It's Three O'Clock: Do You Know Where Your Monsters Are?

Perhaps, as a Chekhov character says of women in Uncle Vanya, you can only become friends after the affair is over.

Some thirty years ago, for about ten minutes, I was a full-fledged science fiction writer, published in the magazines and in anthologies of original writing such as Orbit and Again, Dangerous Visions, soon scooped out of rural Iowa (where I'd given up pretending to be a student, for which I had little knack, in favor of pretending to be a writer, at which I remain passable) to edit New Worlds.

I never really left science fiction, but just went on pursuing my own interests, drifting further and further out to sea. I sent postcards back from time to time. I visited.

At any rate, I'm happy to say that we're good friends now, science fiction and myself.

When I paid those visits, folks were always wanting to know where I'd been. But rumors of my silence were greatly exaggerated. I'd been dancing all along wearing different masks at each ball. Stories, poems and essays showed up regularly in places like the Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, Pequod, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. You weren't supposed to do that, of course. But I've done it all along. I'd had my first poems for Ann Arbor Review and my first stories for the science fiction magazines accepted at the same time; I'd published in Transatlantic Review while I was editing New Worlds.

So science fiction and I cohabited back then. And when our interests began to diverge, we parted happily. George Effinger may have put it best. "I didn't really resign from science fiction," he said years back. "What happened, I think, was that when the music stopped playing, no one had a chair for me. So I'm just going to go on doing what I do, writing what I write, standing up."

Here I am, then, at three o'clock in the morning, all alone, standing up.

There's long been a peculiar relationship between science fiction and its practitioners, one remarkably documented in the series of informal essays Barry Malzberg collected as Engines of the Night. Writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, sensing perilous downdrafts, have taken care to distance themselves from the field. Others believe the constraints of the form integral to its power and appeal, much as one finds imaginative freedom within the strictures of the sonnet or blues, and lobby against importation of values from outside. Some have kept stacks of hats by their typewriters, from time to time taking off the one with the Science Fiction logo and putting on Mystery, Western or Men's Adventure. Science fiction's great originals, meanwhile, people like Philip K. Dick, Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber and Philip Jos Farmer, have simply gone on about their work, largely ignored, making griffins out of sparrows, doing what they do, standing up.

As I've remarked elsewhere, many of us who began writing in the Sixties during the New Worlds era perceived SF as a kind of working man's metaphysical fiction, Borges in stainless steel, Cervantes on the half-shell. It came up in the back of our minds like small hammers insisting that there was another world besides, or beside, this one. We believed that science fiction, speculative fiction, might provide the contemporary mythology, a form that would pull together all the old literatures' themes while at the same time revealing profoundly new ones.

For all its brief life as a genre, Richard Lupoff notes, science fiction has carried out these periodic flirtations with maturity, reaching up and out, sending water over the sides in rolling waves, before relapsing to its usual mishmosh of crude narrative and hackneyed themes. Those who mistook the onenight stand for true love were left waiting at the station.

Writing this, I'm intensely aware that, in speaking of science fiction, what I load onto the truck is almost certainly quite different from the cargo you take off. Most commentators throw all science fiction, fantasy and anything smelling faintly of them into the same bin, babies unseen in the bathwater; there seems little choice. But the genre is now so large and varied and compartmented that the term has ceased to be of much use, like the earlier, once useful term jazz. If we're talking about Kenny G or Eric Dolphy, we're not only saying different things, we're speaking a different language. Likewise, science fiction extends from hordes of heroic-fantasy trilogies at the east border, to the latest Star Trek tie-in on the south, to the furthermost psychic explorations of a J. G. Ballard (there in the northern mists), to the uncategorizable Stanislaw Lem and the innovations of Sturgeon, Bester, Delany, Bill Gibson. Loading the truck, I shove cases of Cordwainer Smith up against Cortzar, stack Landolfi and Lem over there by Lucius Shepard, Howard Waldrop alongside Pynchon. That doesn't clear things up much, I know, but it makes for a hell of a load.

So for convenience's sake, let's agree that we both know what it is we're talking about. Almost certainly we don't, but without that fundamental agreement all communication much beyond the bounds of "Leave my food [or your mother] alone" becomes impossible.

Anyway, there I was, at the station, three o'clock in the morning.

Even back then Tom Disch argued that science fiction was irretrievably an adolescent literature, an argument taken up at length by Norman Spinrad in Science Fiction and the Real World. Come to life in the swamp of pulp fiction, the genre never could quite get its feet clear of the mud; like Aristophanes' Socrates, it kept stumbling into potholes while gazing at stars. Disch, Malzberg, Spinrad and yes, Lem, who's taken science fiction most severely to task would agree that there's something perverse, something epicene or niggardly at its center, which forever confounds science fiction, racking its promise with commercialism and mere cleverness, carrying the coals of received wisdom to the Newcastle of wonder, holding out offers to expand our consciousness through travel yet giving back, when we send in money, only the same old postcards.

"The doors have been thrown open to start on a great quest," in Michel Butor's words, "and we discover we are still walking round and round the house."

When I began reading it, SF was outlaw literature, with absolutely no literary cachet whatsoever no cachet period. Only brainy, odd children read the stuff, and there remained something smarmy and illicit about it; a part of the pleasure was my sense of transgression. We science fiction readers thought about things, knew things, worried over things, others did not.

Looking back on the writers I have most admired, too, what I find in common among many of them is a similar maverick status. When everyone else stood, they sat. So I skipped without a thought, wholly by instinct, past much of the approved canon and settled on the like of Tristram Shandy, Machado de Assis, Chandler, Boris Vian, Miss Lonelyhearts, Marek Hlasko, Queneau, John Collier, Blaise Cendrars. I sought edge literature, yes, but also people writing at the edge, writers not so much lighting out for the territory as dragging the territory back with them farting and belching and smelling unmistakably ripe to civilization.

One of science fiction's or the fantastic's great strengths is its ability, like poetry, to throw into sharp relief the world about us: to make it new again, large again; to wipe out our assumptions, automatic

responses, certitudes. Now, this is precisely what any good literature does what Lionel Trilling called its "adversary intent." As for how this stuff works, Vian put it best in the avant-propos to his stillastonishing L'Ecume des jours:

Its so-called method consists essentially of projecting reality, under favorable circumstances, on to an irregularly tilting and consequently distorting frame of reference.

Thirty-four years of stories here, then, in these two volumes. Not all of them by any means, but a goodly portion. Plucked from science fiction magazines like F&SF and Amazing Stories, excavated from anthologies like Orbit and Full Spectrum, rediscovered in uncategorizable venues like New Worlds and The Edge, saved from drowning in literary magazines like the Georgia Review and South Dakota Review, discovered hiding in the upstairs closets of Alfred Hitchcock's, Gallery, Ellery Queen's, one of them even written on commission for the BBC.

Obviously no one is safe.

Forward, Bravely, Into the Anthills

Thirty-four years of stories.

What comes back to me for the most part are a lot of early mornings. I know some of these stories were written during the day, they had to be, but whenever I think back it's always three in the morning and I'm sitting at a table or makeshift desk somewhere in a circle of light. With the world buzzing against my window, maybe, and I'm thinking "Sure glad I got the screens up in time." Or listening to the world's feet clomping around on the porch, wondering should I go look and see what's out there.

The other thing that comes back to me is the astonishing number of places these stories were written. London, some of them, in a bedsitter with gauzy curtains like bandage slapped against the sky and stairways narrow as ladders. Some of the earliest in rural Iowa, looking out over cornfields and the houses of Mennonite neighbors. A second-floor studio apartment in the East Village whose downstairs vestibule was a favorite sleeping spot for the neighborhood's homeless. Damon and Kate's house in Milford that I rented along with Tom Disch and where we could never be sure just how many visitors might be tucked away in upper rooms. An apartment in Boston that you reached by climbing up, always up, from the streetcar tracks, bank upon bank of cement steps, Azteclike; I lived there when my first book came out. Various apartments in New Orleans whose cockroaches, I swear, moved along with me en masse. A converted garage in Texas where I watched women deliver their children to daycare across the street as I sat to begin writing in the morning and watched the kids get retrieved (this was the summer I wrote The Long-Legged Fly in a month, much of what would become Renderings, and at least two dozen new stories, plus assorted poems, essays and reviews) as I continued on into the night.

Short stories were always what I loved most, always what I intended to write. I'd take "The Man Who Lost the Sea" or Gogol's "The Nose" over any number of earnest Bildungsromans and tales of crumbling marriages; I found it hard to believe (and still do) that any novel could say more about political repression, the human soul and the sources of art than Cortzar's six-page "Graffiti." Having sold my first story, written in a week, for the awesome amount of $300 (this was in 1966), I assumed I would just go on doing this, failing to take into account that, first, I might not be able to write a story every week and, second, that one or two of them might not sell for such splendid sums. In fact, as the market began collapsing a few years later, my checks dwindled steadily, to $100, to $36.25, to $10. Till finally I was out there strutting my stuff on the corner, the literary equivalent of Storyville mattress women. Boxes slowly filled with the complimentary copies of magazines that were often my only pay and followed me from apartment to apartment, city to city, over time squashing down like well-used cushions or old boots.

But I'm not going to write here about trying to make a living as a short-story writer. That all too soon would have one part of my audience laughing uproariously and the other, a very small part, weeping.

Short-story writing. The lemonade stands of literature.

I had started off publishing, as I said, in science fiction magazines and anthologies. Later, in large part due to a wonderful lady named Eleanor Sullivan whom, alas, I was never to meet, I began publishing as well in mystery magazines. Meanwhile, not content with this simple, pure obscurity, I pushed ever onward to new frontiers, heeling my mule all alone over the ridge (for no Indian guide would accompany me; bearers threw down their loads and fled shouting Bwana, Bwana not go there!) towards literary magazines with baker's-dozen circulations that were seen chiefly, in many cases solely, by other contributors.

Yes, I did wonder sometimes, as I stuffed another perfectly innocent envelope with return postage, or tore one open to find my manuscript bearing the hoofprint of the paper clip that clasped a form rejection to its bosom, whether this was not a silly thing for a 33-year old (or 43-year-old, or 53-year-old) supposedly professional writer to be doing. But I just went on doing it, like some out-of-control, perpetual-motion existentialist making his leap into faith, nostrils pinched shut with finger and thumb, again and again, on permanent replay. Headin' em up, movin' em out.

Years ago I wrote a piece for American Pen suggesting that, abandoned by mainstream publishing, our literature even then we'd begun to miss it, you see, and to go looking for it had fled to the literary magazines. They were like those remote islands in science fiction upon which prehistoric life has survived into the present. I truly believed that. Some years later I again wrote on the subject, saying that now I didn't know where our literature had gone. That I had looked and couldn't find it. That if anyone had seen it recently, they should call; I'd pay for information, photos, confirmed sightings. I put its face on milk cartons.

Well, as it happens, a lot of our literature was sidling its way over towards mystery and crime writing. The situation was similar to what had obtained with paperback originals in the Fifties, when writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis could pursue their demons, turning out these highly original, intensely personal novels, yet still make their livings as professional writers. Science fiction in the Sixties, when I began writing it, was just then unfolding (soon the airlocks would slam shut again) and had much the same sense of practical freedom about it. Michel Butor said of science fiction that anticipation had created a language by which in principle we could examine anything. Damned if we couldn't and

didn't! But now writers like Jerome Charyn, K. C. Constantine, Jim Burke, Daniel Woodrell and Walter Mosley were discovering that mystery and crime fiction would let them write the kind of books they wanted, personal books, literary books if you will, and still have an audience.

I'm a little slow, but eventually I figure things out. I'd made my way to Chandler and Hammett while in London, and once back in the States, in short order, to Chester Himes, Rex Stout, Ross Macdonald. In my flat off Portobello Road, gauzy curtains slapping at sky through the open window but never making contact, I had written an odd story, all threat and paranoia, titled "And then the dark." I followed it with one titled "Winner," then over the years with others: "Blue Devils" and "DC al FINE" (which oddly enough earned substantial sums upon broadcast over Italian radio) for Cathleen Jordan at Hitchcock's; "I Saw Robert Johnson," "Dogs in the Nighttime," "Joyride" and "Good Men" all for Eleanor at Ellery Queen's; most recently, "Vocalities" for John Harvey and "Shutting Darkness Down" for BBC radio.

Somewhere in there, too, begun as a short story, completed as a novel, came The Long-Legged Fly. Then others buzzing at the screens. By which time I could pass in most company. I had become, almost without noticing it, bilingual.

Or had begun talking in tongues, perhaps perspective is everything.

But listen. Savages, barbarians, creep towards you from without and within, savages at every border, every edge, just outside the light. They look like you, they have learned to speak like you. Soon none of us will be able to tell them apart. But we, your writers, can help you. We can defend you. We've always aspired, you see, to be outlaws, hired guns, eternal outsiders, long riders. We've always intended to be dangerous.

Please.

The Book Not Written

Reading Out of Sheer Rage, the recent anti-biography of D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer, I began wondering if over past years something that amounts to a new genre hasn't delivered itself roughly into being: the book about not writing a book. Much of this one, subtitled "Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence," for instance, Dyer spends adamantly not wrestling with Lawrence but, instead, serving as apologist for his own inadequacies and idiosyncratic aversion to such niceties of the book trade as coherence, research and reliability. How much more interesting we surely must find Dyer's grand dilemma, upon departing for a trip, over whether to pack the selected or complete poems! This is a literature of perpetration, not penetration.

Research! Research! The very word is like a bell, tolling the death and imminent turning to dust of whichever poor sod is being researched. Spare me. Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably. Exley's A Fan's Notes may be the prototype of the genre, the quintessential how-not-to book. Or Notes from a Cold Island, with its show-and-tell of the book Exley fails (fails even as we watch! by God, there is nothing up his sleeve!) to write about Edmund Wilson. Reading Exley is always a bit like watching a performer take to the tightwire in snowshoes, having left his crutches below on the ground.

Then there's my own favorite, Joe McGinnis's little-known and excellent Heroes, in which McGinnis before our very eyes escapes the second-book curse by the simple ruse of refusing to write the damn thing. Instead he hangs out with the like of John Cheever, repeatedly reminds us of the work he's avoiding, and manages to put together a fine meal (by pure intuition, for the man knows nothing of cooking) from miscellaneous leftovers found in a pantry. Emerging from the oven, that meal smells strongly of symbol.

Nicholson Baker's whining and dining of Updike in U and I is a more recent example: lots of I and very little U.

The apotheosis of the genre, meanwhile, has to be Marcel Bnabou's Why I Haven't Written Any of My Books, which not only doesn't get written but doesn't really even get started, looping back on itself again and again like the first syllable of a perpetual stutter.

These books are the literary equivalent of unfinished furniture, reminiscent of advertisements for used guitars (Needs work, Tunes up well) presented, in this critical age, pre-deconstructed as it were. In them, discursiveness has been pushed to its limits, creating a kind of genius of evasion, a literature of circumlocution.

There's a rich tradition here, mind you.

Montaigne: "Were I to select some subject that I had to pursue, I might not be able to keep up with it."

Pascal: "The thought that escaped me was what I wished to write; I write instead that it has escaped me."

Or Walter Benjamin, whose great ambition was to write a book consisting solely of clips and quotes from his reading: "Every finished work is the death mask of its intuition."

And while I'm speaking here of nonfiction, hoping to avoid that whole postmodern, self-referential, selfbegetting (or in this case unbegetting) thing, it's difficult to consider literary circumlocution without recalling its masters, novelists Laurence Sterne and the brilliant Machado de Assis.

Why not go the long way 'round? these new writers ask with Sterne and Machado de Assis. Come to think of it, why go any way at all? Let's just have us a nice walk, shall we? We're not talking guerrilla literature here. More like gummy bears. You chew and chew.

In all the good Greek of Plato I lack my roast beef and potato,

John Crowe Ransom wrote. But in the good Greek of the book not written, there's always plenty of gravy, jars and jars of condiments, lots of butter. In the book not written, we're always half awake at 3 A.M., busily folding the world's sillinesses, imagined, real or remembered, into our own.

Uncommonly Good

The publishing industry is filled with predictable books. By that I don't mean just formula genre books, such as most romances, action-adventure books, and mysteries, but mainstream books with predictable elements: anti-hero, rising arcs of action over three hundred or so pages, happy ending or not, closure. Such elements have become so ingrained in the industry that books that go against them must be so strongly written that readers (and critics) overlook the lack of familiar elements. In Drive, the powerful prose of James Sallis provides just such a distraction, in a book so off-beat that we never even learn the protagonist's name.

Driver realized then that he was holding his breath. Listening for sirens, for the sounds of people gathering on stairways or down in the parking lot, for the scramble of feet beyond the door.

Written in the best noir style, Drive opens, literally, in a pool of blood. The protagonist, whose name is never more than "Driver", spends part of his time as a stunt driver for the movies, and another part driving for criminals. As the book opens, his work for (the non-Hollywood) criminals has taken a terrible turn, and Driver finds his life completely unhinged. The rest of the book explores how Driver has come to be in this situation, and how he might get himself out. As the story unfolds across Arizona and southern California, Sallis's lean and powerful prose draws a stark image of a man on the fringe of society, in a dark world that most of us only see in the corners of our eyes as we drive quickly by.

Up till the time Driver got his growth about twelve, he was small for his age, an attribute of which his father made full use. The boy could fit easily through small openings, bathroom windows, pet doors and so on, making him a considerable helpmate at his father's trade, which happened to be burglary.

From a writer's perspective, Drive is an excellent example of handling flashback. Common advice for writers is to begin "in media res"in the middle of the action. Drive takes this to the extreme, beginning only a few days before the end, but telling a story that sweeps across a span of years. What does that mean for a story? Flashback, and lots of it. Probably two thirds of the book is flashback, and while that can be the kiss of death for a story in the hands of an amateur, Sallis handles it flawlessly. Despite the dramatic jumps backward and forward in time, a reader goes through the pages without feeling lost. Instead, the narrative comes together as a jigsaw puzzle, with the pieces falling into place one by one until the final, inevitable, piece completes the picture.

Cover to cover, Sallis puts on a demonstration of the style and structure of quality writing. Drive easily could be (and surely will be if it isn't already) used as a textbook in a creative writing class. It's that good.

Perfect round hole between his eyes, Nino staggered back against the partially opened front door, pushing it the rest of the way open. His legs remained on the porch. Varicose veins like thick blue snakes stood out on them. A slipper fell off. His toenails were thick as planks.

Drive is an excellent book, written by a veteran author who really understands books and writing. Any fan of noir should not miss it, and anyone who enjoys a solid story wrapped in excellent prose should not miss it either. That, in my opinion, should include everyone.

The Long Legged-Fly

Chapter One

"Hello, Harry."

His sick eyes slid in the light. He was wearing a corduroy coat over a denim shirt, chinos bagged out at knee and butt, legs too long, cuffs frayed. They'd all seen better days, clothes and man alike. Harry had always been a sharp dresser, people said; they even used the word natty. But now skag and his own black heart had got him.

"Carl?" His voice was an emphysematous whisper. Even now a cigarette dangled out the side of his mouth. It waggled up and down as he talked. "I got the money, man. Business as usual, right? Just like you said." A rumbling cough deep in his chest.

"No rush, Harry. Be cool, there's plenty of time. Let up a little, enjoy life." The yardlights were behind me and he squinted at the shadow moving towards him. Not that it would have made much difference. He didn't know me from Earl Long. "And anyhow, first I want to tell you a story. You like stories, Harry?"

Behind us, oil derricks heaved and rested, heaved and rested.

"Magazine Street. Ten-fifteen, Saturday night, about a month ago. There was a girl from Mississippi, Harry. And a party. And you. Any of this beginning to sound familiar?"

His eyes searched the darkness around him.

"I've been looking for you a long time, Harry. It took a long time to find you. A man like you, with your needs, he shouldn't be so hard to find."

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it down. It lay there like a half-blind eye. I stepped out of the light and when he saw me, he was scared for the first time, really scared. Sweat popped out on his pale forehead. Old fears die hard.

"It's only a story, of course. Stories help us go on living. Stories can't hurt anyone, can they, Harry?"

I let him see the knife in my hand then, a leatherworker's knife.

"Big Black Sambo's coming to get you, Harry. Nigger's gonna carve you up like you did her. Nothing left for the pigs and chickens, not even enough for soul food."

His eyes moved. He knew escape was somewhere. But he also knew that like everything else in his life it was going to get away from him.

"Look, man, I don't know who you are, but you got it all wrong. You listen to me, it wasn't my fault. I just fix things arrange them, like that's all I ever done. It was those crazies, man. Goddam long hair and kraut van. They're the ones did that girl."

It tumbled out of him much as the world must have gone in: fitful starts, none of them connected; and underneath, everything blurring together.

I raised the knife and light glinted on the curved blade.

"Yeah, I know, Harry. Crazies on skag and smack feeding new monkeys, crazies on speed and booze and horse and the rush of a couple hundred dollars they just boosted out of some mom and pop's till. But who got the stuff for them, Harry? Who gave it to them and started the party? How much of their stake did it cost them? And whose idea to bring the girl into that?"

Fear lit his eyes like a torch. All around us oil derricks sighed, the last breaths of tired old men.

"Any of this beginning to sound familiar, Harry? You remember the way her face looked when you got through with her? Or how big you felt then, doing all that to the little nigger girl?"

He turned to run but fear tangled his legs. He fell. I let him crawl, a few yards. He was sobbing. Choking.

"You didn't even know her name, Harry." I walked up slowly behind him, got a foot under and flipped him over. He flopped like something not human, and his eyes rolled. I let him have a good long look at my face, all the things that were in it.

"Sleepy after your bedtime story?"

Blood welled out of his throat and soaked denim, corduroy, ground. His eyes looked like something you'd find under a rock.

I searched his pockets and got the money that was for the kid. Then I bent down and opened up his wasted belly with the knife.

"That was for Angie," I said.

Behind us, oil derricks shushed any eulogy.

Chapter Two

I hadn't been to the apartment in three days, the office in four, so it was a toss-up. Finally, cruising down St. Charles, I decided the office was closer so what the hell. I went around the block a few times. All the parking spaces were filled. I finally pulled the Cad into a tow-away zone and raised the hood. Weak, but it might work. It had before.

The bakery was doing hot business, but upstairs it looked like everybody had moved out. There was something peculiar about that at two-fifteen in the afternoon. Then I remembered it was Labor Day. Maybe I'd have to do some work to celebrate.

I stopped in front of the door marked "Lewis Griffin, In estigations" (the v had escaped a year or so back; most days I envied it) and got out the key. There were a lot of notes tacked to the door I had an informal arrangement with the bakery for taking messages. I ripped them off, turned the key and went on inside. The floor was littered with mail they'd dropped through the slot. I scooped it up and dropped it on the desk with the messages.

There was a half-filled glass of bourbon and an almost empty bottle on the desk. I went to the bathroom, rinsed the glass, and finished emptying the bottle into it. Then I sat down to go through all the junk.

Most of it was just that. Circulars, subscription renewal notices, religious pamphlets. There were three letters from the bank that I was overdrawn and would I please at my earliest convenience drop by and see Mr. Whitney. There was also a telegram. I held it up, turning it over and over in my hands. Never liked those things.

I finally ripped it open and looked. There was the usual salad of numbers and letters that meant nothing. Under that was the message.

FATHER GRAVELY ILL STOP ASKING FOR YOU STOP BAPTIST MEMORIAL MEMPHIS STOP PLEASE CALL

STOP LOVE MOTHER

I sat there staring at the yellow paper. Ten minutes must have gone by. The old man and I had never been close, not for a long time anyhow, but now he was asking for me. Or was that just something Mom put in? And what the hell happened, anyhow? I couldn't see anything short of a train or howitzer ever stopping the old horse.

I got up and went to the window, taking the bourbon with me. I put it down in one gulp and put the glass on the sill. Down in the street a group of kids were playing what looked like cops and robbers. The robbers were winning.

I went back to the desk and dialed LaVerne's number. I didn't really expect to catch her this time of day, but she got it on the third ring.

"Lew? Listen, man, I've been trying to get in touch with you all week. Your mother's been calling me two, three times a day. I left messages all over this town."

"Yeah, I know, honey. Sorry. I've been away on business."

"But you always let me know..."

"Didn't know myself until the last minute." I looked wistfully at the empty bottle on the desk (good word, wistfully), wondering if the drugstore across the street would be open. I hadn't noticed. "But I'm back now and looking to see you."

"What is it, Lew? What's wrong?"

"Mom didn't say?"

"She wouldn't even have told me who she was if she didn't need something."

"My father's sick. I don't know, a heart attack, a stroke, maybe an accident something, anyhow. 'Gravely ill' was what she said."

"Lew. You've gotta go up there. Next plane."

"And what would I use for money."

She paused. "I've got money."

"Like the man says, Thanks but no thanks."

Another pause. "Someday that pride of yours'll kill you, Lew. The pride or the anger, I don't know which'll get you first. But look, it can be a loan, okay?"

"Forget it, Verne. Besides, I'm on a case." I was beginning to wonder why I had called her in the first place. But who else was there? "I'll call tonight, find out what's happening. And I'll be in touch tomorrow. Hang in there."

"You too, Lew. You know where to find me. Bye."

"Yeah."

I put the receiver down and looked again at the empty bottle. Maybe Joe's was the place for me tonight. I looked at my watch. Maybe eight, nine would be the best time to call. Maybe they'd know something by then. Maybe they knew something already.

I threw the letters from the bank in the wastebasket and headed out the door.

When I got to the street, my car was gone.

Moth

Chapter One

It was midnight, it was raining.

I scrubbed at the sink as instructed, and went on in. The second set of double doors led into a corridor at the end of which, to the left, a woman sat at a U-shaped desk behind an improvised levee of computers, phones, stacks of paperwork and racks of bound files. She was on the phone, trying simultaneously to talk into it and respond to the youngish man in soiled Nikes and lab coat who stood beside her asking about results of lab tests. Every few moments the phone purred and a new light started blinking on it. The woman herself was not young, forty to fifty, with thinning hair in a teased style out of fashion for at least twenty years. A tag on her yellow polyester jacket read Jo Ellen Heslip. Names are important.

To the right I walked past closetlike rooms filled with steel racks of supplies, an X-ray viewer, satellite pharmacy, long conference tables. Then into the intensive-care nursery, the NICU, itself like coming out onto a plain. It was half the size of a football field, broken into semidiscrete sections by four-foot tile walls topped with open shelving. (Pods, I'd later learn to call them.) Light flooded in from windows along three walls. The windows were double, sealed: thick outer glass, an enclosed area in which lint and construction debris had settled, inner pane. Pigeons strutted on the sill outside. Down in the street buses slowed at, then passed, a covered stop. Someone in a hospital gown, impossible to say what sex or age, slept therein on a bench advertising Doctor's Bookstore, getting up from time to time to rummage in the trash barrel alongside, pulling out cans with a swallow or two remaining, a bag of Zapp's chips, a smashed carton from Popeyes.

I found Pod 1 by trial and error and made my way through the grid of incubators, open cribs, radiant warmers: terms I'd come to know in weeks ahead. Looking down at pink and blue tags afixed to these containers.

Baby Girl McTell lay in an incubator in a corner beneath the window. The respirator reared up beside her on its pole like a silver sentinel, whispering: shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. LED displays wavered and changed on its face. With each shhhh, Baby Girl McTell's tiny body puffed up, and a rack of screens mounted above her to the right also updated: readouts of heart rate, respiration and various internal pressures on a Hewlett-Packard monitor, oxygen saturation on a Nellcor pulse oximeter, levels of CO2 and O2 from transcutaneous monitors.

Baby Girl McTell Born 9/15 Weight 1 lb 5 oz Mother: Alouette

I could hold her in the palm of my hand, easily, I thought. Or could have, if not for this battleship of machinery keeping her afloat, keeping her alive.

The nurse at bedside looked up. Papers lay scattered about on the bedside stand. She was copying from them onto another, larger sheet. She was left-handed, her wrist a winglike curve above the pen.

"Good morning. Would you be the father, by any chance?"

Reddish-blonde hair cut short. Wearing scrubs, as they all were. Bright green eyes and a British accent like clear, pure water, sending a stab of pain and longing and loss through me as I thought of Vicky. Teresa Hunt, according to her nametag. But did I really look like an eighteen-year-old's romantic other?

Or maybe she meant the girl's father?

I shook my head. "A family friend."

"Well, I had wondered." Words at a level, unaccented. "No one's seen anything of him, as far as I know."

"From what little I know, I don't expect you will."

"I see. Well, we are rather accustomed to that, I suppose. Some of the mothers themselves stop coming after a time."

She shuffled papers together and capped her pen, which hung on a cord around her neck. There was print on the side of it: advertising of some sort, drugs probably. Like the notepad Vicky wrote her name and phone number on when I found her at Hotel Dieu.

Tucking everything beneath an oversize clipboard, Teresa Hunt squared it on the stand.

"Look, I'm terribly sorry," she said. "Someone should have explained this to you, but only parents and grandparents are allowed O, never mind all that. Bugger the rules. What difference can it possibly make? Is this your first time to see her?"

I nodded.

"And it's the mother you know?"

"Grandmother, really. The baby's mother's mother. We... were friends. For a long time."

"I see." She probably did. "And the girl's mother recently died, according to the chart. A stroke, wasn't it?"

"It was." And I had sat beside her bed every night those last weeks, trying somehow to tell her what she had meant to me, trying to explain to us both why I hadn't seen much of her this last year since her marriage, watching light dwindle and fade in her eyes.

"Did she know Alouette was pregnant?"

I shook my head. "Their lives had gone separate ways many years back." So separate that I hadn't even known about Alouette. "She" Say it, Lew. Go ahead and say her name. Names are important. "LaVerne had been trying to get back in touch, to find Alouette."

She looked away for a moment. "What's happened to us?" And in my own head I heard Vicky again, many years ago: What's w rong with this country, Lew? "Well, never mind all that. Not much we can do about it, is there? Do you understand what's happening here?" Her nod took in the ventilator, monitors, bags of IV medication hanging upside down like transparent bats from silver poles, Baby Girl McTell's impossible ark; perhaps the whole world.

"Not really." Does anyone, I wanted to add.

"Alouette is an habitual drug user. Crack, mainly, according to our H&P and the social worker's notes, but there's a history of drug and alcohol abuse involving many controlled substances, more or less whatever was available, it seems. She makes no attempt to deny this. And because of it, Alouette's baby was profoundly compromised in utero. She never developed, and though Alouette did manage to carry her as far as the seventh month, what you're looking at here in the incubator is something more on the order of a five-month embryo. You can see there's almost nothing to her. The eyes are fused, her skin breaks down wherever it's touched, there aren't any lungs to speak of. She's receiving medication which paralyzes her own respiratory efforts, and the machine, the ventilator, does all her breathing. We have her on high pressures and a high rate, and nine hours out of ten we're having to give her hundredpercent oxygen. Two hours out of ten, maybe, we're holding our own."

"You're telling me she's going to die."

"I am. Though of course I'm not supposed to."

"Then why are we doing all this?"

"Because we can. Because we know how. There are sixty available beds in this unit. On any given day, six to ten of those beds will be filled with crack babies like Alouette's. At least ten others are just as sick, for whatever reasons other kinds of drug and alcohol abuse, congenital disease, poor nutrition, lack of prenatal care. The numbers are climbing every day. When I first came here, there'd be, oh, five to ten babies in this unit. Now there're never fewer than thirty. And there've been times we've had to stack cribs in the hallway out there."

"Are you always this blunt?"

"No. No, I'm not, not really. But we look on all this a bit differently in Britain, you understand. And I think that I may be answering something I see in your face, as well."

"Thank you." I held out a hand. She took it without hesitation or deference, as American women seldom can. "My name is Griffin. Lew."

"Teresa, as you can see. And since Hunt is the name on my nursing license, I use it here. But in real life, away from here, I mostly use my maiden name, McKinney. If there's ever anything I can do, Mr. Griffin, please let me know. This can be terribly hard on a person."

She removed vials from a drawer beneath the incubator, checked them against her lists, drew up portions into three separate syringes and injected these one at a time, and slowly, into crooks (called heplocks) in Baby Girl McTell's IV tubing. There were four IV sites, swaddled in tape. Almost every day one or another of them had to be restarted elsewhere, in her scalp, behind an ankle, wherever they could find a vein that wouldn't blow.

She dropped the syringes into the mouth of a red plastic Sharps container, pulled a sheet of paper from beneath the clipboard and, glancing at a clock on the wall nearby, made several notations.

"I don't know at all why I'm telling you this, Mr. Griffin, but I had a child myself, a son. He was three months early, weighed almost two pounds and lived just over eight days. I was sixteen at the time. And afterwards, because of an infection, I became quite sterile. But it was because of him that I first began thinking about becoming a nurse."

"Call me Lew. Please."

"I don't think the head nurse would care much for that, if she were to hear about it. She's a bit stuffy and proper, you understand."

"But what can one more rule matter? Since, as you say, we've already started breaking them."

"Yes, well, we have done that truly, haven't we, Lew. Do you think you'd be wanting to speak with one of the doctors? They should be along in just a bit. Or I could try paging one of them."

"Is there anything they can tell me that you can't?"

"Not really, no."

"Then I don't see any reason for bothering them. I'm sure they have plenty to do."

"That they have. Well, I'll just step out for a few minutes and leave the two of you to get acquainted. If you should need anything, Debbie will be watching over my children while I'm gone."

She nodded towards a nurse who sat in a rocking chair across the pod, bottle-feeding one of the babies.

"That's Andrew. He's been with us almost a year now, and we all spoil him just awfully, I'm afraid."

"A year? When will he leave?"

"There's nowhere for him to go. Most of his bowel had to be removed just after birth, and he'll always be needing a lot of care. Feedings every hour, a colostomy to manage. His parents came to see him when the mother was in hospital, but once she was discharged, we stopped hearing from them. The police went out to the address we had for them after a bit, but they were long gone. Eventually I suppose he'll be moved upstairs to pediatrics. And somewhere farther along they'll find a nursing home that will take him, perhaps."

I looked from Andrew back to Baby Girl McTell as Teresa walked away. Names are important. Things are what we call them. By naming, we understand. But what name do we have for a baby who's never quite made it into life, who goes on clawing after it, all the while slipping further away, with a focus, a hunger, we can scarcely imagine? What can we call the battles going on here? And how can we ever understand them?

Through the shelves I watched people gather over an isolette in the next pod. First the baby's own nurse, then another from the pod; next, when one of them went off to get her, a nurse who appeared to be in charge; finally, moments later, the young man in lab coat and Nikes who'd earlier been standing at the desk in front. Various alarms had begun sounding buzzers, bells, blats as the young man looked up at the monitors one last time, reached for a transparent green bag at bedside, and said loudly: "Call it." Overhead, a page started: Stat to neonatal intensive care, all attendings. He put a part of the bag over the baby's face and began squeezing it rapidly.

Then I could see no more as workers surrounded the isolette.

"Sir, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to step out," Debbie said. She stood and placed Andrew back in his open crib. The child's eyes followed her as she walked away. He didn't cry.

I filed out alongside skittish new fathers, smiling grandparents, a couple of mothers still in hospital gowns and moving slowly, hands pressed flat against their stomachs. An X-ray machine bore down on us through the double doors and lumbered along the hallway, banging walls and scattering linen hampers, trashcans, supply carts. Where's this one? the tech asked. Pod 2, Mrs. Heslip told him.

Most of the others, abuzz with rumor, clustered just outside the doors. Some decided to call it a night and went on to the elevators across the hall, where I knew from experience they'd wait a while. I found stairs at the end of a seemingly deserted hall and went down them (they smelled of stale cigarettes and

urine) into the kind of cool, gentle rain we rarely see back in New Orleans. There, when it comes, it comes hard and fast, making sidewalks steam, beating down banana trees and shucking leaves off magnolias, pouring over the edges of roofs and out of gutters that can't handle the sudden deluge.

I turned up the collar of my old tan sportcoat as I stepped out of the hospital doorway just in time to get splashed by a pickup that swerved towards the puddle when it saw me. I heard cackling laughter from inside.

Earlier I had noticed a small caf on the corner a few blocks over. Nick's, Rick's, something like that, the whole front of it plate glass, with handwritten ads for specials taped to the glass and an old-style diner's counter. I decided to give it a try and headed that way. Moving through the streets of the rural South I'd fled a long time ago. Bessie Smith had died not too far from here, over around Clarksdale, when the white hospital wouldn't treat her following a car accident and she bled to death on the way to the colored one.

At age sixteen, I had fled. Fled my father's docility and sudden rages, fled old black men saying mister to ten-year-old white kids, fled the fields and the tire factory pouring thick black smoke out onto the whole town like a syrup, fled all those faces gouged-out and baked hard and dry like the land itself. I had gone to the city, to New Orleans, and made a life of my own, not a life I was especially proud of, but mine nonetheless, and I'd always avoided going back. I'd avoided a lot of things. And now they were all waiting for me.

Black Hornet

Chapter One

Back in basic, which turned out to be fully a fifth of my military career, there was a guy named Robert, a gangly young man from Detroit so black he seemed polished. We were all out on the range one afternoon. They'd hauled an old World War II tank out there, and we were supposed to step up to the line, assemble a molotov cocktail and lob it into the tank through the open hatch. My own toss, most of our tosses, missed pretty sadly. Then Robert toed up there. He stood a few seconds looking off at the tank and hefting the bottle, getting the weight of it. Then with an easy overhand, he dropped his cocktail squarely into the tank: just like a man walking through a door. His perpetual smile jacked up a half degree, no more. "Sort of thing come in handy back home," he said.

I remembered that, I think for the first time since it happened, when I read about the sniper.

His name was Terence Gully and he was twenty-three. He'd been in the Navy, but things hadn't gone well for him there. Discrimination, he told friends, ex-employers, would-be employers, people on the streetcar or at bus stops. So at 11 a.m. on a bright fall day Gully had lugged a .44-caliber Magnum rifle and a duffel bag full of ammunition up an old fire escape onto the roof of The King's Inn motel half a mile from City Hall, taken up position in a concrete cubicle there, and opened fire. Tourists and office workers on lunch break started going down before anyone knew what was happening. A Nebraska couple staying at the motel on their honeymoon, returning from breakfast. A couple of motel employees. A police officer who'd heard the first shots and rushed over from City Hall.

Hours later, bodycount mounting (bodycount being a term we were getting used to hearing in those years, grce LBJ and General Westmoreland), they brought in a Seaknight chopper from the naval air base at Belle Chase. As they flew in low over the roof preparing to open fire, the pilot and police heard Gully ranting below them: "Power to the people... You'll never take me... Africa! Africa!"

The pilot would later distinguish himself in Vietnam and return home, Purple Heart and Medal of Honor prominently displayed behind his desk, to a Ford dealership out in burgeoning Metairie, where mostly he sat in his glassed-in office and steadily poured Scotch into his coffee, himself a kind of exhibit now, as customers and their children ranged through the showroom beyond. One of the officers aloft with him that day, Robert Morones, would go on to become the city's youngest chief of police and eventually settle into the easy chair of perennial reelection to his seat in the state legislature.

The seige lasted over twelve hours and left in its wake fifteen dead, thirty or more injured, untold damage both from diversionary fires Gully had set and from returned police gunfire.

The seige also left in its wake a badly shaken city. There had always been a silent accommodation here, a gentlemen's agreement that blacks and whites would go on pursuing their parallel lives. But had the codes now changed? If one black man could carry his rage on his back onto a roof and from there hold hostage an entire city, if a group of black men (like those calling themselves Muslims) could recant their place in white man's society, if still other groups and individuals (Black Panthers, The Black Hand) openly advocated taking up arms against that society what remnants obtained of any agreement? Or, finally, of society itself.

The man who cut your yard Monday noon and shuffled feet when he came for his pay might come after your possessions and station, your livelihood, your very life, Tuesday night.

Made you think of the city under Spanish rule circa 1794, when Governor Carondelet, perched on the edge of a chair the French Revolution was busily pulling out from under European complacencies, mindful how quickly this sort of thing might spread, encircled the city with walls and forts, not to turn away attackers, but to help contain (he thought) its own French citizens.

Floors and makeshift shelves at Terence Gully's Camp Street apartment were stacked with literature: pamphlets, flyers, tracts, hand-lettered posters. Over and over on the plasterboard walls Gully had scrawled peace signs, swastikas and slogans.

KILL THEM ALL! BLACK IS RIGHT HATE WHITE PEOPLE BEASTS OF THE EARTH

The King's Inn shootings were one parochial incident all but lost among a hundred others in those years of mounting violence. The first Kennedy had already gone down. The Watts riots were just around the corner. Memphis was waiting for Martin Luther King, L.A. for Robert Kennedy, a lectern in the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, for Malcolm X. A month or so before, fifteen black men and women in Sunday best had staged a sit-in at City Hall's basement cafeteria, where blacks weren't served, and were dragged away by police. Three civil rights workers would be killed up in Mississippi just months later.

Looking back now, 1968 seems pretty much the hub year, a fulcrum. During the summer Olympics in Mexico City two American athletes were suspended for giving a black-power salute. The Tet Offensive also started up that year along with bloody racial riots on the unreported back lots of Vietnam.

Not that I was much up on current events at the time. I had my hands full just getting to know my new home: how to get around in New Orleans, how to slide through the days here, how to clip off enough to survive, how to get by. When you're young, history's not worth much. When you get older, whether you consider it baggage or burden, history's a large part of what you have. So a lot of this I learned, or relearned, later on.

Mostly what you lose with time, in memory, is the specificity of things, their exact sequence. It all runs together, becomes a watery soup. Portmanteau days, imploded years. Like a bad actor, memory always goes for effect, abjuring motivation, consistency, good sense.

So I couldn't have told you then, even with a knife at my throat (were you, for instance, some singular historical mugger intent upon relieving passersby of their lives' spare change), what year Vietnam got underway, when either Kennedy went down, what the Watts riots were really about.

Now I know.

But even then there were things you couldn't help knowing. You'd turn on the radio while shaving and between songs hear about men whose faces had been torn off. Drop by Alton's Barbershop, he'd snap the cloth around in front of you, and just for a minute, as both your eyes went to his big black and white set on a shelf above the cash register, the weight of the world would settle on you. The sky would fall. You'd feel your feet sink a little deeper into the ground.

And in New Orleans those days you couldn't get away from talk of the sniper. Wherever you went, whoever was talking, that was the subject. Like weather, it was everywhere.

Then someone stopped talking about it and started doing something.

Monday morning, mid-November. A young man walking along Poydras on his way between the parking space he rented by the month and his job at Whitney National fell as he started across Baronne and lay dying against the curb. He was wearing a suit, he was white, and he had been shot, once, through the chest. Police sealed off and searched the area to no avail.

Wednesday, again downtown, on Carondelet a block from Canal, another fell, an off-duty bus driver. Bystanders this time reported hearing shots spaced perhaps six seconds apart (investigators counted it out for them, to be sure), and said that the shots came from high up. A roof perhaps. Or one of the upper windows in this sole canyonlike stretch of the city. The bus driver had been struck, first, in the middle of his forehead, then squarely in the chest, through the sternum just above the ziphoid process.

Saturday the action moved uptown, to Claiborne, where a German tourist fell, dead before he hit the buckling sidewalk, as he exited a Chick'n Shack. Police found a single shell casing, already baked halfway into roofing tar, atop a boarded-up Holy Evangelical church nearby.

Police Chief Warren Handy told the public there was no cause for alarm. That the incidents did not appear to be related. And that, at any rate, the department ("I'm going on record here") anticipated speedy apprehension of whatever parties might prove responsible for this "horrendous outrage."

The Times-Picayune recycled Terence Gully stories, with new sidebars, and pointed out that all those shot were white. COPYCAT KILLER, bold headlines announced the first day. GUERILLA LOOSE IN THE CITY? they asked the next. FIRST SHOTS OF A RACE WAR? the weekly newspaper Streetcar suggested.

Then on Wednesday, with a Loyola adjunct instructor dead in the street outside an apartment complex undergoing restoration on Jefferson, John LeClerque and Monica Reyna, hosts of WVUE-TV's six o'clock

news (his toupee, her lisp and impossibly red lips in tow) blossomed to life onscreen before a headline in two-inch letters, stark black on white: ROOFTOP KILLER STRIKES AGAIN.

Eye of the Cricket

Chapter One

The storm came in over the lake, bowing the shaggy heads of young trees and snapping branches off the old, blowing out of Metairie where the white folks live. In my own back yard a hundred-year-old water oak at last gave in, splitting in half as though a broadsword had struck it, opening like a book.

I sat with my back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar. A glass of bourbon sat before me, its outer surface smeared and greasy to the touch. A young roach circled water pooling about the glass.

Astonishingly, what had begun as a letter to an old friend, to Vicky in Paris, had become the opening pages of a novel. The first real writing I'd done in over four years, though a novel not so much new as reimagined. And so I had moved from lined legal pad and kitchen table to a long-neglected computer out here in the slave quarters behind the house.

I paused a moment, sipped at bourbon. It was midnight, it was raining. I glanced out the window and went on.

For a long time we were quiet. The man beside me raised his glass and drank. Traffic sounds fell from the freeway arching above us like a cement rainbow half a block away.

"Life is cruel, old friend, n'est-ce pas?"

His shoulders rose and fell in that peculiar shrug only the French, even Louisiana's long-relocated French, seem able to bring off.

Boudleaux had come to tell me that my son was dead, needlessly, stupidly dead. Though in fact there had been no need to tell me. I had known from the way he entered, his pause in the doorway, light splaying its broad fingers on the bar, what message he brought. Probably I had known all along.

Again he shrugged. In the bar's mirror, our two hands raised glasses, held them momentarily aloft. We watched as they moved towards one another. No sound: had they really touched?

We drank.

It wasn't bourbon in my glass, but non-alcoholic beer, Sharp's. Four years since I'd done much real writing. Four years since I'd had a drink. Somewhere along the way, a lot earlier than I wanted to think about, alcohol's smile had become a grin, then just bared teeth. Whole chunks of my life had fallen into that maw. Friends, intentions, memories, years.

"And nothing to help us but a few hard drinks and morning."

"Rien."

He raised his hand for the barkeep.

Wind tore the door open then. Trailed by teenagers, a brass band playing "Some of These Days" passed in the street outside. The door swung shut. I heard the grill's hiss from back in the kitchen, the click of billiard balls, automobile horns far away, a sports report from the radio beneath the bar. Upstairs, where there were apartments, a toilet flushed, and flushed again before its tank had a chance to refill. That sudden light had blinded us all. Now gradually the room, this stray, gray corner of the world, came back to us.

The phone rang.

I read the last line or two, keyed in ALT-F and S, and leaned over to turn down the volume on Son House's "Death Letter Blues." She a good ol' gal, gonna lay there till Judgment Day. The computer chirred briefly to itself. Outside the window, a spindly orange spider coursed along a web that was visible one moment, invisible the next, as the spider's motion carried it into and out of moonlight.

"I'm sorry to bother you at this hour." A voice that sounded like a lot of my students. Young, not from New Orleans or the South, reluctant to release (in a way you sensed more than heard) the ends of words. "We're trying to reach a Mr. Lewis Griffin. The author?"

"This is Lew. What can I do for you?"

"Excuse me, sir. You're the one who wrote The Old Man?"

"I'm afraid so." But it had gone permanently out of print, like many of our civil liberties, sometime during the Reagan-Bush dynasties.

"All right!" He turned to speak to someone, turned back. "This is kind of complicated."

I waited.

"Mr. Griffin, my name is Craig Parker. I'm a fourth-year medical student currently assigned to the emergency room at University Hospital."

"That's Hotel Dieu, right?"

"Used to be. Yes, sir. I guess people around here, lots of them, still call it that. What I wanted to tell you Excuse me." After a moment he came back. "Listen, this may be really off the wall, but we have a guy down here in Trauma One, a garbage truck backed over him. Driver says none of them ever even saw him. Hard to tell how much damage the truck did, anyway. He'd already been beat up pretty bad. Left there in the alley, the police figure."

"This is someone I know? He told you to call me?"

"No, sir, he's not able to tell us anything. We're doing what we can. But it's not looking good."

"Then I don't think I understand."

"Yes, sir. Well, as I said, it's complicated. And a real long shot. Excuse me a moment, sir." Someone close by him spoke insistently. He responded, listened, responded again. Then he was back. "Sorry. Things are pretty hectic down here. All we need now's Shit! Mr. Griffin, can I call you right back? Two minutes, tops."

"Sure."

It was closer to twenty. I sat watching the cursor blink on the screen before me, checked out the spider's catch, listened to Blind Willie, Robert and Lonnie Johnson blues night on WWOZ. I thought about Buster Robinson, dead, what, ten, twelve years now? Singing the refrain of "Going Back to Florida" in a club on Dryades when a bullet meant for someone else dissected his aorta and left him suspended forever on the seventh. I'd learned a lot from Buster. A lot about the blues. Later on, more important things.

"I do apologize," the young man, Parker, said when he rang back. "Here's what I called about. The guy I told you got run over, worked over before that, he's a John Doe. Brought in with no name or I.D. Nothing. But afterwards one of the nurses thought to look through his clothes piled in the corner and found a paperback book in his back pocket. Looks like it's seen hard times same as he has. That, or he's had it a while."

"The Old Man."

"Yes, sir. There's an inscription on the title page. 'To David.' Then something in Latin"

Non enim possunt militares pueri dauco exducier. The sons of military men can't be raised on carrots.

"and your signature."

Two hands, one of terror, another of hope, tore at my heart.

"Can you tell me what your patient looks like?"

"Afro-American male, probably late twenties. Six feet or so, I'd say, maybe just over, and lean. Athletic build. Brown eyes, hair cut short. Maybe with a knife, from the look of it. Clothes ill-fitting, much-used, but cleaned not too far in the past. From one of the churches or missions, maybe."

I reached out to shut the computer off. This was one thing I could do. One thing in the world that I had control over. The computer asked was I certain this was what I wanted to do. I hit N.

"Would it be possible for you to come down here and have a look, Mr. Griffin? Tell us if you know him?"

"All right," I said, with little idea which I wanted, to know him, not to know him. I again hit ALT-F and X. Then Y for changes, and Y again to confirm my intention to leave Windowland.

The computer beeped once, twice, blinked out at me, shut its systems down.

Growing quiet at the same moment WWOZ and its announcer fell silent between songs.

"Just come to the triage desk out front, right inside the doors, and ask for me, Craig. Any idea when you might be getting here?"

"Depends on the cab situation. Within the hour, anyway."

"Great. We really appreciate this, Mr. Griffin. See you shortly, then."

Music gave way to public-service announcements. A music-and-books raffle at the local UnitarianUniversalist church. A Celtic Weekend two weeks hence. Free AIDS testing.

I finished my glass of Sharp's, looking out at the nebula of spiderweb floating aslant in the darkness, then at the photo on the wall across from the desk.

It was the only thing in the room hinting towards any effort at decoration. Richard Garces had given it to me: a snapshot he'd taken of LaVerne when they worked together at Foucher Women's Shelter, a month or so before she died. She'd stuck her head in the door to ask a question about one of his clients and been trapped there forever. Smiling and at the same time instinctively trying to turn her head away. A Verne I'd not known at all, really. Richard's lover Eugene, successful fashion photographer by trade, starving fine-art photographer by inclination, had cropped and enlarged the snapshot.

For ten years, so long and often that I no longer really think about it, I've told this story to my students, Michelangelo's definition of sculpture: You just take a block of marble and cut away whatever's not part of the statue.

That's what our lives do. Wear away what's not part of the sculpture. Pare us down, if we're lucky, to some kind of essential self.

Or to some hardened, unconsidering icon if we're not.

LaVerne and I had met when we were both little more than children and had gone on chipping away, sometimes together, sometimes apart, most of our lives. No one had been more important to me; my life was inexorably linked with hers. And yet there was no one to whom I had been less kind, no one, among the many I had hurt, whom I had hurt more.

Once Verne said to me, "We're just alike that way, Lew. Neither of us is ever going to have anyone permanent, anyone who'll go the long haul, who cares that much." But she was wrong. In the last years of her life, years during which for the most part I never saw her, she got off the streets. She educated herself, became a counselor and the quietest sort of hero, helping retrieve others' lives even as she ransomed her own. She fell deeply in love, married, and was on her way to reuniting with lost daughter Alouette when a stroke struck the last blow at the marble. By way of saying farewell and the many thank-yous I'd never had time for, I searched out and found Alouette, but after a time she, like so many others, had gone away.

Gone away as had David, my own son. Into the darkness that surrounds us all.

It occurred to me now that LaVerne may well have been the finest person I've known.

Individually, collectively, we struggle to rise out of the slough of ourselves, strive upwards (like a man trapped in water beneath ice, swimming up to the air pocket just under, where at least he can breathe) towards something better, something more, than we truly are. That's the measure of grace given us. But few of us individually, and seldom does the collective, manage it.

Leaving, I turned off lights, threw the switch that shut down power to the slave quarters. Stopped off in the kitchen to open a can of tuna with egg bits for Bat and have a glass of water from the tap, then walked three doors down, to where, as usual, the bright-green DeVille taxi sat out front.

"Father home?" I asked the young man who came to the door. Rap's heavy chopped beat and nervous legato lyrics filled the room behind him. He wore jeans so oversize that they hung on his hips like a skirt, crotch down about his knees, bottoms lopped off. Sixteen, seventeen. Head shaved halfway up, hair like a wooly shoot above. All ups and downs.

"Yeah," he said.

"Think I might speak to him, Raymond? That possible?"

"Don't see why not."

Norm Marcus appeared behind him, peering out. He wore baggy nylon pants, a loose zipped sweatshirt, shower cap.

"Lewis. Been a while. Thought I heard the door."

"Raymond and I were just saying hello."

"I bet you was. Well, Cal and me, we're just sitting down to breakfast." I never had been able to figure when this family slept, what kind of rhythm they were on. "Why don't you come on in and join us? There's plenty of food, and we can always find an extra chair somewheres."

Then to his son: "You want to step away now, Raymond, give us some room here?"

The boy shrugged and returned to the couch that, near as I could tell, he lived on. He was surrounded there by stacks of CDs, half-eaten packages of chips, Pepsi cans, pillows and a blanket.

"Thanks, Norm. Some other time. Soon. I promise."

"You need a ride."

"Afraid so. But look, you're about to eat"

"No problem, Lewis. Just wish we'd see you some time when you could stay a few minutes. Where we going? So I can tell Cal how long I'm gonna be."

He stepped into the kitchen and was back at once.

"Let's roll."

From his couch Raymond carefully ignored our departure.

"I apologize for taking you away from your family and your dinner, Norm," I said as we turned on to St. Charles, "but it's important."

"You wouldn't of asked, otherwise."

He took Jackson to Simon Bolivar, turned on to Poydras. The hospital was surrounded by stretches of vacant lots behind chain-link fencing. As he cut between two of them, I said: "I think my son's in the ER."

He nodded. "Hurt bad?"

I told him I didn't know. Neither of us said anything else until we pulled in at the hospital.

"You want me to come inside with you, man? Or wait out here?"

I shook my head. "But thanks."

"Anything I can do, you let me know."

"I will."

"Tough, huh?"

I'd started away when he called out: "Lewis." He leaned down into the passenger window so we could see one another. Put a closed hand to his ear. Call me.

One might have expected to see Craig Parker, with his elegantly understated clothes, blond hair and strong features, in the pages of a fashion catalog rather more than in this chaotic, bloody, antiquated ER. Yet, surrounded by junkies and drunks, gunshot wounds, knifings, crushed limbs and cardiacs, the breathless, he seemed strangely at home here calm and in control. A rare fortunate man who had found his place in the world and begun to flourish.

He thanked me for coming, turned to a woman nearby and said, "Cover for me, Dee?" Three other people were all talking to her at the same time. "Sure, no problem," she told him.

"Come with me please, Mr. Griffin."

We went down a hallway straight and narrow as a cannon.

"Something I need to tell you. Bear right, here, sir... Shortly after we spoke, the patient arrested. He came back pretty quickly, but whenever the bottom drops out like that, it's a tremendous shock to the system. We've put him on a respirator, chiefly to take some of the strain off his heart. It"

"I know, Doctor Parker. I've been through this before." Searching for LaVerne's daughter Alouette, first I had found her premature baby, on a ventilator in a neonatal intensive care unit up in Mississippi. Alouette herself had been on one for a while.

He nodded. "I wanted you to be prepared. Most people aren't. Here's the book, before I forget." He pulled it from one bulging side pocket of his lab coat.

The cover was all but torn away, mended top and bottom with Scotch tape. A horseshoe-shaped section like a bite was gone from the lower right corner. Cover, spine, pages, all were filthy, mottled with a decade and a half of spills.

I hadn't seen a copy in years but, holding it now, I remembered with a physical lurch of memory and an instinctive motion to save myself, as though about to fall from a precipice the day I sat writing the final chapter.

I pushed the door open and saw his back bent over the worn mahogany curb of the bar. I sat beside him, ordered a bourbon and told him what I had to.

For a long time then we were quiet.

"He's in here, Mr. Griffin."

Through the open door I saw several people standing over a gurney. On it lay a nude, catheterized young man. One of the workers was between us, and I couldn't see the young man's face. A bright-green ventilator stood by the wall, squeezing air into him through plastic tubes that danced with each respiration. Other, smaller tubes snaked down from poles hung with bags of saline and medication. Tracings of his heartbeat, respiratory pattern and blood pressure stuttered across the screen of a monitor overhead.

"Anyone called for a pulmonary consult?" one of those in the room asked.

"They're all up on pedi, one of the hearts went bad on them. We're next on the list."

I looked around, back along the corridor. There were windows far away, at its end. Lots of windows. Rain washed down them all.

Bluebottle

Chapter One

"Be still, sir" Her head turned away. "Anyone get his name?"

From across the room: "Lewis Griffin."

"Be still, Mr. Griffin. Please. Work with us here. We know the pain's bad."

I formed a slurry of words that failed to make it from mind to tongue, then tried again, something simpler: "Yes." When I was a kid we'd practice doo-wop songs in the tile bathroom at school. That's what my voice sounded like.

"I can give you something to help." She spoke across me, someone at the other side of the gurney. Gobbledy, gobbledy, fifty milligobbles.

"There. Should start easing off pretty quickly.... Better?"

"Mmm." Was it? My voice feathery now, floating. Not that the pain had gone away or diminished, but I didn't care anymore. I turned my head. Sideways room the size of a dancehall. Glare everywhere. Someone on the next stretcher was dying with great ceremony and clamor, half a dozen staff in attendance. I saw tears running down one nurse's face. She looked to be in her early twenties.

"You've been shot, Mr. Griffin. We can't be sure just how serious it is, not yet. Bear with us. Can you feel this?"

Something ran up the sole of my right foot, then the left.

"Yes."

"And this?"

Pinpricks on both hands. First one, a pause, then two, like Morse. A tattoo, drummers would call it. Tattoo needles. Queequeg. Fiji islanders. Gauguin in Tahiti, those brown bodies. Tattoo of rain on the roof.

"Mr. Griffin?"

"Mmm."

"I asked could you feel that."

"Yes m'am." But I felt a tug towards something else, something other body and mind borne on separate tides, about to wash up on separate shores.

"Super. Okay, Jody, let's get blood work. ABG, SMAC, type and crossmatch from the way it's looking. Xray's on the way, right?"

"So they tell us."

Meanwhile connections between myself and the world were faltering, as though tiny men with hatchets hacked away at cables linking us, cables that carried information, images, energy, power. The world, what I could see of it, had contracted to a round tunnel, through which I sighted. On the rim, just out of

sight, images sparked and fell away into darkness. Beautiful in the way only lost things can be. Then darkness closed its hand.

"Music."

"What?"

She leaned close.

"Music. There, behind all the rest." Like the sound of your body coming up around you deep in the night, creaking floorboards, snap and buzz of current within walls, this singing in wires a house, a body, requires.

Nietzsche said that without music life would be a mistake. Danny Barker breathed it in and out like air. Or Buddy Bolden: carried through slaughter to cut hair at the state hospital, remembering all his life how once he'd banged the bell of his horn on the floor and got the whole town's attention. Walter Pater.

"He's hearing the Muzak overhead," someone said.

What all art aspires to, the condition of.

"That's an old Lonnie Johnson tune," I told them.

"I can't see," I said.

Suddenly she was close again and I smelled her breath, tatters of perfume and sweat, suggestion of menstrual blood, as she leaned above me.

"Tell me when you see the light, when it goes away." As the world has done. "Mr. Griffin?"

I shook my head. "Sorry."

"Jody, I want a CAT scan. Now. Radiology tries stalling, anyone up there even clears his throat, you let me know."

World rendered down to sound, sensation. Rebuild it from this, what will I get? Fine word, render, bursting at the seams. Render unto Caesar. A court chef reports: forty choice hams for rendering to stock. Deliver, give up, hand down judgment, restore. Reproduce or represent by artistic or verbal means.

A Cajun waltz with seesaw accordion replaced Lonnie Johnson overhead. Tug of the stretcher's plastic against my skin, slow burn at the back of my hand where there's a needle and drugs course in. Coppery smell of fresh blood. Layers of voices trailing off into the distance. New horizons everywhere.

Now with a lurch brakes are kicked off and we're barreling headfirst, headlong. Past patchworks of conversations, faces above, curious sounds. Through automatic doors that snap open like a soldier's salute, along hallways smelling of disinfectant, onto an elevator.

Down.

I think of Emily Dickinson's "Before I had my eye put out." Remember both Blind Willies, Blind Lemon, Riley Puckett. Maybe they'll teach me to play.

Down.

Wonder if Milton's waiting down there to give me a few tips. Friends call him Jack, wife and daughters attend his every need.

I was trying to read a book but the damned thing kept talking to me, interrupting. Don't turn this page, it would say. Or: You don't have any idea what this is all about, where I'm going with this, do you. Gotcha. You don't know the real me at all. Look, no hands!

One hand, at least.

It rested lightly on my shoulder.

"Just like home, huh, Lew. Sound asleep at three in the afternoon."

I started to grunt, but it hurt so much I didn't carry through. Those same little men who'd hacked through the cables connecting world and self had sneaked in while I slept and glued my tongue to the top of my mouth. It came loose, finally, with a tearing sound.

"You started smoking again. Pizza for lunch. Laundry's piling up."

Holmes had nothing on me. Other senses more acute and all that.

"Amazing. Absolutely amazing."

I knew he'd be shaking his head.

"Only the smell's soaked up from the department, which you'll remember is pretty much an ashtray fitted with desks and file cabinets. Pizza, right but for breakfast, not lunch. Been in the fridge a while. I think the green was peppers."

"Keep the faith."

"Not to mention the leftovers. Exactly. And I'm wearing new pants because my old ones don't fit anymore. I finally broke down, bought new ones."

Four or five pair all the same, if I knew Don. He shopped (an event taking place every decade or so) the way frontiersmen laid in provisions. Staples. In quantity.

"They've got that smell they always have. Cleaning fluids or whatever."

"Yeah, guess they do."

"You could always wash them first."

"Before I wear them?" His tone sprinkled salts of incredulity over the concept. File with Flat Earth, maybe. Or the wit and wisdom of Richard Nixon. "I don't know, Lew. Way too much time sitting behind a desk filling out paperwork, humping the phone. Ever since I came off patrol and started wearing these monkey suits. I see the street, it's out the window, like some painting, you know? Hanging on the wall. Hung up there myself."

I heard him sink into the chair alongside. One chair leg was short. He eased his weight off and moved the chair around, trying for better topography.

"So how you doing?"

"Hell if I know. Have to ask the experts."

"I did. Just came from a long talk with Dr. Shih. She's pretty sure the blindness is temporary. Happens sometimes with major trauma, she says. They don't know why."

She proved to be right. In following weeks sight returned by increments. Veil after veil fell away. Light swelled slowly till I was aware of its presence. Then light became motion, mass, outline, form at last shaped itself again into the world I knew, or something close enough.

"You remember my being here before?"

I shook my head.

"I've been by every day. It's Thursday. You were brought in over a week ago. We've had conversations, some of them truly strange. One time you went on for better than an hour about Roshomon and Ahab's gold sovereign. Then you had to tell me about some book called Skull Meat. Plot, characters, what the neighborhood looked like. Set over in Algiers. Couldn't tell whether you were supposed to have read it or written it, that kind of wobbled back and forth. Told me the book's hero finally got fed up with the whole thing and walked out right off the page. Now that's a real hero, you said."

"Must be the drugs they were giving me."

"Yeah. Must be."

"The part about the character stalking off's stolen from Queneau, of course."

"Of course."

Don shifted again in his chair. Any moment, things can fall on you, disappear from under you. What you hope, all you hope, is that the seat you're on just now's a safe one.

"Shih asked me about your drinking, Lew. Halfway through the operation you started waking up from the anesthetic. Shih says people only do that when their bodies are accustomed to high levels of depressives."

A bird alit (I guessed from the sound) on the sill outside, then with a sudden whir of wings was gone. Shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane.

"I know it's been bad. Maybe some of it has to do with what happened up there in Baton Rouge. God knows what else. Maybe it's worse than either of us thought. Maybe someday we oughta sit down and talk about it."

We were quiet for a time then.

"LaVerne's been here too, you know, two, three times a day."

Sudden aromatic assault as he took the lid off a cup of caf au lait.

"One for you," holding it out, waiting as my hand groped and made contact. I pushed up in bed, against the headboard. Heard him peel the lid off another cup. He blew across its mouth. The smell grew stronger.

"Shih says you shouldn't worry over the gaps for now. That some memories may come back in distorted form or not at all, but that most will come back, and for the most part whole."

There were memories, parts of my life, I wouldn't have minded losing, even back then. Don knew that's what I was thinking.

"Verne's okay?"

"Sure she is. Worried about you, like the rest of us."

We were quiet again. I imagined Don looking off the way he did, watching nothing in particular.

"You remember what happened, Lew?"

I shook my head. "Pieces. Fragments that don't fit together. Images. Some of what I do remember seems more like a dream than anything real."

"You met a woman in a bar downtown, said she was a journalist."

Random moments surfaced. Denim skirt, silk jacket. One eye peering at me through a glass of Scotch. Glass none too clean and Scotch raw as rubbing alcohol: that kind of bar.

"You stayed there just over three hours. Buster Robinson was playing. Lady's got a taste for the music, it seems. Taste for something, anyway. Last month or so, she'd made herself a regular down there along Poydras."

"But not before."

"So far as we can tell, nobody ever saw her before that. Nor will any newspaper for a hundred miles around lay claim to her."

We sipped caf au lait.

"Between you you threw back close to thirty dollars' worth. She tried to put it on American Express and they just looked at her. Get serious, you know? Wound up giving them a fifty and said keep the change."

"Wanted to make sure she was remembered."

"As though a white woman down there wouldn't be already, yeah. The two of you left together then, most likely to get something to eat. Barmaid heard you talking about Ye Olde College Inn and Dunbar's. The name Eddie B. also came up a couple of times, she says. You told this Esmay woman you had to make one quick stop first."

"I was meeting Eddie Bone."

"That's how we figure it."

"Why would I do that? No one looks for Eddie Bone."

"Yeah, people've been known to leave town to avoid looking for him."

Holding the cup two-handed, I dropped an index finger to measure liquid level, brought the cup to my face, cautiously sipped.

"Give it time, Lew. You're just gonna have to pull back here all around, give things room to happen."

"And hope they do."

He must have nodded, then caught himself. "Yeah," he said.

"You'd barely stepped outside when the shots came. Couple of kids from the cleaners next door were in the alley out back on a break, passing joints and a bottle of George Dickel back and forth. They tell us you two came out the front door and stood there a minute talking, then you stepped around and embraced her. One of them remembers saying Now that's something you ain't gonna see uptown and handing the bottle over. Then the shots came. Guy reaching for the bottle dropped it."

I sipped coffee again. Sartre's got this long rap in Being and Nothingness about smoking in the dark, how different the experience becomes. In my own dark now, I was forced to admit this was one time he seemed to be onto something. Ordinary coffee, the drinking of it, had become a kind of sacrament. Visual clues missing, true. Sartre pointed out one's inability to see the smoke, to observe one's own breath course in and out. But whatever the loss, there was greater gain: the physical world, its smells, its heats and anticipations, fell upon you with unsuspected intensity.

"The shots were meant for her," I said.

Don's chair creaked.

"It's a possibility we've considered."

Finishing my coffee, I set the cup on the bedside table and heard Don's empty cup click down beside it. A group of visitors or new employees passed as though on tour at a museum in the hall outside. A young man with a voice like a rapidly dripping faucet guided them, pointing out the hospital's various departments and unique services.

"We haven't had any luck tracking her down. Maybe she's gone to ground, scared of what almost happened." Don shifted again in his chair. "For all we know, maybe it was just coincidence."

"Or a setup."

"Yeah. Have to tell you the thought crossed my mind. Mine and some others' as well. Then, the morning after this shooter takes you down, Eddie Bone himself turns up dead. He's got this room all set up at home, must be eight, ten thousand dollars worth of gym equipment in there. Squad responding to an anonymous call finds him slumped over the handlebars of his exercise bike, naked. They figure at first it's a heart attack, something like that, but then they see something hanging out of his mouth. When they raise his head they find a dead rat crammed in his mouth."

"Cute."

"You bet. One thing these guys have, it's a sense of humor. We didn't wonder what the connection was before, how Bone and this woman fit, where it all came from, now we have to."

With a sketchy knock the door eased open to concatenations of horns, whistles and buzzers from the lounge TV, someone winning a load on a game show. No music up here. Just this gabble of America's threadbare culture.

"Mr. Griffin. You've a visitor. From New York, he says."

My visitor from New York came in limping. Maybe he'd walked all the way. The side of one shoe dragged as he approached.

A year and spare change later, four A.M. on a Sunday, my phone would ring for Lee's wife to tell me that, waking and turning Leewards that morning, she'd found him dead. Lee's diabetes had been out of control for some time, she said remember how his feet always hurt? I hung up the phone, lay back down alongside LaVerne and held her close.

"Mr. Griffin? Thanks for seeing me."

A pause.

"Lee Gardner."

A longer pause. I realized that he'd put his hand out, reached till I found it, and shook.

"Poor choice of words, perhaps, in the circumstance. I had no idea of your situation, of course. No, wait. I need to back up here, don't I? Marvelous thing, time's elasticity. Though I suppose it always slaps into

you on the snapback. Like Thurber's claw of the seapuss, gets us all in the end. I've just come from the police. A detective there gave me your name. But that's still not the place to start, is it. Sorry. And it's all mutable. Once an editor....I've already told you my name. I come from Maine. Taking care of all that David Copperfield business, right?

"I'm an editor at Icarus Books. Editor-publisher, actually. One of our authors, R. Amano you may know of his work, his novel about Gilles de Rais started at the top of the best-seller list and sank slowly through it a few years back lives here in the city. In, if you can believe it, a house trailer that once belonged to his parents. Says there's nothing he treasures more than that view of the woods on one side and, on the other, the gravel parking lot of a country-music juke joint.

"Now Hollywood wants to buy one of his books, not the Gilles de Rais, the one we thought would be a sure shot, Bury All Towers, but another one, this tiny little novel about a man on death row awaiting execution and another who comes out of a ten-year coma, been out of print twelve years at least. Ray doesn't have an agent and asked me to negotiate the contract for him, which I did. But then all of a sudden Ray stopped answering his mail. We call, this man who seldom steps outside the trailer, rolls from bed to the kitchen counter where he works and back to bed, with time out maybe for a sandwich and three pots of coffee, he's never home. I send telegrams no response. Meanwhile the producer's calling us up two, three times a week. We tell him we're on top of it, naturally.

"Sorry. I've rather torn into it here, haven't I? Forever leaping into things. Always saying sorry too, come to think of it. Mother was an actress. Grand entrances all her life. And spent most of her life apologizing, trying to explain away her regrets.

"What she really was was one of the first rock-and-rollers, sang background for an awful lot of those late-fifties, Dell Shannon, Dion, Brian Hyland things. But all her life she insisted on actress, which was the way she'd started out."

Don and I waited. New York seemed to have run down.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Gardner," I said.

Don grunted. I could have told you within inches, just from the sound, where he was. "Guess I better get on downtown. Shift changes in a couple hours and we're half a dozen men short as usual." He'd been put on the desk while recuperating from a near-fatal gunshot, kept there because with him at the helm, for the first time in years the ship failed to run aground. He hated it. "Later, Lew."

The door fanned open and shut to the sound of recycling laughter.

"You're not up to this, I need to leave, just tell me," Gardner said.

"Company's appreciated. No extra points for distance, though."

"Distance is easy. A thing I'm good at."

"We all have our strengths."

Was there, then, another rustle of wings at the window? A sound like LaVerne's satin dresses or gown.

"People out there in the lobby watching, whatsit, Days of Our Lives," Gardner said. "Doctors playing back tapes they'd made secretly months ago when everyone believed Sylvia was dying and husband Dean sat there day after day telling her 'all the things I've never told anyone.' Now Sylvia's made this miraculous recovery and it's organ chord Truth Time. My mother used to watch that show."

"Lots did. And still do."

"Not exactly Dostoevski or Dickens."

"Not even Irwin Shaw."

"But it's all we have. What we live with."

I listened to my visitor's foot drag towards the window. He pulled the window open. I was surprised this proved possible in such a building. But yes, there were sudden new tides of air, smell, sound.

"Maybe what people are starting to say, is true. Maybe what those like myself do, everything we believe in literature, fine music, fine writing, the arts generally maybe none of that matters anymore. We're digging up ruins. Quaint as archaeologists."

"I assume your Mr. Amano doesn't write soap operas."

Gardner laughed. "Actually, now that you mention it, he did for a while a few years back. Paid the rent, bought groceries, kept (as he said) slim body and slimmer soul together. Not something he wants remembered. And they were exceedingly strange soap operas.

"But I've gotten astray of any point, haven't I? Sorry.

"There's that word again.

"Mountain and Mohammed time, I finally decided. Flew in from New York, picked up a rental car and drove out to Kingfisher Mobile Home Park. The door to fourteen-D was open, naturally. Ray told me he had no idea where the key was. TV on inside, sound turned down, some old movie, flickers of light. Four plates, rinsed but far from clean, stacked by the side of the sink. Carry-out cartons in the trash, also a package of chicken awrithe with maggots beneath the wrapping. Dozen or so empty beer bottles lined against the back wall by the sink. Books everywhere."

"And no writer."

"No writer." For some reason I imagined Gardner's fingers moving about independently as he spoke, seeking phones to dial, yet-unbreached manuscripts, a desktop with objects wanting rearrangement,

and thought of Nerval's disembodied hand, Cendrars's main coupe, Beast with Five Fingers. "I went immediately to the police, of course. They didn't want to hear about it. When I insisted, they filled out report forms. Told me there wasn't much they'd be able to do beyond getting this information out. I sat there drinking bad coffee and not doing the one thing they most wanted me to do, which was to go away. So finally they offered a private detective's number, said maybe I'd want to get in touch with him."

"A.C. Boudleaux." Achilles. Ah-sheel.

"The same. I finally track him down to this caf the size of a railroad car on the edge of town, built out over water like steaming green soup. Looks like the place's been around long enough for Longfellow to have sat in there writing Evangeline. Boudleaux listens, then tells me 'No pun intended, but I'm swamped.' Gives me your number. 'Missing persons, you won't find anyone better.' When I call the number Boudleaux gave me, a young lady answers, tells me you're here."

"Given the circumstances, I don't see how I can help you, Mr. Gardner."

"Of course. But the circumstances were exactly what I didn't know. Now I don't know why I've gone on so about all this."

When he stood I sensed a change in light. Something moved towards me. His hand again. I found it, shook.

"Good luck to you, Mr. Griffin."

"And to you."

He went out the door. Not much by way of sound out there now. Hall lights bright like a sea around the dark, dark island of his form.

##

That night LaVerne stopped by on her way to work with a cassette player and a recording of black poets reading their work.

"Something I thought you might like, Lew."

I did. And must have listened to it thirty or forty times over the next several days. Something about being cut off from the visual world made that tape so much more real to me, so much more substantial. I began living in those words and voices living through them.

LaVerne had heard the album, from a New York label that put out a steady stream of Southern field recordings, folk music by aging Trotskyites and suburban youngsters, klezmer, polka, at a client's home.

"Thanks."

My arms went out and she was there, in them.

"You smell good."

"I won't for long. Seven at night and it still has to be a hundred degrees out there."

"You could take the night off."

"And do what? You just get yourself well and come home. Then I'll take the night off. Maybe several nights."

"You mean like a date?"

"Yeah." Whenever she focused on something close, LaVerne's eyes seemed to cross. It gave her face a vulnerable, softly sexy look. Broke my heart every time. I couldn't see her then, but I knew she was doing it. "Yeah, like a date, Lewis."

She stretched out on the bed beside me, smoothed her dress back under her. Neither of us spoke for a while.

I don't remember this, of course. Verne told me about it later, some of it. The rest, I imagined into place.

"It's been a while since we did this, Verne."

Turning, she tucked her head against my arm. I felt the warmth of her breath on my chest as she spoke.

"I miss you, Lew. Miss you sometimes even when you're there. But I miss you a whole lot more when you're gone."

I don't know how long we lay like that. Once a nurse started peremptorily into the room, fetched up stock-still just inside the door and backed out without a word.

When LaVerne sat up, the fabric of her satin dress crackled. She wore her hair long then, cut straight across front and back.

"Maybe this is different from most of life, Lewis. Maybe this is something we can fix."

I put my hand on her waist.

After a moment she stood. Began tucking things in. Breast, hair, slip. Her sadness.

"Have to go, Lew. Late enough start as it is."

"If it's as hot as you say it is, things'll be slow on the street."

"You never know. Sometimes heat just brings the beast out."

"Take care..." She was almost to the door. "Verne?"

A pause. "Yeah, Lew."

"Is it dark outside?"

That's what bothered me most. Where things were, the shapes of rooms, finding my way to toilet and lavatory all minor problems. But being suspended in time, out of the gather and release of the day, was something else entirely, an immeasurable loss.

"Almost," she said.

"A clear night?"

"Pinpricks of stars in the upper window. Moon will be full in another day or two."

"And city lights stretched out below us."

"Yes."

"Diminutive fires of the planet, Neruda called them."

"Sure he did. See you tomorrow, hon."

I remembered lines from a Langston Hughes poem: Night comes slowly, black like me. Once LaVerne was gone, I nudged tape into player. Sure enough, Hughes's poem was there, right after one about a lynching. Further along was another, by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, that would haunt me for years.

Son singin fount some words. Son singin in that other

language talkin bout "bay bee, why you leave me here," talkin bout "up under de sun cotton in my hand." Son singing, think he bad cause he can speak

they language, talkin bout "dark was the night the ocean deep white eyes cut through me made me weep."

Son singin fount some words. Think he bad. Speak they language. 'sawright I say 'sawright wit me

look like yeh, we gon be here a taste.

I think that may have been the first time I thought about all these different languages we use. Danny Barker used to talk about that, how with this group of musicians he'd talk one way, that way with another one, uptown and downtown talk, and still he'd have this private language he'd use at home, among friends. We all do that. To survive, our forebears learned dissimulation and mimickry, learned never to say what they truly thought. They knew they were gon be here a taste. That same masking remains in many of us, in their children's blood, a slow poison. So many of us no longer know who, or what, we are.

Ghost of a Flea

Chapter One

After a while I got up and walked to the window. I felt that if I didn't say anything, if I didn't think about what had happened, didn't acknowledge it, somehow it might all be all right again. I listened to the sound of my feet on the floor, the sounds of cars and delivery vans outside, my own breath. Whatever feelings I had, had been squeezed from me. I was empty as a shoe. Empty as the body on the bed behind me.

A limb bowed and pecked at the window, bowed and pecked again. Winds were coming in across Lake Ponchartrain with pullcarts of rain in their wake. I heard music from far off but couldn't tell what it was, not even what kind. Maybe only wind caught in the building's hard throats and hollows, or the city's random noise congealing.

I seem never to learn that standing still doesn't work. There you are with a smile on your face, they won't notice me, and all the while all the things you fear keep moving towards you, their smiles a violent travesty of your own. "In your books you never write about anything that's not past, done with, gone," LaVerne had said years ago. She knew that was a way to stand still, too. And she'd been right about that as about so much else.

Sooner or later I'd have to move. Go back out there, into the world, a world much smaller now, where it was about to rain. And where one of the coldest winters in New Orleans history like a bit player waited impatiently in the wings, strutting and thrumming, for its cue to go on.

I'd spent my life in rooms much like this. You move, like a hermit crab, into their shell. Then in time, as old clothes and mattresses do, they begin taking on your form. Their safe, familiar walls are a second skin. You and the room become of a size and kind, indistinguishable. The room, its surfaces, its volumes, diminish when you leave; and you in turn, away from the room too long, find yourself growing restless, edgy, at loose ends. I peered out the window, a dim image of the room behind me superimposed there like a fading photograph or one taken too soon from the developing tray, suspended half-formed,

neither wholly out of the world nor quite a part of it. The window had become a universal mirror. In it everything was reversed, turned about, transformed: light bled away to darkness, walls and corners bent to obscure, indecipherable shapes, the whole of the room lumpen, autumnal.

And out there in the window-world where a moth beat against glass, a man I knew both too well and not at all stood watching. A man dark and ill-defined, with the mark of lateness, of the autumnal, upon him too. I remembered Henry James' remark upon meeting George Gissing that he appeared to be a man "quite particularly marked out for what is called in his and my profession an unhappy ending." Gissing had deployed his creativity as the single dynamic force in a life otherwise marked by doubts and indecision, discord, disappointment, disillusion. All of which had a familiar ring to it. I must come to some sort of conclusion, I suppose, I had written, years ago. I can't imagine what it should be. Now I knew.

All the people we've met, all those memories and voices real or imagined, the hoarse whisper of our communal sadness, the beat of regret and sorrow in our blood, the haphazard apprehensions that have made us what we are they're out there now in the darkness, all of them, at these silent barricades. All the people (as LaVerne used to say) we've watched disappear out the back windows of trains. LaVerne, parents, Hosie Straughter, Vicky, Baby Boy McTell. Myself. This odd man Lew Griffin who understood so much about others and so little, finally, about himself.

Another moth joins the first. Together, apart, they beat soundlessly at the window's periphery. This latecomer, a sphinx moth, has the body of a bulldog, colors like those of an oil slick in moonlight. Also called a hawkmoth. I watch the two familial insects, who could scarcely be more dissimilar, bump and bounce away from the window, skitter the length of its glass in long slides. Perhaps I should value my life more, that something else so badly wants in.

Because the volume has been increased, or because other sounds have fallen away, I can make out the music now. Charlie Patton's slurred voice and guitar, like hands that have gone into water and come out with something shapeless, something that nonetheless coheres for just a moment before it begins spilling away. Po' Boy, Long Way from Home. A long way indeed.

Here in this still room, then, in this moment before the world returns in a rush and bears me back into it, I will tell you what I know: It is not yet midnight. It is not yet raining.

Death Will Have Your Eyes

Chapter One

The man kept opening his mouth, wanting something from me, but it was a language I didn't know. Not Mandarin. Not Thai or Vietnamese. Only sounds. His voice rose and fell in pitch. Shouting, demanding. I shook my head, the sour, foul smell of my own body washing up over me in waves, tongue so swollen I could not talk, could not respond. Soon the pain would start again. And I would rise, hover near the ceiling looking down. Watching. Apart.

I woke suddenly, rushing to exchange the currency of dreams for coin I could spend. Morning light fell dazzlingly through the skylight onto the futon. Those wide shadows were not bars or slats in a cage only the leaves of plants in hanging baskets up there. That sound was only the phone.

Nothing else in the room. No windows. The futon, a painted bamboo screen against one wall, an expanse of blond wood floor tongue and groove I'd put in myself. About as close as the real world gets to the ordered simplicity of oriental drawings.

No one else, either. Only Gabrielle and myself.

She slept crosswise on the futon, my head cradled in her lap. Trying to get away from the light, I turned over. "O yes, please," she said. But obviously the phone was not going to quit ringing, so I snaked along the bed to answer it. Gabrielle grabbed me as I went by and held on.

I listened for a moment and hung up. "Wrong number," I told her. "I've got your number," she said, head moving to replace her hand, but I stopped her, wrapping black hair around both my hands and pulling her up into a slow, easy kiss.

"I'm going for a run," I said. "Get the sludge out. Want to come along?"

"At six in the bleedin' mornin'?"

With Gabby you never knew what accent you might get. Her features came mostly from an Irish mother and patrician Mexican father, but her extended family was pure goulash. Dad left when she was three, and she and her mother spent years shuttling from household to household, family to family, country to country. This early morning, the accent was British, a better choice than most, I suppose, for gradations of polite outrage.

"Okay, but don't say I didn't ask. So go back to sleep now, my little peasant."

"Pheasant?"

"Peasant. Half an hour, tops, even with a head wind. I'll bring breakfast."

"And here I thought you were breakfast."

"Miss, have you considered taking up a hobby?"

"No time for it."

"That was my point."

She shrugged. "One stays with what one's good at. Run along now," and was asleep again before I got shorts and shoes on.

I stood watching her a moment, her compact brown body against light blue sheets, breasts just a little too heavy, rib cage set high, then went into the bathroom. Turned on the radio there. It was Mozart, a serenade performed on "original" instruments with which the musicians struggled valiantly to bring them into tune. Thousands upon thousands of dollars, thousands upon thousands of hours, had been devoted to this bogus authenticity, these elaborate counterfeits. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, then stood at the window looking out till the piece was over. One doesn't hang up on Mozart.

There were few others in the park that early: a handful of runners and dog-walkers, one young mother who looked remarkably like Shirley Temple pushing a pram, another trodding along with three children, all of them androgynous and none over five years old, at her heels, street people starting off on their day's boundless odyssey. Birds and squirrels worried at yesterday's leavings, perhaps hoping their investigations would help them understand these huge, dangerous beings that lived in their midst.

I swung around the park's perimeter in an easy jog, following an asphalt bike path, and stopped at a pay phone on the far side, the kind of old-fashioned booth you rarely see anymore. There I dialed a number I still knew all too well. It was picked up on the first ring.

"Age has slowed you, perhaps."

"As you must realize, I was in no hurry to return this call. At first, I was not even sure that I wanted to respond at all. And after eight years"

"Actually, it just slipped over the edge into nine."

"I believed it likely that whatever business you think you have with me could wait a few more minutes."

"Perhaps. However, your plane departs at ten or thereabouts. American, flight 817. You are Dr. John Collins, a dentist on vacation."

"Sir."

Silence.

"It has been, as you say, nine years. I have a career, a new life, commitments."

Silence still.

"I am no longer in your employ."

A still longer silence. Then finally: "It will be good to see you again, David."

I hung up and ran back the way I'd come, pushing myself now. A light breeze was coming up, and full sunlight struck the artificial lake at a slant, tossing off sheets of glare. Birds and squirrels didn't seem any closer to understanding us. Neither did I.

They were waiting by the benches about halfway around, in a space partially screened by trees. You wouldn't be able to see much, here, either from the street or adjacent apartments. So some thought had gone into it, at least.

One was in jeans, black sweatshirt and British Knights, twentyish, a broad, pale-complected man with bad skin. His head kept tic-ing convulsively towards his right shoulder, crossing and recrossing the same minute, almost imperceptible arc. The other was maybe ten years older, wearing what had once been an expensive suit, with a chambray dress shirt frayed to white at the cuff and loose threads at the collar, and a knit tie with the knot tugged down to his breastbone. Lank brown hair tucked behind his ears.

"Your money, sir?" the younger one said, stepping in front of me. "Don't mean to hurt you. This can all be over with in half a minute, you want."

Chest heaving, heart throwing itself again and again against rib cage, I sank onto one of the benches. A placard alongside documented this as STATION NINE (9). Pictographs indicated that I was to restretch muscles and tendons, check my pulse against my own personal MHR, perform ten to twenty deep knee bends.

"...Minute," I said. Then, catching my breath: "I don't carry money when I'm running, boys. Better pick another pigeon."

"Done got our pigeon." The older one. He raked straying hair behind one ear with the open fingers of his hand. Ran his nose quickly along that coat sleeve. It was slick already from prior crossings. "Just got to fry it up now. Drumsticks."

I glanced briefly at him, and when I did, the younger one made his move.

With amateurs, it's always easier when there's more than one. Then you can use them effectively against each another, the same way you use an attacker's own momentum against him in classic judo. That's the physical part. But they also get overconfident: safety in numbers and all that. And even those who know something about what they're doing can get sloppy or, hesitating to check on the other one, let down their guard for that essential brief second.

With these guys I swiveled into a basic high-low, unwinding like a spring, low and moving inexorably rightward to take out the younger one with a sideways blow to the knee as I spun past, then on past the older one, coming in high and behind as he was looking down to see what happened to his partner, watching him crumple from an open-handed blow just below the third cervical vertebra as I went past.

I followed the arc out to its natural stop and straightened, concerned. You never lose the reflexes, but the edge fades on you. You lose the exact touch, where imperceptible gradations can mean the difference between stunning an adversary and permanently damaging him. I was afraid I might have come down a little too hard.

But apparently not. If anything, from my concern over going in too hard and fast when I shouldn't have been thinking at all, simply reacting I'd held back. The older guy had already climbed to his feet and was staggering towards me with a hunting knife he'd tugged out of his boot.

I felt all consciousness of self melt away, felt myself dissolving into motion, reflex, reaction.

The knife clattered onto cement and he lay in a grassy patch beside a bench, elbow shattered, face draining of color.

"Please," he said. "Oh shit. Please."

I stood there a moment. Yesterday, even an hour ago, what had just happened would not have. I'd have handed over whatever money I had, talked to them. Or simply run. And yesterday, even an hour ago, once it had happened, I would have called the police and awaited them. I'd spent years trying to turn myself off, shut the systems down, before I was finally successful. And now the switch had been thrown again: deep within myself, whether or not I wished it, whether or not I accepted it, I was again active, and on standing orders.

So I left the muggers there, knowing they were people with complicated histories and frustrated needs like my own and probably didn't deserve what had happened to them, and went home to Gabrielle.

She stumbled into the kitchen just as I was finishing breakfast, wearing one of my t-shirts, which hit her mid-thigh, and white socks that had started off at the knee and now were bulky anklets. She took the cup of tea I handed her, looked at my face and said, "What's wrong, Dave? Something has happened."

"Sit down." I slid a plate of buttered rye toast, fruit and cheese in front of her. Ceramic plate, thrown on a wheel near Tucson, signed by the artist, all brilliant blues and deep greens. I sat opposite her with my own tea, in a mug from the same set.

"This is going to be difficult."

"Yeah, looks that way. But we've been through a lot together. And we've always handled it."

"Nothing like this, G, believe me."

I looked at the window, wondering how the birds and squirrels were doing, then at her face. So familiar, so filled with meaning for me. So open to me now.

"Everything you know about me, everything you think you know, is false."

"No," she said.

"Yes. I have to tell you that much, have to insist on it. But for good reason I can't tell you more, not now. Now I have to ask you to do something for me, to do it immediately and without question."

After a moment she nodded.

"I want you to pack whatever you absolutely must have and I want you to go away. Not back to your apartment, but somewhere anywhere else. Preferably out of the city. I don't want to know where you are. In a week, a month, whenever I can, if I can, I'll come and find you."

"It would be easier if I knew why, Dave."

"Yes. It would."

"But I don't have to know."

She was away maybe ten minutes and came back into the kitchen with a huge over-the-shoulder bag and one small suitcase. I sat at the table and drank my tea, looked out the window. Heard sirens nearby, then, as though just an echo, others far away. Watched an ambulance pull up at a brownstone down the street, lights sweeping.

"Well," she said.

"You're an extraordinary woman, Gabrielle. I love you, you know."

"Yes. You do."

And she was gone.

Outside, several million lives went on as though nothing had happened.

After a while I walked through the archway into the studio. Began capping tubes and cans of paint, turning off burners and hotplates under pots of wax, soft metals, glue. It would be a long time before I came back here, if I came back at all.

At one end of the long room, by the windows, sat the piece I'd been working on, a forbidding mass of mixed materials burlap, clay, metals, wood, paper from which a shape struggled to release itself. You could feel the physicality, the sheer exertion, the intensity, of that struggle. I threw a tarp over it and as the tarp descended, the sculpture's form, what I'd been seeking, what I'd been trying to uncover for so long, came to me all at once: suddenly I could see it.

Cypress Grove

If your kneebone achin' and your body cold.... You just getting' ready, honey, for the cypress grove. Skip James, "Cypress Grove Blues" Chapter One

I heard the Jeep a half mile off. It came up around the lake, and when it hit the bend, birds took flight. They boiled up out of the trees, straight up, then, as though heavy wind had caught them, veered abruptly, all at once, sharp right. Most of those trees had been standing forty or fifty years. Most of the birds had been around less than a year and wouldn't be around much longer. I was somewhere in between.

I watched the Jeep as it emerged from trees and the driver dropped into third for the glide down that long incline to the cabin. Afternoon light on the lake turned it to tinfoil. Not much sound. High-in-thethroat hum of the well-maintained engine. From time to time the rustle of dry leaves as wind struck them and they tried to ring like bells there on the trees.

He pulled up a few yards distant, under the pecan tree. Shells on its yield so hard you had to stomp them to get to half a spoonful of meat. I swore that squirrels left them lined up under tires for cracking and sat alongside waiting. He got out of the Jeep and stood beside it. Wearing gray work clothes from Sears, old-fashioned wide-top Wellingtons and what looked to be an expensive hat, though one that would have been more at home further south and west. He stood leaning back against the driver's door with arms crossed, looking around. Folks around here don't move fast. They grow up respecting other folks' homes, their land and privacy, whatever lines have been drawn, some of them invisible.

Respecting the history of the place, too. They sidle up, as they say; ease into things. Maybe that's why I was here.

"Good afternoon," he said, final syllable turned up slightly in such a way that his utterance might be taken as observation, greeting, query.

"They all are."

He nodded. "There is that. Even the worst of them, here in God's country....Not interrupting anything, I hope."

I shook my head.

"Good. That's good." He pushed himself off the door, turned to reach inside, came out with a paper sack. "Looks to be room for the both of us up there on that porch."

I waved him aboard. Settling into the other chair, like my own a straightback kitchen chair gone rickety and braced with crisscrosses of sisal twine, he passed across the sack.

"Brought this."

I skinned paper back to a bottle of Wild Turkey.

"Talk to Nathan, by some chance?"

My visitor nodded. "He said, as the two of us hadn't met before, it might be a good idea to bring along a little something. Grease the wheels."

Nathan'd lived in a cabin up here for sixty years or more. Step on his land, whoever you were, you'd get greeted with a volley of buckshot; that's what everyone said. But not long after I moved in, Nathan started turning up with a bottle every few weeks and we'd sit out here on the porch or, coolish days, inside by the fire, passing the bottle wordlessly back and forth till it was gone.

I went in to get glasses. Poured us both tall soldiers and handed his across. He held it up to the light, sipped, sighed.

"Been meaning to get up this way and say hello," he said. "Things keep shouldering in, though. I figured it could wait. Not like either of us was going anywhere."

That was it for some time. We sat watching squirrels climb trees and leap between them. I'd nailed an old rusted pan onto the pecan tree and kept it filled with pecans for them. From time to time one or the other of us reached out to pour a freshener. Nothing much else moved. Up here you're never far away from knowing that time's an illusion, a lie.

We were into the last couple of inches of the bottle when he spoke again.

"Hunt?"

I shook my head. "Did my share of it as a boy. I think that may have been the only thing my old man loved. Game on the table most days. Deer, rabbit, squirrel, quail and dove, be begging people to take some. He never used anything but a .22."

"Gone now?"

"When I was twelve."

"Mine too."

I went in and made coffee, heated up stew from a couple of days back. When I returned to the porch with two bowls, dark'd gone halfway up the trees and the sounds around us had changed. Insects throbbed and thrummed. Frogs down by the lake sang out with that hollow, aching sound they have.

"Coffee to follow," I told him. "Unless you want it now."

"After's fine."

We sat over our stew. I'd balanced a thick slab of bread on each bowl, for dunking. Since I'd baked the bread almost a week before and it was going hard on stale, that worked just fine. So for a time we spooned, slurped, dunked and licked. Dribbles ran down shirtfronts and chins. I took in the bowls, brought out coffee.

"Never been much inclined to pry into a man's business."

Steam from the cups rose about our faces.

"Why you're here, where you're from, all that. Folks do pay me to keep track of what's going on in these parts, though. Like a lot of things in life, striking a balance's the secret to it."

Frogs had given up. Paired by now. Shut out by darkness. Resigned to spending their evening or life alone. Time for mosquitoes to take over, and they swarmed about us. I went in to replenish our coffee and, returning, told him, "No great secret to it. I was a cop. Spent eleven years in prison. Spent a few more years as a productive citizen. Then retired and came here. No reason things have to get more complicated than that."

He nodded. "Always do, though. It's in our nature."

I watched as a mosquito lit on the back of my hand, squatted a moment, and flew away. A machine, really. Uncomplicated. Designed and set in motion to perform its single function perfectly.

"Can I do something for you, Sheriff?"

He held up his cup. "Great coffee."

"Bring a pot of water to boil, take it off the fire and throw in coffee. Cover and let sit."

"That simple."

I nodded.

He took another sip and looked about. "Peaceful out here, isn't it?"

"Not really."

An owl flew by, feet and tail of its prey, a rodent of some sort, dangling.

"Tell the truth, I kind of hoped I might be able to persuade you to help me. With a murder."

Chapter Two

Life, someone said, is what happens while we're waiting around for other things to happen that never do.

Amen! as Brother Douglas would have said, hoisting his Bible like a sword and brandishing it there framed by stained-glass windows depicting the Parable of the Talents, Mary Magdalene at the tomb, the Assumption.

Back then and back home, there among kudzu in the westward cup of Crowley's Ridge and eastward levees built to keep the river out, I'd been a golden child, headed for greatness -- greatness meaning only escape from that town and its mean horizons. I'd ridden the cockhorse of a scholarship down the river to New Orleans, then back up it to Chicago (following the course of jazz) where, once I had secured a fellowship, head and future pointed like twin bullets towards professordom. Then our president went surreptitiously to war and took me with him. Walking on elbows through green even greener than that I'd grown up among, I recited Chaucer, recalled Euclid, enumerated, as a means of staying awake and alert, principles of economy -- and left them there behind me on the trail: spore, droppings.

No difficulty for this boy, rejoining society. I got off the plane on a Friday, in Memphis, stood outside the bus station for an hour or so without going inside, then left. Never made it home. Found a cheap hotel. Monday I walked halfway across the city to the PD and filled out an application. Why the PD? After all these years, I can't remember any particular train of thought that led me there. I'd spent two and a half years getting shot at. Maybe I figured that was qualification enough.

Weeks later, instead of walking on elbows, I was sitting in a Ford that swayed and bucked like a son of a bitch, cylinders banging the whole time. Still making my way through the wilderness, though. If anything, the city was a stranger, more alien place to me than the jungle had been. Officer Billy Nabors was driving. He had breath that would peel paint and paper off walls and singe the pinfeathers off chickens.

"What I need you to do," he said, "is just shut the fuck up and sit there and keep your eyes open. Till I tell you to do something else, that's all I need you to do."

He hauled the beast down Jefferson towards Washington Bottoms, over a spectacular collection of potholes and into what appeared to be either a long-abandoned warehouse district or the set for some postwar science fiction epic. We pulled up alongside the only visible life forms hereabouts, all of them hovering about a Spur station advertising Best Barbecue. A four-floor apartment house across the street had fallen into itself and a young woman sat on the curb outside staring at her shoes, strings of saliva snailing slowly down a black T-shirt reading ATEFUL DE D. A huge rotting wooden tooth hung outside the onetime dentist's office to the right. The empty lot to the left had grown a fine crop of treadbare auto

tires, bags of garbage, bits and pieces of shopping carts, bicycles and plastic coolers, jagged chunks of brick and cinder block.

Nabors had the special on a kaiser roll, Fritos and a 20-ounce coffee. I copied the coffee, passed on the rest. Hell, I could live for a week off what he spilled down his shirtfront. But that day his shirt was destined to stay clean a while longer, because, once we'd settled back in the squad and he started unwrapping, we got a call. Disturbance of the peace, Magnolia Arms, apartment 24.

He drove us twelve blocks to a place that looked pretty much like the one we'd left.

"Gotta be your first DP, right?"

I nodded.

"Shit." He looked down at his wrapped barbeque. Grease crept out slowly onto the dash. "You sit here. Anything looks out of whack, you hear anything, you call in Officer Needs Assistance. Don't think about it, don't try to figure it out, just hit the fuckin' button. You got that?"

"Gee, I'm not sure, Cap'n. You know how I is."

Nabors rolled his eyes. "What the fuck'd I do? Just what the fuck'd I do?"

Opening the door, he pulled himself out and struggled up plank-and-pipe stairs. I watched him make his way along the second tier. Intent, focused. I reached over and got his fucking sandwich and threw it out the window. He knocked at 24. Stood there a moment talking, then went in. The door closed.

The door closed, and nothing else happened. There were lights on inside. Nothing else happened for a long time. I got out of the squad, went around to the back. Following some revisionist ordinance, a cheap, ill-fitting fire escape had been tacked on. I pulled at the rung, saw landings go swaying above, bolts about to let go. Started up, thinking about all those movies with suspension bridges.

I'd made it to the window of 24 and was reaching to try it when a gunshot brought me around. I kicked the window in and went after it.

Through the bathroom door I saw Nabors on the floor. No idea how badly he might have been hurt. Gun dangling, a young Hispanic stood over him. He looked up at me, nose running, eyes blank as two halves of a pecan shell. Like guys too long in country that had just shut down, because that was the only way they could make it.

I shot him.

It all happened in maybe twenty seconds, and for years afterward, in memory, I'd count it out, one thousand, two thousand.... At the time, it seemed to go on forever, especially that last moment, with him sitting there slumped against the wall and me standing with my S&W .38 still extended. Right hand only, not the officially taught and approved grip, never sighting but firing by instinct, how I'd learned to shoot back home and the only way that ever worked for me.

I'd hit him an inch or so off the center of his chest. For a moment as I bent above him, there was a whistling sound and frothy blood bubbling up out of the amazingly small wound, before everything stopped. He had three crucifixes looped around his neck, a tattoo of barbed wire beneath.

Nabors lay there lamenting the loss of his barbeque. Man like him, that's the note he should go out on. But he wasn't going out, not this time. I picked up the phone and called in Officer Down and location. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn't cleared the rest of the apartment.

Not much rest to clear, as it happened. A reeking bathroom, a hallway with indoor-outdoor carpeting frayed like buckskin at the edges. Boxes sat everywhere, most of them unpacked, others torn open and dug through, contents spilling half out. The girl was in the back bedroom, in a closet, arms lashed to the crossbar, feet looped about with clothesline threaded into stacked cinder blocks. Her breasts hung sadly, blood trickled down her thighs, and her eyes were bright. She was fourteen.

Renderings

Chapter One

They come in the dark and do terrible things to me. They go away.

In the morning there are bruises, memories. Eva traces them across my chest, down my arms. She asks no questions.

Their heads are like foxes. (I have seen, in the old books, pictures of foxes.) Their feet are hooves. They leave prints of bloody paws on the door, the sheets.

I do not know what country I am in. A strange sky streaked with blue clouds, yellowish hills far off, always the smell of damp clay and dust, and the twilight hovering over our heads like a moth. I do not know the name of the language I speak, though I speak it, I'm told again and again, quite well.

Eva does not speak the language.

Eva paints.

Her latest: myself, dying. There is a smile (I think it a smile) on my lips, the smile of a man who has achieved his life's ambition. For some time I envy the man trapped there, this circle closing itself.

What, in the drudge and dazzle of the days, I keep forgetting: I am here for a purpose. The expedition is well financed; they will expect results. This journal? Eva's paintings? Neither will be enough. They expect nothing less than une petite cosmogonie complte. While my own book lies dormant as the Kraken, as Kansas corn, others continue, miraculously, to find their way to me they simply appear in my room

for jacket blurbs, review, consolation, criticism. And in the meanwhile my poems wander among the baffles of their words, looking for salvation, redeeming wisdom, gnosis, wherever seams and corners come imperfectly together.

I visited the grave today.

It rests in a tiny valley between two hills. Atop the hills are fig trees, down their sides, kudzu. There is a small stone.

A woman was there before me and stood looking down at the grave. From behind I could see that her shoulders were wide, waist narrow, legs muscular and long. She wore a leiderhosen sort of thing, of old leather or something much like it, over a long-sleeved white shirt. On her feet were ankle-length oxblood boots with low, narrow heels.

Strangers rarely came to see us here, and I was startled to encounter one so casually, still more startled at her hair, of a forbidden black. My own had been bleached to a pale bluish white before I came.

When she turned I could see her breasts, but partly contained by clothing, small, upturned. I thought of the snouts of small animals in the old books.

I came too late, she said. On her face a mask, beneath it (I sensed) a smile. I tried to come earlier. Everything has become so difficult. Why do they always leave me?

I sensed, could almost feel, her own features sliding inside those of the mask, rearranging themselves.

They always go away. They flee to foreign lands, the back rooms of libraries, they have families, become editors, forget me. I ask so little of them, only love. AM I so hard a woman to love?

The features of the mask changed perceptibly.

 Look at me. I am beautiful, spa? And young, always young. Anything a man wants, I can be. I become the hollow only he can fill, I empty myself into him, nourish, protect. And still he will not stay with me. My hands close on air, my legs clasp empty space.

The mask was now that of a Greek comedy. Inappropriate affect, I thought, remembering words read long ago, when I still thought it possible to understand, to know.

The sun shrugged to its zenith overhead as shadows flowed back to their sources, this woman's mask blanc now. A hand moved, palm open, towards the gravesite.

He last spoke of killing me. He put his fist against my throat. Another time, a knife between my legs. I saw the world spinning about a dsordre I had never known. The walls of the room collapsed. I saw at the window the eye of a whale.

A shrug, or shiver, passed over her. For a moment the mask was silver, a mirror in which I swam watching.

Some of the things he saw: I do not doubt it. But I don't know how he bore them. How any of you do.

She turned away to the grave again.

I have been in hospital, she said.

Yes.

Features flared on the mask, faded. You knew?

I told her my name.

You have changed, she said finally.

I nodded. It's been a long time. Many years, many poems, many abandoned books and stories.

And women?

Abandoned?

Or otherwise.

A few. One in particular, a painter named Eva. She is here with me.

But you will send her away, now that I have come.

No.

Her silver mask tilted upwards and swept slowly across the sky, a tiny observatory dome.

You cannot go on without me.

Perhaps.

You will encounter deserts and thirsty rivers. The gound itself will tremble as you pass across it.

Taking a step towards her, I lifted a hand to the mask.

That is not allowed, she said.

In art, I said, all is allowed, and pulled it down. It hung, ineffective, pitiful noose, about her throat. While above it like a moon rose Eva's face, impossibly old.

And so I walked away from that grave, from that place and time,

And I came at last onto a green field beyond which I could see a small settlement,

Like (I saw for the first time) a natural thing, a growing thing, alive,

And the vast empty spaces around.

They come no more at night.

I watch Eva's face in the moonlight.

The book is almost finished.

Chapter Two

Metonymies of Europe and its civilization: tea, excellent manners, trains. I had my taste of the first two while waiting for the third.

The tea shop nearest the gate at New Paddington Station was a small one with perhaps eight tables, all of them empty so early in the morning. I shrugged out of my wet mac and was served by a middle-aged woman intent upon making, of my tea and toast, a deferential ceremony. She wore a rather tight brown uniform and, over it, a navy blue cardigan stretched long in front from many years' pocketed tips.

My train sat idly steaming in its slot. A few passengers made their way aboard, most of them burdened with various bundles and unwieldy bags, as I sat over breakfast. At last taking up my own single parcel, I walked the train's length searching for empty compartments, finally settling on one encamped by (as I soon learned) a young seminary student. Moments before departure we were joined by a breathless woman of about the same age.

"I assume you're not a believer, of course," the student said as we pulled away from New Paddington, looking up from his Greek bible first at the woman, then, getting no response, at me.

I simply looked back at him. The woman took out a paperback The Brothers Karamazov and began reading (though there was no marker) somewhere near the middle of the book.

"You don't have to believe, of course: that's the message of the modern world," he told us. "Only faith matters. And if you can only have faith in beauty, in the world, yourself those also are among the names of Yahweh."

Having got all that on record, he took refuge again in the orderly decline of Greek. I though of Tillich as aplogist, the history of religion a graveyard of dead symbols. This gentle young man with his dead language and dead mythologies. This city illimitably, yet with great civility, dying also. I watched, silent witness, as station after station went past. At first these were frequent, active; then the intervals between increased, their platforms ever more sparsely populous, until the last hove into view overgrown with honeysuckle and kudzu, colonized by rats the size of beaver.

Soon then, our train broke into a blasted, scabrous landscape. Stark and sere, trees stood, jagged dark teeth, on the horizon. We thundered past collapsing structures once buildings, past steel and cement,

water towers like downed Goliaths, the plundered remains of bridges, signs gone grey and featureless as stone.

The morning's rain had given way to sun. Soon, too, our tracks gave onto bare earth and, both my companions being occupied with books, there being little landscape to observe now, I elected to join them.

Untying its thong from around a sort of button, I opened the cardboard satchel I always carried with me and took from it a manila folder. I read over the most recent pages it had become my habit to type up the manuscript page by page as it progressed, and the newest pages were uppermost then replaced the folder, removing in its stead a pad of cheap yellow paper and pen.

Far off beyond the hills, I wrote, I hear the rumbling discourse of dynamite, and wait for the winds that will roll down towards us.

In her letters Violet writes of ordinary things that seem to be receding ever further from me: walking to the store for milk, a new coat, newspapers. The sky looms overhead like promises one should live up to. I read Dostoevski and wait for meals.

Today, walking in the hills, I came across a gravesite.

Towards noon, hand wrapped about a teacup that would do most others for a soup bowl, the train's engineer joined us. I took note of a limp, the left leg, if I remember correctly, and mused that his face resembled some wooden implement left outdoors for weeks and finally retrieved.

"First time?" he asked my female companion, who went on reading.

"How about you?" he said to me then. "Been to the settlement before?"

I said that I had not.

He drank. I noticed that his left hand, whenever he removed it from the cup, shook.

He took in the land outside our windows with a quick glance.

"'S the future," he said. "You don't doubt it, do you? I been a railroadman a long time." Another mouthful of tea. "Pushed down some borders myself in my day. Lasted longer than most, too. My kids come home from school and they don't know what any of it was all about, what it was for. Don't have enough history to cover a shirtsleeve."

He drank what seemed to be the last of his tea.

"That's what'll save us, the settlement up there. I hope you folks have a nice stay. Do it myself in a minute, if I could."

He trudged along the aisle and out the compartment's doors.

The woman had exchanged Karamazov for Balzac, the student his Attic scripture for a Talmud. Miles to go, one supposed.

"The captain strolls on the deck in moonlight," the woman beside me said after a while.

I nodded. "Quite."

The student looked up, a little befuddled: our scriptures were apart from his. I became acutely aware of the woman there with me, of legs tight against the coarse fabric of pants, the lift of breast and bare arm, more than anything else, perhaps, a familiar, fugitive sense of promise, of possibilities.

"You are traveling alone?" she asked.

I said that I was and she returned to her book. I watched out the window for a moment a few low clouds, an abandoned machine or two before returning to my own.

I remember, as I entered the settlement for the first time, thinking that I was aware, not in some remote, faintly acknowledged manner, but physically aware, with a rise along my spine, that simultaneously we all inhabit two worlds, the one we carry within our minds and the external (or projected) one, and these two meet, the "real" and "shadow," only selectively, like the scant overlapping lips of Venn diagrams.

With some surprise I realized that both my chapter and journey had come to an end. The train was as at a standstill. Clusters of simple buildings loomed in a curious twilight.

Both companions already stood. Leaning close as I closed my satchel, the woman siad: "My name is Eva. We'll see one another often."