greatly impressed. Several of them applied for Baptism, desiring that ceremony which appeared to confer such courage. Since they had no intention of discontinuing their attacks on the French, they were refused.

– They should have got it, Catherine whispered to the blood smears. They should have got it. It doesn’t matter what it’s used for. Harder! Harder! What’s the matter with you, Marie-Thérèse?

– It’s my turn now.

– All right. But while I’m in this position I want to check something. Move your feet wider apart.

– Like this?

– Yes. I thought so. You’ve become a virgin.

12

Catherine Tekakwitha secretly gave up eating on Mondays and Tuesdays. This is of prime interest to you, especially in regard to your bowel complication. I have other vital intelligence for you. Theresa Neuman, a Bavarian peasant girl, refused to take any solid food after April 25, 1923. A little while later she declared that she no longer felt the need to eat. For 33 years, right through the Third Reich and Partition, she lived without food. Mollie Francher, who died in Brooklyn in 1894, received no food for years. Mother Beatrice Mary of Jesus, a Spanish contemporary of Catherine Tekakwitha, fasted for long periods. One of them lasted 51 days. During Lent, if she smelled meat, she went into convulsions. Try and think back. Do you remember Edith ever eating? Do you remember those plastic bags she wore inside her blouse? Do you remember that birthday when she leaned over to blow out the candles and ruined the cake with vomit?

13

Catherine Tekakwitha became seriously sick. Marie-Thérèse told the priests the details of their excess. Le P. Cholenec gently forced Catherine to promise not to perform her penitence so rigorously. This was the second secular promise which she broke. She regained her health slowly, if the word health can be used to describe her chronically feeble state.

– Father, may I take the Oath of Virginity?

– Virginitate placuit.

– Yes?

– You will be the first Iroquois Virgin.

It was on the day of the Annunciation, March 25, 1679, that Catherine Tekakwitha formally offered her body to the Savior and His Mother. The marriage question was resolved. She made the Fathers very happy with this secular offering. The little church was filled with bright candles. She loved the candles, too. Charity! Charity for us who love the candles only, or the Love which the candles make manifest. In some great eye I believe the candles are perfect currency, just as are all the Andacwandets, the Fuck Cures.

14

Le P. Chauchetière and le P. Cholenec were baffled. Catherine’s body was covered with bleeding wounds. They watched her, they spied at her kneeling before the wooden cross beside the river, they counted the lashes she and her companion exchanged, but they could detect no excessive indulgence. On the third day they became alarmed. She looked like death. “Son visage n’avait plus que la figure d’un mort.” They could no longer attribute her physical decline to her ordinary infirmity. They questioned Marie-Thérèse. The girl confessed. That night the priests came into Catherine Tekakwitha’s cabin. Wrapped tightly in blankets, the Indian girl was sleeping. They tore off the blankets. Catherine was not sleeping. She only pretended. Nobody in the midst of that pain could sleep. With all the skill she had used to weave the belts of wampum, the girl had sewn thousands of thorns into her blanket and mat. Every movement of her body opened up a new source of outside blood. How many nights had she tortured herself like this? She was naked in the firelight, her flesh streaming.

– Don’t move!

– Stop moving!

– I’ll try.

– You moved!

– I’m sorry.

– You moved again!

– It’s the thorns.

– We know it’s the thorns.

– Of course we know it’s the thorns.

– I’ll try.

– Try.

– I’m trying.

– Try to keep still.

– You moved!

– He’s right.

– I didn’t exactly move.

– What did you do?

– I twitched.

– Twitched?

– I didn’t exactly move.

– You twitched?

– Yes.

– Stop twitching!

– I’ll try.

– She’s killing herself.

– I’m trying.

– You’re twitching!

– Where?

– Down there.

– That’s better.

– Look at your thigh!

– What?

– It’s twitching.

– I’m sorry.

– You’re mocking us.

– I promise I’m not.

– Stop!

– The buttock!

– It’s twitching!

– Elbow!

– Wha?

– Twitching.

– Kneecap. Kneecap. kneecap.

– Twitching?

– Yes.

– Her whole body is twitching.

– She can’t control it.

– She’s tearing her skin off.

– She’s trying to listen to us.

– Yes. She is trying.

– She always tries.

– Give her that, Claude.

– Those thorns are ugly.

– They make an ugly thorn.

– Child?

– Yes, Father.

– We know you’re in terrible pain.

– It’s not so bad.

– Don’t fib.

– Did she tell an untruth?

– We think you’re up to something, Catherine.

– There!

– That wasn’t a twitch.

– That was a deliberate move.

– Bring the fire closer.

– Let’s have a look at her.

– I don’t think she can hear us any more.

– She seems so far away.

– Look at her body.

– It seems so far away.

– She looks like a painting, sort of.

– Yes, so far away.

– This is some night.

– Hmmm.

– Like one of those paintings that bleed.

– Like one of those icons that weep.

– So far away.

– She is at our feet but I have never seen anyone so far away.

– Touch one of those thorns.

– You.

– Ouch!

– I thought so. They’re real.

– I’m glad we’re priests, aren’t you, Claude?

– Terribly happy.

– She’s losing a lot of blood.

– Can she hear us?

– Child?

– Catherine?

– Yes, my Fathers.

– Can you hear us?

– Yes.

– What do we sound like?

– You sound like machinery.

– Is it nice?

– It is beautiful.

– What kind of machinery?

– Ordinary eternal machinery.

– Thank you, my child. Thank her, Claude.

– Thank you.

– Will this night ever end?

– Will we ever go back to bed?

– I doubt it.

– We’ll stand here for a long time.

– Yes. Watching.

15

Shakespeare is 64 years dead. Andrew Marvell is 2 years dead. John Milton is 6 years dead. We are now in the heart of the winter of 1680. We are now in the heart of our pain. We are now in the heart of our evidence. Who could have told it would take so long? Who could have told when I entered the woman with my quick and my wit? Somewhere you are listening to my voice. So many are listening. There is an ear on every star. Somewhere you are dressed in hideous rags and wondering who I was. Does my voice sound like yours at last? Did I assume too much when I sought to un -burden you? I covet Catherine Tekakwitha now that I have followed her last years. I the pimp am I the customer. Old friend, was all this preparation for nothing but cemetery triangle? We are now in the heart of our pain. Is this what longing is? Is my pain as valuable as yours? Did I give up the Bowery too easily? Who tied the reins of government into a love knot? Can I ride in the Magic I enfueled? Is this the meaning of Temptation? We are now in the heart of our agony. Galileo. Kepler. Descartes. Alessandro Scarlatti is 20 years old. Who will exhume Brigitte Bardot and see if her fingers bleed? Who will test the sweet smell in the tomb of Marilyn Monroe? Who will slip with James Cagney’s head? Is James Dean flexible? O God, the dream leaves fingerprints. Ghost tracks on the powdered varnish! Do I want to be in the laboratory where Brigitte Bardot lies? I wanted to meet her on the leather beach when I was 20. The dream is a sheaf of clues. Hello, famous blonde naked, a ghost is speaking to your suntan as they unshovel you. I saw your open mouth hovering in formaldehyde. I think I could make you happy if we keep the money and guards. Even after the lights came up, the Cinerama screen continued to bleed. I quiet the crowd with a raised scarlet finger. On the white screen your erotic auto accident continues to bleed! I wanted to show Brigitte Bardot around revolutionary Montréal. We will meet when we are old, in an old dictator’s cafeteria. Nobody knows who you are except the Vatican. We stumble on the truth: we could have made each other happy. Eva Peron! Edith! Mary Voolnd! Hedy Lamarr! Madame Bovary! Lauren Bacall was Marlene Dietrich! B.B., it is F., ghost from green daisies, from the stone pit of his orgasm, from the obscure mental factory of English Montréal. Lie down on my paper, little movie flesh. Let your towel preserve impressions of your bosom. Develop into a pervert in our private. Shock me with chemical or tongue request. Come out of the shower with your hair wet and rest your crossed shaved legs on my one-handed desk. Let the towel slide as you fall asleep during our first argument, while the fan heaves the same long wisp of golden path every time it faces you. O Mary, I have come back to you. I have returned up my arm to the true swatch of black body windows, the cunt of now, soak of the present. I led myself from Temptation and I showed it happening!

– You needn’t have, says Mary Voolnd.

– No?

– No. It’s all included in the so-called fuck.

– I can imagine whatever I want?

– Yes. But hurry!

16

We are at the heart of the winter of 1680. Catherine Tekakwitha is cold and dying. This is the year she died. This is the big winter. She was too sick to leave the cabin. Secretly starving, the thorn mat continues to bounce her body like a juggler. Now the church was too far away. But, le P. Chauchetière tells us, she spent a part of each day on her knees or balanced on a crude bench. The trees came to beat her. We are now at the beginning of Holy Week before Easter, 1689. Holy Monday, she weakened considerably. They told her she was dying fast. As Marie-Thérèse caressed her with birch, Catherine prayed:

– O God, show me that the Ceremony belongs to Thee. Reveal to your servant a fissure in the Ritual. Change Thy World with the jawbone of a broken Idea. O my Lord, play with me.

At the mission there was a curious custom. They never carried the Holy Sacrament to the cabin where the sick lay. Instead, they carried the sick people on a bark stretcher to the chapel, hazardous as the trip was. The girl was definitely too sick for the stretcher ride. What were they to do? Customs were not that easily come by in early Canada, and they longed for a Jesus of Canada dignified by convention and antiquity, as He is today, pale and plastic above the guilty traffic tickets. This is why I love the Jesuits. They argued about to which they had the deepest obligation, History or Miracle, or to put it more heroically, History or Possible Miracle. They had seen a strange light in Catherine Tekakwitha’s mucous eyes. Dare they deny her the supreme consolation of the Body of the Savior in His Viatique Change, the Wafer Disguise? They gave their answer to the dying girl, half naked among her thorn-torn rags. The crowd cheered. An exception was justified in the case of Perfectly Shy, as some of the converts had begun to call her. To dignify the occasion, we have the humble detail, Catherine asked Marie-Thérèse to cover her with a new blanket or anything to hide her half-nakedness. The whole village followed the Holy Sacrament as it was borne to the cabin of the invalid. The crowd pressed around her mat, all the converted Indians of the mission. She was their best hope. The French were murdering their brethren in the forests, but this dying girl would somehow certify the difficult choices they had made. If ever there was gloom thickly laced with unmaterialized miracles, it was here, it was now. The voice of the priest began. After the general absolution, with ardent filmed eyes and bruised tongue, she received the “Viatique du Corps de Nôtre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ.” Visibly she was dying now. Many of the staring crowd wanted to be remembered in the prayers of the departing girl. Le P. Cholenec asked her if she would receive them individually. He asked her softly because she was in agony. She smiled and said she would. Throughout the whole day they filed by her mat with their burdens.

– I stepped on a beetle. Pray for me.

– I injured the waterfall with urine. Pray for me.

– I fell on my sister. Pray for me.

– I dreamed I was white. Pray for me.

– I let the deer die too slowly. Pray for me.

– I long for human morsel. Pray for me.

– I made a grass whip. Pray for me.

– I got the yellow out of a worm. Pray for me.

– I tried to grow an ointment beard. Pray for me.

– The west wind hates me. Pray for me.

– I darkened the old crop. Pray for me.

– I gave my rosary to the English. Pray for me.

– I soiled a loincloth. Pray for me.

– I killed a Jew. Pray for me.

– I sold beard ointment. Pray for me.

– I smoke manure. Pray for me.

– I forced my brother to watch. Pray for me.

– I smoke manure. Pray for me.

– I spoiled a singsong. Pray for me.

– I touched myself while paddling. Pray for me.

– I tortured a raccoon. Pray for me.

– I believe in herbs. Pray for me.

– I got the orange out of a scab. Pray for me.

– I prayed for a famine lesson. Pray for me.

– I dirtied on my beads. Pray for me.

– I’m 84. Pray for me.

One by one they kneeled and passed her bristling Lenin couch, leaving with her their pitiful spirit luggage, until the whole cabin resembled one vast Customs House of desire, and the mud beside her bearskin was polished by so many kneecaps that it shone like the silver sides of the last and only rocket scheduled to escape from the doomed world, and as the ordinary night fell over the Easter village the Indians and the Frenchmen huddled beside their barking fires, fingers pressed to their lips in gestures of hush and blowing kisses. Oh, why does it make me so lonely to tell this? After the evening prayers, Catherine Tekakwitha asked permission to go into the woods once more. Le P. Cholenec granted her the permission. She dragged herself past the cornfield under its blanket of melting snow, into the fragrant pine trees, into the powdery shadows of the forest, on the levers of broken fingernails she pulled herself through the dim March starlight, to the edge of the icy Saint Lawrence River, to the frozen root of the Crucifixion. Le P. Lecompte tells us, “Elle y passa un quart d’heure à se mettre les épaules en sang par une rude discipline.” There she spent 15 minutes whipping her shoulders until they were covered with blood, and this she did without her friend. It is now the next day, Holy Wednesday. It was her last day, this day of consecration to the mysteries of the Eucharist and the Cross. “Certes je me souviens encore qu’à l’entrée de sa dernière maladie.” Le P. Cholenec knew it was her last day. At three o’clock in the afternoon the final agony began. On her knees, praying with Marie-Thérèse and several other whipped girls, Catherine Tekakwitha stumbled over the names of Jesus and Mary mispronouncing them. “… elle perdit la parole en prononçant les noms de Jésus et de Marie.” But why didn’t you record the exact sounds she made? She was playing with the Name, she was mastering the good Name, she was grafting all the fallen branches to the living Tree. Aga? Muja? Jumu? You idiots, she knew the Tetragrammaton! You let her get away! We let another one get away! And now we have to see if her fingers bleed! We had her there, nailed and talkative, ready to undo the world, and we let the sharp mouths of the relic boxes gnaw at her bones. Parliament!

17

She was dead at 3:30 in the afternoon. It was Holy Wednesday, April 17, 1680. She was 24 years old. We are in the heart of the afternoon. Le P. Cholenec was praying beside the new corpse. His eyes were closed. Suddenly he opened his eyes and cried out in amazement, “Je fis un grand cri, tant je fus saisi d’étonnement.”

– Eeeeeoooowwww!

The face of Catherine Tekakwitha had turned white!

– Viens ici!

– Look at her face!

Let us examine the eyewitness account of le P. Cholenec, and let us try to suppress our political judgments, and remember that I promised you good news. “From the age of four years, Catherine’s face had been branded by the Plague; her sickness and her mortifications had further contributed to the disfigurement. But this face, so battered and so very swarthy, underwent a sudden change, about a quarter of an hour after her death. And in a moment she became so beautiful and so white …”

– Claude!

Le P. Chauchetière came running, and a village of Indians followed him. As if in peaceful sleep, as if under a parasol of glass, she floated into the dark Canadian afternoon, her face serene and bright as alabaster. Thus she launched her death, upturned face of white, under the concentrated gaze of the village. Le P. Chauchetière said:

– C’était un argument nouveau de crédibilité, dont Dieu favorisait les sauvages pour leur faire goûter la foi.

– Shhhhhhh!

– Hush!

Two Frenchmen happened to be passing by later on. One of them said:

– Look at that pretty girl sleeping there.

When they found out who it was, they knelt in prayer.

– Let us make the coffin.

At that precise moment the girl entered the eternal machinery of the sky. Looking back over her atomic shoulder, she played a beam of alabaster over her old face as she streamed forward on the insane grateful laughter of her girl friend.

18

Red and white, skin and pimples, open daisies and burning weeds – pace, old friend and all you racists. Let it be our skill to create legends out of the disposition of the stars, but let it be our glory to forget the legends and watch the night emptily. Let the mundane Church serve the White Race with a change of color. Let the mundane Revolution serve the Gray Race with a burning church. Let the Manifestoes attach all our property. We are in love with a tower view of rainbow bodies. Suffer the change from red to white, you who weave insignia, which is all of us in our night. But we are merely once upon a time. Another second from our raw fingers, now we are in love with pure flags, our privacy is valueless, we do not own our history, it is borne away in a shower of tiny seed dust and we filter it as in the network of a high drift of wild daisies, and our fashions change beautifully. A kite climbs over the hospital, some O.T. prisoners follow or ignore it, Mary and I, we slip into the orgy of vase Greeks and restaurant Greeks. A new butterfly rollercoasts on the jerky wax shadows of the greenery, small circus falls like air-pocketed kite, the village parachutist essays the tipping fern, plunging in blur Icarus postage stamps. Montréal laundry flaps from the high rent – but I fail perfectly naturally, since I’ve elected to swell the Fact Charity. Here is good news for most of us: all parties and churches may use this information. St. Catherine of Bologna dies in 1463, a nun of fifty. Her sisters buried her body without a casket. Soon the sisters felt guilty, wondering about all the weight of mud on her face. They were given permission to exhume the body. They scrape her face clean. It is found to have been only slightly distorted by pressure of the mud, perhaps a collapsed nostril the only trophy of 18 days’ interment. The body smelled sweet. As they examined it, “the body that was white as snow turned slowly red and exuded an oily liquid of an ineffable fragrance.”

19

The funeral of Catherine Tekakwitha. Anastasie and Marie-Thérèse worked softly over the body. They washed her limbs, stroked away the dried blood. They combed her hair and rubbed oil into it. They dressed her in white beaded robes of skin. With new moccasins they covered her two feet. Usually a corpse was carried to the church on a bark stretcher. The Frenchmen had made her a real coffin, “un vrai cercueil.”

– Don’t close it!

– Let me see!

The crowd had to be satisfied. They longed to contemplate her new beauty for another hour. We are now in Holy Thursday, day of sadness, day of joy, as her biographers observe. From the church they carried her to the great cross of the cemetery situated beside the river, where the girl loved to forge her prayers. Le P. Chauchetière and le P. Cholenec had argued about the location of the grave. Le P. Chauchetière wanted to bury her inside the church. Le P. Cholenec wished to avoid this singularity. During another grave-digging in which Catherine had participated, the priest had heard her state her own personal preference – beside the river.

– Then I give in.

The next day was Holy Friday. The missionaries preached the passion of Christ Jesus to an audience seized with the deepest emotion. They wanted to weep for longer time. They wouldn’t let the celebrant get past the first two words of the Vexilla.

– Vexilla re–

– No! No! Sob! Arrgghh!

– Vexilla regis–

– Stop! Time! Sob! Please!

That whole day and the next day, the priests witnessed the most excessive mortifications that they had ever seen.

– They’re tearing themselves apart!

– It’s happening!

On Friday night a woman rolled on thorns until the morning. Four or five nights later another woman did the same.

– Bring the fire closer.

They beat themselves until they bled. They crawled on their bare knees through the snow. Widows vowed never to remarry. Young married women took the vow and renounced remarriage should their husbands die. Married couples separated and promised to live as brother and sister. Le P. Chauchetière cites the good François Tsonnatoüan, who turned his wife into a sister. He made a little rosary which he called “Catherine’s Rosary.” It consisted of a cross on which he said the Credo, two “grains” for the Pater and the Ave, and three other “grains” for the three Gloria Patri. The news was passed from fire to fire, from convert to convert, from convert to heathen, from heathen to heathen, across the land of the Iroquois.

– La sainte est morte.

– The saint is dead.

In the early Church this type of popular recognition was called la béatification équipollente. Look down, look down, see the snowy mandala, see the whole village, see the figures writhing on the white field, try and see through the opaque prism of personal blister of accidental burn.

20

Here is the testimony of Captain du Luth, commandant of Fort Frontenac, a man after whom a Montréal street is named. He was, says le P. Charlevoix, “un des plus braves officiers que le Roy ait eus dans cette colonie.” He also gave his name to an American city on Lake Superior.

I, the undersigned, certify to whomever it may concern, that, having been tormented with the gout for twenty-three years, with such pain that for a space of three months I had no rest, I addressed myself to Catherine Tegahkouita, Iroquois virgin, deceased at Sault Saint-Louis a saint in the general opinion, and I promised to visit her grave, if God would give me back my health because of her intervention. I have been so perfectly cured, at the end of a novena which I arranged to be done in her honor, that for fifteen months now I have not suffered a single attack of gout. Fait au fort Frontenac, ce 15 août 1696.

Signé J. du Luth

21

Like a numbered immigrant in the harbor of North America, I hope to begin again. I hope to begin my friendship again. I hope to begin my rise to President. I hope to begin Mary again. I hope to begin my worship again to Thee who has never refused my service, in whose flashing memory I have no past or future, whose memory never froze into the coffin of history, into which your children, like amateur undertakers, squeeze the carelessly measured bodies of each other. Not the pioneer is the American dream, for he has already limited himself by courage and method. The dream is to be immigrant sailing into the misty aerials of New York, the dream is to be Jesuit in the cities of the Iroquois, for we do not wish to destroy the past and its baggy failures, we only wish the miracles to demonstrate that the past was joyously prophetic, and that possibility occurs to us most plainly on this cargo deck of wide lapels, our kerchief sacks filled with obsolete machine guns from the last war but which will astound and conquer the Indians.

22

The first vision of Catherine Tekakwitha appeared to le P. Chauchetière. Five days after the girl’s death, at four o’clock in the morning of Easter Monday, while he was hard at prayer, she came to him in a blur of glory. At her right was a church upside down. At her left was an Indian burning at the stake. The vision lasted two hours, and the priest had time to study it in ecstasy. This is why he had come to Canada. Three years later, in 1683, a hurricane hit the village, tipping over the 60-foot-long church. And in one of the attacks on the mission, an Iroquois convert was captured by the Onnontagués and burnt slowly while he proclaimed his Faith. These applications of the vision may satisfy the Church, dear friend, but let us beware of allowing an apparition to leak away into mere events. A useless church, a tortured man – are these not the usual factors in a saint’s flourishing? Eight days after her death she appeared to the old Anastasie in a blaze of light, her lower body beneath the belt dissolved in the brilliance, “le bas du corps depuis la ceinture disparaissant dans cette clarté.” Had she lent her other parts to you? She appeared also to Marie-Thérèse when she was alone in her cabin and gently reproached her for some of the things she was doing.

– Try not to sit on your heel when you’re beating your shoulders.

Le P. Chauchetière was favored with two more visions, one on July 1, 1681, the other on April 21, 1682. On both occasions Catherine appeared to him in her beauty, and he heard her say distinctly:

– Inspice et fac secundum exemplar. Regarde, et copie ce modèle. Look, and copy this model.

Then he painted many portraits of his visionary Catherine, and they worked perfectly when placed on the head of the sick. At Caughnawaga today there is a very ancient canvas. Is this the one that le P. Chauchetière painted? We will never know. I pray that it will work for you. But what about le P. Cholenec? All the others had their candy. Where were his movies? It is he whom I most resemble, as he endures without so much as a cartoon spark, hunted only by the Papacy.

23

“… An infinity of miraculous cures,” writes le P. Cholenec in 1715, “une infinité de guérisons miraculeuses.” Not only among the savages but even among the French at Québec and Montréal. It would take volumes. He calls her la Thaumaturge du Nouveau-Monde. With a sense of pain you must now be able to imagine, I record some of the cures.

The wife of François Roaner was 60 during January 1681 and close to death. She was an inhabitant of la Prairie de la Magdeleine, where le P. Chauchetière was also serving. The priest hung a crucifix around her neck. It was the same crucifix that Catherine Tekakwitha had grasped to her rags while dying. When Mme. Roaner was cured she refused to surrender the relic. The priest insisted but gave the woman a little bag of mud from the tomb of Catherine to hang in place of the crucifix. Some time later, she happened to take it off for one reason or another. As soon as it was clear of her head she collapsed, stricken to the ground. It was only when the bag returned to her chest that she recovered once again. A year later, her husband was seized by a violent pain in the kidneys. In a reckless instant of charity she removed the mud from her person and hung it over his neck. His pain stopped immediately, but she staggered, stricken again, crying out that her husband was murdering her. He was persuaded by several bystanders to return the little sack to his wife. She was instantly cured but his kidneys began again. Let us leave them here, in their new cruel service to Catherine Tekakwitha, as she invites their souls. Is this familiar, dear comrade? Did Edith move between us like a package of mud? Oh God, I see the miserable old Roaners, who had not touched each other for years, clawing each other like animals on the stone floor of their kitchen.

In 1693 the Superior at Sault was le P. Bruyas. Suddenly his arms became paralyzed. He was removed to Montréal to receive treatment. Before he left he asked the Sisters of Catherine, a group of devotees which had formed around her memory, to do a novena on behalf of his cure. In Montréal he refused all treatment. On the eighth day of the novena there was still no change in his stiff arms. Faithful, he kept the doctors away. Four o’clock on the next morning he awakened waving his arms, not surprised, but ravished with joy. He hurried to thank.

1695. The cures began to creep into the upper classes like a dance step. They began with the Intendant, M. de Champigny. For two years he had had the same cold, which worsened day by day, until now he could barely make himself heard. His wife wrote the Fathers at Sault, begging them to have a novena done to their holy girl in order to obtain her husband’s cure. The prayers they chose for the novena were one Pater, one Ave, and three Gloria Patri. M. de Champigny’s throat cleared up day by day, and on the ninth day it was normal – indeed, his voice possessed a special new resonance. Mme. de Champigny extended the cult of the Iroquois Virgin. She had thousands of Catherine Tekakwitha pictures distributed everywhere, including France, and even Louis XIV looked carefully at one.

1695. M. de Granville and his wife mixed the mud with a little water and fed it to their little daughter, who was dying. She sat up laughing.

“The power of Catherine extended itself even to animals,” writes le P. Cholenec. In Lachine lived a woman with only one cow. One day, for no apparent reason, the cow became so bloated, “enflée,” that the woman thought the beast would die. She fell to her knees.

– O good holy Catherine, have pity on me, save my poor cow!

She had barely spoken the words when the cow began to unswell, returning to its ordinary size right before her eyes, “et la vache s’est bien portée du depuis.”

Last winter, writes le P. Cholenec, a steer fell through the ice in Montréal. They hauled him out but his body was so frozen that he couldn’t walk. He was obliged to spend the winter in his stable.

– Kill that animal! commanded the master of the house.

– Oh, let him live one more night, a servant girl pleaded.

– Very well. But he dies tomorrow!

She put some of the tomb mud which she cherished into the steer’s drinking water, saying:

– Pourquoi Catherine ne guérirait-elle pas les bêtes aussi bien que les hommes?

This is the actual quotation. The next morning the steer was found on his feet, to the great astonishment of all except the girl and the animal. The most important question the histories naturally ignore. Were the cow and the steer eventually eaten? Or did nothing really change?

Thousands of cures, all recorded, among children and among the senile. A thousand novenas and a thousand bodies glow again. Twenty years after her death the miracles were not so frequent, but we have evidence as recent as 1906. Let us examine the April 1906 edition of Le Messager Canadien du Sacre-Coeur. The miracle took place at Shishigwaning, an Indian outpost on Ile Manitouline. Living there was a good Indian woman (une bonne sauvagesse) who had been afflicted, for the past 11 months, with syphilis ulcers in the mouth and throat. She had contracted the disease by smoking the pipe which belonged to her syphilitic daughter, “en fumant la pipe dont s’était servie sa fille.” The disease advanced hideously, the ulcers spreading and widening their circumferences and their crater depth. She couldn’t even take a little soup, so swollen with sores was her mouth. The priest arrived September 29, 1905. Before becoming a Jesuit he had been a doctor. She knew this.

– Help me, Doctor.

– I am a priest.

– Help me as a doctor.

– No doctor can help you now.

He told her that her cure was beyond human dominion. He pressed the victim to ask for the intercession of Catherine Tekakwitha, “your sister by blood!” That night she began a novena in honor of the long-dead Iroquois Virgin. One day passed, two days passed, nothing happened. On the third day, she sent her tongue searching over the roof of her mouth, but the syphilis Braille had disappeared like the volumes of Alexandria!

24

In 1689 the mission of Sault Saint-Louis moved farther up the Saint Lawrence River. The reason for the exodus was soil exhaustion. The old location (at the place where the Portage River enters the Saint Lawrence) had been called Kahnawaké, or, at the rapids. Now it took the name Kateri tsi tkaiatat, or, the place where Catherine was buried. They took her body with them to the new village which was called Kahnawakon, or, in the rapids. They called the abandoned site Kanatakwenké, or, place of the removed village. In 1696 they moved once again up the south bank of the great river. The last migration took place in 1719. The mission installed itself in its present location, across the rapids opposite Lachine, now connected by a bridge to Montréal. It took the Iroquois name of 1676, Kahnawaké, or in its English form, Caughnawaga. There are still some relics of Catherine Tekakwitha at Caughnawaga, but not all. Some of her skeleton had been given away at different periods. Her head was carried to Saint-Régis in 1754, to celebrate the establishment of another Iroquois mission. The church in which the head was placed burned to the ground, and the skull did not survive.

KATERI TEKAKWITHA

Apr. 17, 1680

Onkweonweke Katsitsiio

Teotsitsianekaron

Kateri Tekakwitha

17 avril, 1680

La plus belle fleur épanouie

chez les sauvages

THE END OF F.’S HISTORY OF THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF CATHERINE TEKAKWITHA’S LIFE

There! Done! Dear old friend, I did what was necessary! I did what I dreamed about when you, Edith, and I sat on the austere seats of the System Theatre. Do you know the question with which I tormented myself during those silvery hours? At last I can tell you. We are now in the heart of the System Theatre. We are in the dark jockeying for elbow dominion on the wooden armrests. Outside on Ste. Catherine Street, the theater marquee displays the only neon failure in miles of light: dropping two letters which will never be repaired, it signals itself as stem Theatre, stem Theatre, stem Theatre. Secret kabals of vegetarians habitually gather under the sign to exchange contraband from beyond the Vegetable Barrier. In their pinpoint eyes dances their old dream: the Total Fast. One of them reports a new atrocity published without compassionate comment by the editors of Scientific American: “It has been established that, when pulled from the ground, a radish produces an electronic scream.” Not even the triple bill for 65¢ will comfort them tonight. With a mad laugh born of despair, one of them throws himself on a hot-dog stand, disintegrating on the first chew into pathetic withdrawal symptoms. The rest watch him mournfully and then separate into the Montréal entertainment section. The news is more serious than any of them thought. One is ravished by a steak house with sidewalk ventilation. In a restaurant, one argues with the waiter that he ordered “tomato” but then in a suicide of gallantry he agrees to accept the spaghetti, meat sauce mistake. But this is far away from the glass pillar of stubs which the three of us passed and satisfied hours ago. Let us not forget that these doorway ticket depositories are not altogether docile. On more than several occasions I have stood behind a customer whose stub the chute rejects absolutely, and he is forced to get his money back from the contemptuous female sentry booth. They are not pleasant to deal with, these women posted in the entrances of every cinema: they are bound by choice to guard Ste. Catherine Street against self-destruction: the little streetside offices which they dominate protect the army of traffic by an administration which combines the best functions of Red Cross and G.H.Q. And what of the unacceptable patron with his money back? Where can he go? Was the cruel rejection arbitrary, in the sense that Society invents Crime so as to make itself indispensable? There is no dark for him to eat the Oh Henry! – all candy is threatened! Mere suicide vaudeville for the living? Or is there some ointment on the refusal of the toothed throat of the stub depository? Is this the kingly oil of election? Does some new hero discover his ordeal? Is this the birth of the hermit, or his equally passionate complement, the anti-hermit, seed of the Jesuits? And this chess side choice between saint and missionary, is this his first tragic testing? No matter to Edith, you and I, who have safely passed two aisles and half an alphabet, well into the bright amusement. We are now in the heart of the last feature in the System Theatre. Within severe limits, like smoke in a chimney, the dusty projection beam above our hair twisted and changed. Like crystals rioting in a test-tube suspension, the unstable ray changed and changed in its black confinement. Like battalions of sabotaged parachutists falling from the training tower straight down in various contortions, the frames streamed at the screen, splashing into contrast color as they hit, just as the bursting cocoons of arctic camouflage spread colorful organic contents over the snow as the divers disintegrate, one after the other. No, it was more like a ghostly white snake sealed in an immense telescope. It was a serpent swimming home, lazily occupying the entire sewer which irrigated the auditorium. It was the first snake in the shadows of the original garden, the albino orchard snake offering our female memory the taste of – everything! As it floated and danced and writhed in the gloom over us, I often raised my eyes to consult the projection beam rather than the story it carried. Neither of you noticed me. Sometimes I conceded surprising territories of the armrest so as to distract your pleasure. I studied the snake and he made me greedy for everything. In the midst of this heady contemplation, I am invited to formulate the question which will torment me most. I formulate the question and it begins to torment me immediately: What will happen when the newsreel escapes into the Feature? What will happen when the newsreel occurs at its own pleasure or accident in any whatever frame of the Vista-vision, willy nilly? The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature like Boulder Dam, vital as a border in the Middle East – breach it (so I thought), and a miasmal mixture will imperialize existence by means of its sole quality of total corrosion. So I thought! The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature: like a tunnel on the Sunday drive it ends quickly and in creepy darkness joins the rural mountains to the slums. It took courage! I let the newsreel escape, I invited it to walk right into plot, and they merged in aweful originality, just as trees and plastic synthesize new powerful landscapes in those districts of the highway devoted to motels. Long live motels, the name, the motive, the success! Here is my message, old lover of my heart. Here is what I saw: here is what I learned:

Sophia Loren Strips For A Flood Victim

THE FLOOD IS REAL AT LAST

Joy? Didn’t I promise it? Didn’t you believe I would deliver? And now I must leave you, but I find it so hard. Mary is restless now, she is jiggling restlessly, neither of us has any pleasure now, and some of her fluids are so ancient and unreplenished that there are pinchy paths of evaporation down my arm. Patients in O.T. are signing unfinished baskets so they can be identified in the nurse’s collection. The short spring afternoon has darkened and the tight lilac buds beyond the barred window are barely redolent. The afternoon linen has been sterilized and crisp folded beds require us.

– Bow wow wow! Bow wow! Grrrrrrr!

– What’s that commotion outside, Mary?

– Just the dogs.

– The dogs? I didn’t know there were going to be dogs.

– Well, there are. Now hurry! Pull it out!

– My hand?

– The package! The oilskin package!

– Must I?

– It’s from our friends!

With some fishlike movement she maneuvered her haunches, altering all the internal architecture of her cunt reception. Like a trout dragging the hook into the roof of its mouth, some blunt delicious shelf of miniature fountains applied the oilskin package to my hooked four fingers, and I withdrew it. Her wide white uniform shielded me from curiosity as I read the message. I am reading it now, as Mary Voolnd insists.

ANCIENT PATRIOT

FIRST FATHER PRESIDENT

THE REPUBLIC SALUTES YOUR SERVICE

WITH ITS HIGHEST HONOR

the escape is planned for tonight

is scribbled in invisible ink which her lubrications have activated! Tonight.

– Grrrrrr! Arroooooof!

– I’m frightened, Mary.

– Don’t worry.

– Can’t we stay here a little longer?

– See the pretty lines, Mary?

– Too late for sex, F.

– But I think I could be happy here. I think I could acquire the desolation I coveted so fiercely in my disciple.

– That’s just it, F. Too easy.

– I want to stay, Mary.

– I’m afraid that’s impossible, F.

– But I’m right on the edge, Mary. I’m almost broken, I’ve almost lost everything, I almost have humility!

– Lose it! Lose everything!

– Help! Haaaaaaallllllpppp! Somebody!

– Your screaming can’t be heard, F. Come along.

– HAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLPPPPP!

– Click, clickclick. Bzzzzzzzzz. Sputter!

– What’s that funny noise, Mary?

– Static. It’s the radio, F.

– The radio! You didn’t say anything about the radio.

– Quiet. It wants to tell us something.

(DOLLY IN TO CLOSE-UP OF THE RADIO ASSUMING THE FORM OF PRINT)

– This is the radio speaking. Good evening. The radio easily interrupts this book to bring you a recorded historical news flash: terrorist leader at large. Only minutes ago, an unidentified Terrorist Leader escaped from the Hospital for the Criminally Insane. It is feared that his presence in the city will touch off new revolutionary extremes. He was aided in his get-away by a female accomplice who had infiltrated the Hospital Staff. Mutilated by routine police dogs in a diversionary tactic, she is now undergoing surgery, but is not expected to survive. It is believed that the escaped criminal will attempt to contact terrorist strongholds in the forests beyond Montréal.

– Is it happening, Mary?

– Yes, F.

– Grrrrr! Chomp! Arararara! Erf!

– Mary!

– Run, F.! Run. Run!

– Bow wow! Hoooowwwwllll! Grrrrrrr! R-i-i-i-i-p!

(SALIVATING POLICE DOG JAWS TEAR INTO THE FLESH OF MARY VOOLND)

– Your body!

– Run! Run, F. Run for all of us A——s!

(CLOSE-UP OF RADIO EXHIBITING A MOTION PICTURE OF ITSELF)

– This is the radio speaking. Eeeek! Tee hee! This is the ah ha ha, this is the hee hee, this is the radio speaking. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, oh ho ho ho, ha ha ha ha ha ha, it tickles, it tickles! (sound effect: echo chamber) This is the radio speaking. Drop your weapons! This is the Revenge of the Radio.

And this is your lover, F., finishing the joyous letter which I promised. God bless you! Oh darling, be what I want to be!

Yours truly,

Signé F.

Spring comes into Québec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the west coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Québec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montréal the cafés, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “The winter has not killed us again!” Spring comes into Québec from Japan, and like a prewar Crackerjack prize it breaks the first day because we play too hard with it. Spring comes into Montréal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and everyone has to sleep with a foreigner, and suddenly the house lights flare and it’s summer, but we don’t mind because spring is really a little flashy for our taste, a little effeminate, like the furs of Hollywood lavatories. Spring is an exotic import, like rubber love equipment from Hong Kong, we only want it for a special afternoon, and vote tariffs tomorrow if necessary. Spring passes through our midst like a Swedish tourist co-ed visiting an Italian restaurant for mustache experience, and they assail her with ancient Valentino, of which she chooses one random cartoon. Spring comes to Montréal so briefly you can name the day and plan nothing for it.

It was such a day in a national forest just south of the city. An old man stood in the threshold of his curious abode, a treehouse battered and precarious as a secret boys’ club. He did not know how long he had lived there, and he wondered why he no longer fouled the shack with excrement, but he didn’t wonder very hard. He sniffed the fragrant western breeze, and he inspected a few pine needles, blackened at their points as if winter had been a brush fire. The young perfume in the air produced no nostalgic hefts in the heart beneath his filthy matted beard. The vaguest mist of pain like lemon squeezed from a distant table caused him to squint his eyes: he scraped his memory for an incident out of his past with which to mythologize the change of season, some honeymoon, or walk, or triumph, that he could let the spring renew, and his pain was finding none. His memory represented no incident, it was all one incident, and it flowed too fast, like the contents of a spittoon in recess jokes. And it seemed only a moment ago that the twenty-below wind had swept through the snow-laden branches of the second-growth fir trees, wind of a thousand whisk brooms raising tiny white hurricanes between the dark of the branches. Beneath him there were still islands of melting snow, like the bellies of beached and corrupted bloated fish. It was a beautiful day as usual.

– Soon it will get warm, he said out loud. Soon I’ll begin to stink again, and my thick trousers which are now merely stiff will become sticky, probably. I don’t mind.

The obvious problems of the winter he hadn’t minded either. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. Years (?) back, when some fruitless search or escape had chased him up the trunk, he had hated the cold. The cold seized his shack like a bus stop, and froze him with a fury that was positively personal and petty. The cold chose him, like a bullet inscribed with a paraplegic’s name. Night after night he cried out in pain during the freezing appliance. But this last winter the cold had only passed through him in its general travels, and he was merely freezing to death. Dream after dream had torn shrieks from his saliva, imploring the name of someone who might have saved him. Morning after morning he rose from soiled leaves and papers which comprised his mattress, frozen snot and tears in his eyebrows. Long ago, the animals fled each time he broke the air with his suffering, but that was when he screamed for something. Now that he merely screamed, the rabbits and weasels did not frighten. He presumed that they now accepted his scream as his ordinary bark. And whenever this fine mist of pain made him squint, as it did on this spring day, he stretched open his mouth, torturing the knots of hair on his face, and established his scream throughout the national forest.

– Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh! Oh, hello!

The scream switched into a salutation as the old man recognized a boy of seven running toward his tree, taking great care to wade through every drift. The child was out of breath as he waved. He was the youngest son of the keeper of a nearby tourist hotel.

– Hi! Hi! Uncle!

The child was not a relative of the old man. He used the word in a charming combination of respect for the ancientry and a rubbing of the forefingers in Naughty, Naughty, for he knew the fellow was shameless, and half out of his head.

– Hello, darling boy!

– Hello, Uncle. How is the concussion?

– Climb up! I’ve missed you. We can get undressed today.

– I can’t today, Uncle.

– Please.

– I haven’t got time today. Tell me a story, Uncle.

– If you haven’t got time to climb up you haven’t got time to listen to a story. It’s warm enough to get undressed.

– Aw, tell me one of those Indian stories that you often swear you’re going to turn into a book one day, as if I cared whether or not you were successful.

– Don’t pity me, boy.

– Shut up, you filthy creep!

– Climb up, oh, c’mon. It’s a short tree. I’ll tell you a story.

– Tell it from up there, if you don’t mind, if it’s all the same to your itchy fingers, if it’s half a dozen and six, I’ll squat right where I am.

– Squat here! I’ll clear a space.

– Don’t make me sick, Uncle. Now let’s hear it.

– Be careful! Look at the way you’re squatting! You’re ruining your little body like that. Keep the thigh muscles engaged. Get the small buttocks away from the heels, keep a healthy space or your buttock muscles will overdevelop.

– They asked me if you ever talk dirty when the children come across you in the woods.

– Who asked you?

– Nobody. Mind if I pee?

– I knew you were a good boy. Watch your leggings. Write your name.

– Story, Uncle! And maybe later I’ll say maybe.

– All right. Listen carefully. This is an exciting story:

IROQUOIS

ENGLISH

FRENCH

Ganeagaono

Mohawk

Agnier

Onayotekaono

Oneida

Onneyut

Onundagaono

Onondaga

Onnontagué

Gweugwehono

Cayuga

Goyogouin

Nundawaono

Seneca

Tsonnontouan

The Iroquois ending ono (onon in French) merely means people.

– Thank you, Uncle. Goodbye.

– Do I have to get down on my knees?

– I told you not to say bad words. This morning, I don’t know why, but I informed the Provincial Police about us.

– Did you tell them details?

– I had to.

– Such as?

– Such as your cold freakish hand on my little wrinkled scrotum.

– What did they say?

– They said they’ve suspected you for years.

The old man stood by the highway, jerking his arm in the hitchhiker’s signal. Car after car passed him. Drivers that didn’t think he was a scarecrow thought he was an outrageously hideous old man, and wouldn’t have touched him with your door. In the woods behind, a Catholic posse was beating the bushes. The best he could expect at their hands was a death whipping, and to be fondled unspeakably, as the Turks Lawrence. Above him on the electric wires perched the first crows of the year, arranged between the poles like abacus beads. His shoes sucked the water out of the mud like a pair of roots. There would be a mist of pain when he forgot this spring, as he must. The traffic was not heavy but it scorned him regularly with little explosions of air as the fenders snapped by. Suddenly, as the action freezing into a still on the movie screen, an Oldsmobile materialized out of the blur streaming past him. There was a beautiful girl behind the wheel, maybe a blond housewife. Her small hands, which hung lightly from the top of the wheel, were covered with elegant white gloves, and they drifted into her wrists like a pair of perfect bored acrobats. She drove the car effortlessly, like the pointer on a Ouija Board. She wore her hair loose, and she was used to fast cars.

– Climb in, she spoke only to the windshield. Try not to dirty things.

He shoveled himself into the leather seat beside her, having to shut the door several times in order to free his rags. Except for footwear, she was naked below the armrest, and she kept the map light on to be sure you noticed it. As the car pulled away it was pelted with stones and buckshot because the posse had reached the edge of the forest. At top speed he noticed that she had slanted the air ventilator to play on her pubic hair.

– Are you married? he asked.

– What if I am?

– I don’t know why I asked. I’m sorry. May I rest my head in your lap?

– They always ask me if I’m married. Marriage is only a symbol for a ceremony which can be exhausted as easily as it can be renewed.

– Spare me your philosophy, Miss.

– You filthy heap! Eat me!

– Gladly.

– Keep your ass off the accelerator.

– Is this right?

– Yah, yah, yah, yah.

– Come forward a little. The leather hurts my chin.

– Have you any idea who I am?

– Ubleubleubleuble – none – ubleubleubleuble.

– Guess! Guess! You thatch of shit!

– I’m not in the least interested.

– Iσις ἐγŵ –

– Foreigners bore me, Miss.

– Are you quite finished, you foul stump of rot? Yi! Yi! You do it wonderful!

– You ought to use one of those anti-sweat wood ladder seats. Then you wouldn’t be sitting in your juices in a draft all day.

– I’m very proud of you, darling. Now get out! Clean up!

– Are we downtown, already?

– We are. Goodbye, darling.

– Goodbye. Have a magnificent crash.

The old man climbed out of the slow-moving car just in front of the System Theatre. She rammed her moccasin down on the gas pedal and roared into the broadside of a traffic jam in Phillips Square. The old man paused for a moment under the marquee, eyeing the huddled vegetarians with two slight traces, one of nostalgia, one of pity. He forgot them as soon as he bought his ticket. He sat down in the darkness.

– When does the show start, pardon me, sir?

– Are you crazy? And get away from me, you smell terrible.

He changed his seat three or four times waiting for the news-reel to begin. Finally he had the whole front row to himself.

– Usher! Usher!

– Shhh. Quiet!

– Usher! I’m not going to sit here all night. When does the show start?

– You’re disturbing the people, sir.

The old man wheeled around and he saw row after row of silent raised eyes, and the occasional mouth chewing mechanically, and the eyes shifted continuously, as if they were watching a small pingpong game. Sometimes, when all the eyes contained exactly the same image, like all the windows of a huge slot machine repeating bells, they made a noise in unison. It only happened when they all saw exactly the same thing, and the noise was called laughter, he remembered.

– The last feature is on, sir.

Now he understood as much as he needed. The movie was invisible to him. His eyes were blinking at the same rate as the shutter in the projector, times per second, and therefore the screen was merely black. It was automatic. Among the audience, one or two viewers, noting their unaccustomed renewal of pleasure during Richard Widmark’s maniac laugh in Kiss of Death, realized that they were probably in the presence of a Master of the Yoga of the Movie Position. No doubt these students applied themselves to their disciplines with replenished enthusiasm, striving to guarantee the intensity of the flashing story, never imagining that their exercises led, not to perpetual suspense, but to a black screen. For the first time in his life the old man relaxed totally.

– No, sir. You can’t change your seat again. Oops, where’s he gone? That’s funny. Hmmm.

The old man smiled as the flashlight beam went through him.

The hot dogs looked naked in the steam bath of the Main Shooting and Game Alley, an amusement arcade on St. Lawrence Boulevard. The Main Shooting and Game Alley wasn’t brand new, and it would never be modernized because only offices could satisfy the rising real estate. The Photomat was broken; it accepted quarters but returned neither flashes nor pictures. The Claw Machine had never obeyed an engineer, and a greasy dust covered the encased old chocolate bars and Japanese Ronsons. There were a few yellow pinball machines of ancient variety, models from before the introduction of flippers. Flippers, of course, have destroyed the sport by legalizing the notion of the second chance. They have weakened the now-or-never nerve of the player and modified the sickening plunge of an unobstructed steel ball. Flippers represent the first totalitarian assault against Crime; by incorporating it into the game mechanically they subvert its old thrill and challenge. Since flippers, no new generation has really mastered the illegal body exertions, and TILT, once as honorable as a saber scar, is no more important than a foul ball. The second chance is the essential criminal idea; it is the lever of heroism, and the only sanctuary of the desperate. But unless it is wrenched from fate, the second chance loses its vitality, and it creates not criminals but nuisances, amateur pickpockets rather than Prometheans. Homage to the Main Shooting and Game Alley, where a man can still be trained. But it was never crowded any more. A few teen-age male prostitutes hung around the warm Peanuts and Assorted machine, boys at the very bottom of Montréal’s desire apparatus, and their pimps wore false fur collars and gold teeth and pencil mustaches, and they all stared at the Main (as St. Lawrence Boulevard is called) rather pathetically, as if the tough passing crowds would never disclose the Mississippi Pleasure Boat they might rightfully corrupt. The lighting was early fluorescent, and it did something bad to peroxide hair, it seemed to x-ray the dark roots through the yellow pompadours, and it located every adolescent pimple like a road map. The hot-dog counter, composed mainly of bells and pits of aluminum, exhibited the gray hygiene of slum clinics, which depends on a continual distribution, rather than elimination, of grease. The counter men were tattooed Poles, who hated each other for ancient reasons, and never got in each other’s way. They wore the possible uniforms of an infantry of barbers, spoke only Polish and a limited Esperanto of hot-dog conditions. It was no use to complain to one of them over an unanswered dime. An apathetic anarchy mounted out of order signs over the slots of broken telephones and jammed electric shooting galleries. The Bowl-a-Matic habitually divided every strike between First and Second Player regardless of who or how many threw. Still, here and there among the machines of the Main Shooting and Game Alley a true sportsman would be losing coin in gestures that attempted to incorporate decay into game risk, and, when an accurately blasted target did not fold away or light up, he understood it merely as the extension of the game’s complexity. Only the hot dogs had not declined, and only because they have no working parts.

– Where do you think you’re going, Mister?

– Aw, let him in. It’s the first night of spring.

– Listen, we got some standards.

– C’mon in, Mister. Have a hot dog on the house.

– No thank you. I don’t eat.

As the Poles argued, the old man slipped into the Main Shooting and Game Alley. The pimps let him go by without an obscenity.

– Don’t get near him. The guy stinks!

– Get him out of here.

The pile of rags and hair stood before William’s De Luxe Polar Hunt. Above the little arctic stage set an unilluminated glass picture represented realistic polar bears, seals, icebergs, and two bearded, quilted American explorers. The flag of their nationality is planted in a drift. In two places the picture gave way to interior-looking windows which registered score and time. The mounted pistol pointed at several ranks of movable tin figures. Carefully the old man read the instructions which had been Scotchtaped along with fingerprints to a corner of the glass.

Penguins score 1 point – 10 points second time up

Seals score 2 points

Igloo Bull’s Eye when entrance is lit, scores 100 points

North Pole when visible, scores 100 points

Walrus appears after North Pole has been hit 5 times & scores 1000 points

Slowly, he committed the instructions to memory, where they merely became part of his game.

– That one’s broken, Mister.

The old man pressed his palm against the pineapple grip and hooked his finger on the worn silver trigger.

– Look at his hand!

– It’s all burnt!

– He’s got no thumb!

– Isn’t he the Terrorist Leader that escaped tonight?

– Looks more like the pervert they showed on TV they’re combing the country for.

– Get him out!

– He stays! He’s a Patriot!

– He’s a stinking cocksucker!

– He’s very nearly the President of our country!

Just as the staff and clientele of the Main Shooting and Game Alley were to succumb to a sordid political riot, something very remarkable happened to the old man. Twenty men were swarming toward him, half to expel the disgusting intruder, half to restrain the expulsionists and consequently to boost the noble heap on their shoulders. In a split second the traffic had stopped on the Main, and a crowd was threatening the steamy plate windows. For the first time in their lives, twenty men experienced the delicious certainty that they were at the very center of action, no matter which side. A cry of happiness escaped from each man as he closed in on his object. Already an accumulation of tangled sirens had provoked the strolling mob like an orchestra at a bull fight. It was the first night of spring, the streets belong to the People! Blocks away, a policeman pocketed his badge and opened his collar. Hard women in ticket booths sized up the situation, whispering to the ushers as they secured their plow-shaped wood window plugs. The theaters began to empty because they face the wrong way. Action was suddenly in the streets! They could all sense it as they closed in on the Main: something was happening in Montréal history! A bitter smile could be detected on the lips of trained revolutionaries and Witnesses of Jehovah, who immediately dispatched all their pamphlets in one confetti salutation. Every man who was a terrorist in his heart whispered, At Last. The police assembled toward the commotion, ripping insignia away like it was scabs which could be traded, but preserving their platoon formations, in order to offer an unidentified discipline to serve whatever ruled next. Poets arrived hoping to turn the expected riot into a rehearsal. Mothers came forth to observe whether they had toilet-trained their sons for the right crisis. Doctors appeared in great numbers, natural enemies of order. The business community attained the area in a disguise of consumers. Androgynous hashish smokers rushed in for a second chance at fuck. All the second chancers rushed in, the divorced, the converted, the overeducated, they all rushed in for their second chance, karate masters, adult stamp collectors, Humanists, give us, give us our second chance! It was the Revolution! It was the first night of spring, the night of small religions. In another month there would be fireflies and lilacs. An entire cult of Tantric love perfectionists turned exocentric in their second chance at compassion, destroying public structures of selfish love with beautiful displays of an acceptable embrace for street intercourse of genitalia. A small Nazi Party of adolescents felt like statesmen as they defected to the living mob. The Army hovered over the radio, determining if the situation was intensely historical, in which case it would overtake Revolution with the Tortoise of a Civil War. Professional actors, all performing-artists including magicians, rushed in for their last and second chance.

– Look at him!

– What’s happening?

Between the De Luxe Polar Hunt and the plate-glass windows of the Main Shooting and Game Alley the gasps were beginning that would spread over the heads of the astounded crowd like a leak in the atmosphere. The old man had commenced his remarkable performance (which I do not intend to describe). Suffice it to say that he disintegrated slowly; just as a crater extends its circumference with endless tiny landslides along the rim, he dissolved from the inside out. His presence had not completely disappeared when he began to reassemble himself. “Had not completely disappeared” is actually the wrong way of looking at it. His presence was like the shape of an hourglass, strongest where it was smallest. And that point where he was most absent, that’s when the gasps started, because the future streams through that point, going both ways. That is the beautiful waist of the hourglass! That is the point of Clear Light! Let it change forever what we do not know! For a lovely briefness all the sand is compressed in the stem between the two flasks! Ah, this is not a second chance. For all the time it takes to launch a sigh he allowed the spectators a vision of All Chances At Once! For some purists (who merely destroy shared information by mentioning it) this point of most absence was the feature of the evening. Quickly now, as if even he participated in the excitement over the unknown, he greedily reassembled himself into – into a movie of Ray Charles. Then he enlarged the screen, degree by degree, like a documentary on the Industry. The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky, and he leaned over him as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. A fleet of jet planes dragged his voice over us who were holding hands.

– Just sit back and enjoy it, I guess.

– Thank God it’s only a movie.

– Hey! cried a New Jew, laboring on the lever of the broken Strength Test. Hey. Somebody’s making it!

The end of this book has been rented to the Jesuits. The Jesuits demand the official beatification of Catherine Tekakwitha!

“Pour le succes de l’enterprise, for the success of this enterprise, il est essential que les miracles éclatent de nouveau, it is essential that the miracles sparkle again, et donc que le culte de la sainte grandisse, and thus extend the cult of the saint, qu’on l’invoque partout avec confiance, that one may invoke her with confidence everywhere, qu’elle redevienne par son invocation, that she becomes again by her mere invocation, par les reliques, by her relics, par la poudre de son tombeau, by the dust of her grave, la semeuse de miracles qu’elle fut au temps jadis, the sower of miracles that she was in former times.” We petition the country for miracle evidence, and we submit this document, whatever its intentions, as the first item in a revived testimonial to the Indian girl. “Le Canada et les États-Unis puiseront de nouvelles forces au contact de ce lis très pur des bords de la Mohawk et des rives du Saint-Laurent. Canada and the United States will achieve a new strength from contact with this purest lily from the shores of the Mohawk and the banks of the St. Lawrence River.”

Poor men, poor men, such as we, they’ve gone and fled. I will plead from electrical tower. I will plead from turret of plane. He will uncover His face. He will not leave me alone. I will spread His name in Parliament. I will welcome His silence in pain. I have come through the fire of family and love. I smoke with my darling, I sleep with my friend. We talk of the poor men, broken and fled. Alone with my radio I lift up my hands. Welcome to you who read me today. Welcome to you who put my heart down. Welcome to you, darling and friend, who miss me forever in your trip to the end.

CREDITS

The epigraph poem and others quoted in The Favourite Game are from The Spice Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen, and are reprinted by kind permission of the publishers, McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

The lyrics on page 37 are from “The Girl That I Marry” by Irving Berlin. Copyright © 1946 (Renewed) by Irving Berlin. All rights for the world, excluding the U.S., China, Japan, Okinawa controlled by Warner Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL. 33014.

The lyrics on page 44 are from “Near You” by Kermit Goell and Francis Craig. Copyright © 1947 (Renewed) by Supreme Music Corporation. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL. 33014.

The lyrics on pages 102-103 are from “I Almost Lost My Mind” by Ivory Joe Hunter © 1956 (Renewed) by Unichappell Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL. 33014.

The lyrics quoted on pages 326–330 are from “It Hurt Me Too” by M. Gaye and W Stevenson. Copyright © 1962 by Jobete Music Co., Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2009 by Leonard Cohen

This omnibus edition published in 2009 by McClelland & Stewart

The Favourite Game: Copyright © 1963 by Leonard Cohen

First published in England by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1963

Beautiful Losers: Copyright © 1966 by Leonard Cohen

First published by McClelland & Stewart in 1966

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cohen, Leonard, 1934–

The favourite game & Beautiful losers / Leonard Cohen.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-309-6

I. Cohen, Leonard, 1934–. Beautiful losers. II. Title.

PS8505.022F3 2009    C813′.54    C2009-901782-2

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

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