INCH TIME FOOT GEM, NOT TWICE THIS DAY, EVERY MOMENT A PRECIOUS GEM

THE ACID THAT TESTS GOLD

Chapter One

 She stepped back from the painting and unpoised the consciousness in her eyes, allowing the paint to play and trick with them.  The painting bulged outwards and then sank deeply into space flinging "objects" out into the room where she stood.  Her eyes were filled with it. She'd been working on the painting for four days now and she could actually see it in her sleep. It was the focusing and then the "unfocusing " or rather an alternate kind of "fuzzy focus" which caused the effect, and whose action sensitized her eyes.

First the BLUE lost its rugged character and became a smooth insubstantial, luminous and fairy-like space. Rows of pink horizontal "clouds" with upwardly graduating hue pressed the BLUE further to a near ether, while maintaining for themselves a plane of suggested verticality like the rungs of a ladder. A strange disconnected sort of still life made of sometimes paint and sometimes "object" floated or hovered in front of the pink "clouds",  but occasionally a golden pear or a lasso of bright paint would unceremoniously escape from its assigned position and hurl itself past the edges of her vision.

Below this peculiarly animated "sky", was a "beachscape", streaked silvery ochre paint with two bright green "nests" (or they could have been "wings" or "epaulets" or simply clumps of "beach grass").  They, the "nests", were separated by a swirling streamish form that worked in opposition to the SILVERY OCHRE.  The "stream" would sometimes move outward like a cowcatcher or any proper stream, but at other times it would hang like a curtain or a  waterfall, sometimes it would stand up perfectly straight like a geyser while the SILVER OCHRE would rush to close below. It did suggest the ocean's movement but it also worked to extend the notion of verticality (by an  averaging of the  possibilities, that is to say;  visual fatigue) and with the more dramatic and complex workings "above", the "land's..' scape-ness"  was more because of "below" and "under" than because of "on". The sacrifice of course was memory.

But in exchange for this loss of solidity of ground, the "string work" above amused and beguiled with its vector-like motions, its bulwark of complexity, and its "thereness" somehow made up for a lack of anchorage.  Strings of paint would terminate in "mid-air" being suddenly supported by the "objects" which hung from them, and each new focus released a new animation somewhere else.

On the upper right corner there was a bright loop of white paint whose end-points reached beyond the edges of the  painting.  To it was attached a thick red "cord" which pulled at the central "entanglement" and made a bridge between the two before looping back in a "knot" and then dangling down in front of one of the "nests" ludicrously offering itself. She could grab it and climb up ...  and she let her eyes wander around in the stringy still life, climbing up and then falling down, up and down, around and repeating with little variations.

Two "peaches" suspended upon yellow paint cords hung below the tangled mass but above the "stream". One "peach's" cord was fractured inwardly.  Her vision floated forward now into the turquoise "beyond" almost bird-like, as if her middle was brushing against the "peaches".  That was her sensation. She let her eyes circulate around, climbing and falling. Sometimes the paint would be a "bauble" and at other times it would become a "door" which while attracting her upper parts, would repel and knock away her lower half until she'd get that strange "floating forward felling".

It was a little like diving into an enchanted world found in a child's story book, or, being confronted by some weird fleshless dancer. It was a bit like evaporation. Sometimes the entire unlikely structure would appear to be supported by one single stripe of vertical paint whose unattached terminations were in clear view, and oddly, this fact did not undermine the illusion or disrupt the momentary stillness.

Then she spotted a place where the paint was too "solid" and interrupted the composition, so she shifted her focus back and continued painting for awhile longer. When she stepped back again to look, the paint flowed easily  past the "solid" spot without causing any new upsets. At length, she made the additional judgment that she could stop painting now if she chose to since the painting had an overall "evenness", though it was yet unfinished.

She blinked her eyes once or twice and began gathering her brushes, wiping them one at a time and placing each in the can of turpentine.  Then she took the can of brushes to the kitchen and began sloshing them against the sides and bottom of the can. She fingered each brush, letting the loose color bleed out into her hands filling up the tiny pores.  There were about fifteen brushes, and they'd need a soap cleaning  too. She wondered how late it had gotten.  She tossed her head to catch the hair obstructing her view, and with one rigidly held grimy green fore finger she pressed a tiny button on the side of her watch.  A bright red light told the hour, it was seven thirty already.  Perhaps it would be nice to go out, she mused. The turpentine stung in the hot water and its smell burst pungently.  The brushes oozed a thick colored mud now that collected in her cuticles.  Yes, she would go out, she could go to the coffee house alone.  It would be nice to see what the weather was like outside, to look at people , be among them.  She hadn't felt sociable like this in a long time, not since teaching had ended.

She laid the brushes in a row to dry and went to wash her hands and face.  She peered into her wet eyes as they emerged above the hot steaming wash cloth, they looked OK. She thought about the painting, it was coming along. Her clothes were even clean enough, yes, she'd go out.  She glanced at the painting in passing but now her focus was racing ahead of her and out the door.

At the coffee house, there were plenty of parking spaces and on entering she found the shop was nearly empty. Besides herself, there was only one other customer.

He sat at a small square table in the center of the room  and was wearing a motley dark blue seacap, a plaid overshirt and worn jeans.  He didn't look like the usual crowd who were really too "chic" for her tastes. He even looked friendly, reading a  paperback and sipping a cup of one of the "fancy" coffees.  She could tell it was "fancy" because there was still some white shiny froth floating on the top.  At the counter,  she ordered a "fancy"  coffee too.  Strange, it was so empty, still, it was a Monday...

The place had been a used clothing store, but now it was transformed with white walls, wooden beams, pillars, lamps  everywhere, and a variety of antique tables. Even by Marin County standards, it was comfortable.  It had an outdoor court too but that closed at 4. Its cold bleak pane windows and doors stood shut now ominously reminding her of the dark enclosed space beyond.  She stepped away out into the brightly lit room and walked as ordinarily as she could to the table nearest to his.  It was the only oval table in the room and there was a round water stain just above where a spoon would go if the table  were "set".  She had always felt constrained from sitting at this particular table, as if it were. "special" but today she brushed away her reserve and placed her cup of cappuccino below the watermark, and sat down.

She was thinking about the "special-ness" of the table,  sitting in a funny "tall" way,  reminiscent of the usual crowd,  trying to "feel" the table, comparing circles to squares and wondering where ovals came in,  when he asked, "Are you from here?"

The focus of his attention turned her idle thinking  into actual introspection.  She was "from here" because the regular crowd was absent, and the thoughts of the previous moment melted away with recognition.  It was as if the thoughts themselves belonged to the "chic" crowd and not to her at all. "Circles, squares, "special-ness";  why the waitress didn't even  recognize her! She searched for a thought more familiar and finding none, she reexamined.  She did not "possess" the room  but rather sat "within" it;  she was "on" the chair, "at" the table.  Still she thought, there must be an answer to his question,  an answer which she could  give.

"No," she said dropping the affectation, without aligning herself with anything at all and continuing factually, "I mean I do "live here" but I'm not "from here".  He had bright blue eyes and as she looked at him both the question and the answer slipped away and she felt herself becoming light and floaty inside of the faded cotton pants and blouse which she wore.  She admired the way he drank his coffee; slowly, without concern, without desire ever troubling him.  She wanted to gulp hers down, sip the hot liquid from under the whipping cream before it melted.

He was from Washington, Washington state, presently. He'd also lived here once and other places.  He was mostly from Florida (he's  grown up there), and he'd  been in Viet Nam.  He wanted to know where she was from originally and she answered that she had moved all her life and that she had been here to do practice teaching. Now, that was over and she was looking for work... but not in the teaching line.

She felt a twinge of sadness and left-over hurt begin to  emerge behind her words, but he countered approvingly, "You didn't get on with it?"  and he laughed  warmly.  No, she thought, she "hadn't got on with it" and she looked questioningly at him as he continued to chuckle in congratulation.  A hot sensation in her chest made her slightly confused so she asked him what he was reading.  It was Howard Ruff's new book about how to survive the decline of civilization (the Bomb) and make a fortune at the same time.  He wasn't interested in making a fortune he told her but he wanted to be informed, know what other people were thinking.  He didn't believe in the "Ostrich" approach to the world.

How she admired that attitude and wished she too had the guts to really look at things, or, even the brain power necessary.  Things had been so strange in the world lately and then with teaching too....trying  to explain it, sort of...It had all been hell!  She could remember the guy in the geometry class who'd been so excited about various news items...  the kids being trampled to death at a rock concert! and then; the bay,  the San Francisco bay, being "mined",  and by "patriots". It had been pretty hard for her to say much about any of it, so she had just tried to share a giddy appreciation with them,  confirming the fact of its "strangeness".  At home, she'd listened to the reports by herself and had felt most insecure. (Could she believe her ears?)  She'd tried to meditate, she'd heard that meditation was calming and  also she found herself eating odd combinations of food like "parsley, sage, rosemary and  thyme"  pizzas - to keep the world in one  piece. (The sage was kind of odd, and the rosemary, and she'd missed the oregano, and, it was after all a rather feeble response to international disasters but, when one is alone, how can one express oneself?  (Prayer was  wholly out of the question.)

She looked across the table at him, he seemed to mirror her hysteria but he was in more control, more able to use it somehow. Her shame surfaced briefly and she got up to use the ladies' room.  It was the same room for both men and  women which made a difference in the graffiti on the walls. There was a cork bulletin board just outside the door and she thought about what she'd noticed there as she'd entered through the wood door frame, closing the door behind.  Inside she considered the combined literary effort.

Returning to the room, she found he had moved to the oval table and now sat opposite "her seat", calmly reading. She sat down wondering what would happen next, the coffee being almost finished.

He was a student at a small school called Evergreen. She knew of it because it was one of the many schools where she had tried to get a job teaching.  It was an avant-garde sort of school and she had had all kinds of wonderful plans about how she could really experiment with classes there... try things like color meditation exploring gansfields, dress, study optics - as art students that is, and do various group studies which she could not do alone...of course, that was such a long time ago, it was all out of the question now.

She was surprised by his knowledge on these subjects and he told her that they already had classes like that and he'd taken some. Her esteem dropped momentarily, a shade of remorse crossed her breast but it was counter-balanced by her interest in what she might learn from him about these things, and too, her growing attraction, and some fantasy beginning to form.  Why she could go there herself, not as a teacher, but still, to go there; herself, and be part of this "renegade" culture which lived in constant celebration with the land and life itself.  This was what she imagined, the roots from which this man had come.  She was  simultaneously  aware of her own mistrust of the "whole-wheat crowd", she  called them that name too.  How they were so haughty and could make you feel like such a misfit.  How she felt so burned when they'd break her stuff or use it up without  asking, and then act pious in righteous defense, as if it were her fault to have had the thing in the first place, and weren't you small....to be so begrudging, and, "accidents do happen". And again, how weird she felt every time she went into a health food store, or how hopeless it seemed trying to figure out which vitamins to take.  Lately, all the stores felt funny. She didn't know why but she thought it might be because of the strikes.  It was hard to find one that wasn't on strike, and then too, waiting in lines had become so interesting, so difficult.  Her attempts at a  "straight career" just hadn't worked out, maybe they would accept her this time, not find her ways too strict, her thinking  too "linear" as they put it. Why, maybe this man would even suggest....but there she left off her fantasy,  that was not her space to think about. She was pleased when he asked if she would like to take a walk with him.

Although he had already told her that he'd been injured in Viet Nam, that he'd stepped on a landmine; although she'd felt  ashamed about it, embarrassed even, saddened that it was so, in awe that he'd  been to Viet Nam and had survived and was now so vividly alive; still when he got up and his limp was encountered as an actual fact, she was fairly swept away.  She had a moment of "instant understanding"... the finality, the anguish, the curse of it.  The wind was gone from her body as she tried to shape her steps to his.  The bell tinkled on the door as it fell shut.

On the street she was less awkward.  There was a light breeze blowing and it was quite pleasant following him out into the empty night street.  They crossed the intersection diagonally and stopped at the 7-11 and bought some licorice.  His truck and one other vehicle were parked under the bright 7-11 florescent light which sputtered spring insects in its ghostly glow.  An old weathered International, the color of red dust with a cracked windshield, filled with papers, books, dash clutter of all sorts, hanging things.  He put his book inside and carefully relocked it, then stepping away he indicated a direction.

They walked.  They walked up and down the few old streets on that side of town. They walked under the willows and the birch and the sycamores.  They walked on the broken sidewalks in the night air, in spring.   They talked as they went, they might even have smelled the night flowers in bloom, as they passed talking to one another.

Then they both drove to her apartment, he followed her.    He parked on the street, shuffled the contents of the driving compartment and emerged carrying a small drab green backpack.  He showed her what was under the lump of canvas in the back of the truck, the row boat he had made.  He liked to row, he said.

Inside the apartment she drew the curtains and turned on the lights. There was almost no furniture, the floor was  covered with cardboard and in the far corner stood the painting she had been working on only a few hours before. How much had changed in so short a time and still she could feel the contents of the room pulling at her with admonitions of caution,  reminding her of her limitations and needs.  He accepted the room without surprise or neglect and set his backpack down right in the center of the cardboard floor and proceeded on to inspect the painting at closer view.

His presence gave her a second perspective, a chance to recoil from her usual more cautious approach.  She regarded her own recent past from the "afar" of his nearness, her own voice echoing hopeless and unheard, and the numbness which always proceeded its rupture.  Then the strange near beauty of its event. Her disparate parts realigning.  She didn't want to indulge in this thinking but with him here...she could almost view the tenuous loneliness and its expression as a thing of triumph, but her shyness intervened.

She made tea.  She was not ashamed of the painting now suddenly on display, nor was he overly impressed.   Together they chattered sitting on the floor near his backpack, drinking tea and eating licorice.  They had some peanuts too, in the shell, and as he opened one he told her about an idea he had been "working on" about a peanut and a pearl.  He said he was going to write a story about a peanut and a pearl...how a character would find a pearl instead of a peanut inside of a peanut shell.  Instead of in an oyster.  It was so fine!   She hoped she'd be able to read the story. The pearl he continued, was the only gem that grew, grew organically, naturally inside of a living organism.

She considered what he said and she thought about the grain of sand, the sand inside the oyster...and  she remembered what someone had told her about growing peanuts, how they said that if you throw things onto the plants, then they make more peanuts.  There was a certain logic to this if peanuts grew underground, still, it seemed inefficient.  She concluded it was just one of "those stories", like goats eating boots, and carrots needing holes to grow in. The kind of story one believes until one thinks, not important enough to research ordinarily, but intriguing and so one remembers it and is never certain as to its verity.  She thought again of the grain of sand, the peanut and the pearl.

She told him about a book she'd just read:  THE PRINCESS   BRIDE.   She'd gotten it from her brother and it had frightened her to sleeplessness some nights...She had to admit though, so much was happening then that it was difficult to be sure just what was causing what.  He was most eager to see the book since she seemed to describe precisely the ideals he aimed to achieve in his writing.

Yes, it had been the ideas presented in the book that had been so troubling to her, things like the conqueror becoming the conquered, and always being faced with exactly what one would like most to avoid.   Then there was the problem of the princess never escaping, and never meeting with her mate...except as  a memory...or, in death.  The whole problem of "actor-witness-victim" made vivid, or was it just her own trying to live alone?  It was all high adventure in the book but it had jumped up off the page and filled her mind with such mind boggling rhythms and starts...well, she'd taken it too personally, she knew.  She was very careful with what she read, she always had been, and with the demands of teaching too, she'd been doubly cautious, and there was so much unavoidable stuff one had to think about anyway.

She checked the shame wanting to rise in her body.  She regained some poise realizing that he wasn't judging her and while she felt he "saw" her, he had no fear or contempt for the things she'd just remember to herself and not say outloud. Then there was his limp, that made her want to be brave, gave her a kind of courage.  He'd taken off his shoes and his one foot was sort of round.  He liked to massage his feet every night he said, and he told her that there are places on the feet which correspond to the organs and even affect the mind.  Then she was massaging his feet, and he was talking about Viet Nam.

He'd done sabotage and demolition work after first being in regular combat.  She didn't know what he meant and only pieced it together from his stories. Slowly she understood that he had  had assignments like sneaking into towns and blowing up factories and ammunition supplies.  She comprehended this information in steps; Viet Nam, Asia, a war, he had been...and she almost thought "terrorist"  ...and then she quickly thought about James Bond but that image dissolved too and was replaced  by the movie "Sand Pebbles", the one that had convulsed her body, right in the theater.  She had doubled over twice, sobbing, as if she were the only one there.  Then the whole horrible feeling she still had about Viet Nam...  and she looked at him, the person sitting  before her on the cardboard floor, his round foot in her hands.

And he went on talking, more rapidly now, about combat and the way the Viet Namese were guerrilla warriors and how the United States hadn't had a chance against their methods, how they often had little regard for their own people's lives while the Americans sometimes doubled their losses for just one man.  And, even if things had evened-out in battle, there were always more and more of "them" arriving from the north. No, the Americans couldn't ever have "won".

The Viet Namese were everywhere, in ones and twos and threes, in the trees and villages of their own country among people who spoke the same language. The Americans tried to make their way without even a goal through an incomprehensible people.  They went by assignment, sort of, with their mud-caked machinery and shiny weapons to buoy them...but they had needed more, a magic cloak or a portable wall, and a goal post with people shouting on the other side...or maybe just not to have  been there in the first place. Then he began again, "And sometimes the Viet Namese would end up with the equipment too," and he gauged his words effect upon her. Again he paused and shifting his emphasis began a new assault gaining momentum as he spoke.

"The Viet Namese  were famous for their booby-traps, and when the Americans would get maimed, it would slow down a  whole regiment, foot injuries  were  the worst," and he  paused. "There was one,  sharp bladed stakes which they'd hide in light  brush, imbedded in the ground so the blades stuck up...and when the Americans would run through, the spears would cut right through the soles in the boots." He smiled his rye smile assessing her readiness and comprehension, and continued, "So the Americans redesigned their boots.  Six months later, all issue boots had reinforcing steel in the soles, and three weeks later...the Viet Namese had set new traps, like animal traps, that snapped over on the  top."

He explained how morale was so low all of the time and how everyone smoked dope, like it was some hedge on sanity and how they were all half "crazed" most of the time anyway. Near the end, he said, sometimes an order would "come down" and a whole regiment would just sit down and pass around the pipe.

"And the new lieutenants!"  He grinned showing his teeth but including her on the grin side.  It was their green period  that was so dangerous,  sometimes they'd compensate for their ineptitude by getting bossy...and  doing dumb things. Sometimes they'd be killed in their first encounter.  Then he added that occasionally, one would be discovered with a hole in his back, instead of in his chest.

She knew it was true, she knew war was horrible.  Then he told her about how the women were part of it too. There were stories of GIs being murdered by the whores, and, while making love too.  Even the children set traps and ran messages, and they could kill. The Americans just couldn't cope with this kind of thing, and some of them would get so nuts.

She lamented to herself as she had done so many times,  "Why had they ever gone to Viet Nam?"  She looked at him, he wasn't the "they" of "why had they ever gone to Viet Nam?"  Then her thinking slid.  She reviewed old unresolved ground not recently disturbed and so all the more disturbing.

Could it really have been, as her father had said, because of Kennedy? She thought to her self... because  of some arrangement he'd agreed to years before the war? And the good Kennedy too, the best one ..he was so smart and popular, how could that be so?  And he was murdered by "terrorists", or was it the CIA, someone had said that too? Nothing made sense.  Why was it so hard to understand? Was she so much more stupid that she couldn't understand?  How she hated politics, how she hated war.

She looked at him again, sitting on the cardboard floor,  a  small pile of peanut shells just to the right of his hip, she looked at his round foot in her hands, his own foot.   As she rubbed the smooth pale skin and  the thin flesh she could feel how the bones were all welded together inside.  She wondered how the blood got around and about the places where it wouldn't bend right.

He told her about how it had happened, about the first time he had seen "it" and again,  after the operation, like some strange philosophical argument on the end of his leg; a table's existence is 'tableness', ...if  I  go into the next room, how can I know if the table still 'exists'?  And falling trees unheard and I am...because, because, because??? And then he got used to it, but the doctor said it had to be cut off, but he wouldn't sign the papers and after all these years, LOOK, he still had it.  Nobody was going to get his foot. She blushed in admiration and pressed and pinched the cool flesh more familiarly, somewhat more confident now that it would not break.  She imagined how painful it must be broken inside with nerve endings all mixed up and the bones all fused together...tiny pulses of purple and chartreuse sense waves climbing up his leg with each step.  But he'd gotten used to it - like the beggar and the shoes story, only different. She thought again of his control, his mild hysteria, his vigor and too, the reason.

She became wildly brave and read aloud a Kabir poem, for him, aloud and without one hesitation. It went like this:

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside, and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings no one touches, and the source of all water.

from THE KABIR BOOK
versions by Robert Bly

And then he told a wonderful story, a story about after Viet Nam, after he'd been injured,  after he'd returned to the States.  He was supposed to give a briefing to a whole assembly of young men soon to leave for Viet Nam.  It was just a short talk about the use of specialized personal   equipment like the gas mask and conditions they could "expect".  And feeling morally incomplete for the task he'd  taken some "LSD", his first.   In Viet Nam he'd always been too afraid.  He was just coming on to the drug as he climbed up on to the stage.  He, the experienced veteran, with weak knees, trembling, speechless.  It wasn't stage fright exactly and his mind still remembered that the auditorium was filled with young men wearing khaki uniforms, yet when he looked out over the audience,  all his eyes could see were man-sized grasshoppers!  "Heightened understandings" often cross normal boundaries.

She was laughing.  He was laughing. It was scary..."man-sized grasshoppers", it was funny scary...chewing; then, it was hysterical.  Her belly ached, her ribs ached.  She didn't care. It was wonderful, not to care, intensely, intensely not to care.  For awhile, they couldn't speak. Then they couldn't speak without becoming hysterical again.  Slowly one set of muscles would soften but already another set would be knotting up.  No matter, she liked this man.  He had survived...  and she had too.

He asked her if she would like to go rowing tomorrow. She accepted without hesitation and with a shy pleasure, barely perceptible.  He said he'd be by about 10 and he left directly.

She listened as he warmed up the engine outside on the  street;  wondering where he would spend the night, noting the small dishevelment they had made with the room and gaily deciding to leave it.  She washed her face, brushed her teeth, put on her nighty, and slid into the smooth cool sheets beneath the turquoise bed spread which she had gotten at the second hand store.  She had a momentary flash of satisfaction mingled with joy at the color, visible now partially by virtue of memory and partly because of her current mood.  She turned out the light.  The curtains fluttered slightly in the breeze.  They had a white-on-white thread pattern and were of such light cotton as to seem  almost "see-through".  From an even finer material, also white, she had fitted under curtains; they bulged now with night air.  Outside, a plum tree in bloom reached up from its tiny cement edged  bed, placed unceremoniously between the parking lot and the building foundation.  Its close branches strummed softly on the screen.

STROKE-LUNGE-CREAK-LAP

            Chapter Two

The next morning he arrived as planned.  He was wearing a different pair of jeans, newer, and a white T-shirt. She again had on her rather shapeless cotton, her "painting" clothes.

On "water maps", he showed her where they might go, depending upon conditions.  They were such fine maps, "water maps".  She'd never seen maps like this before. They were delicate and massive and serious.  They were mostly blue with rows of frail topographical lines showing the ocean's floor.  She loved water and although she'd never been in a boat out "on" it, she'd always wanted to be.  In fact, as a child, being at sea had been her favorite "shut-your-eyes -picture-story" when she was frightened or sad or sick.  Now, she had to breath deeply to prevent her stomach from rising up into her rib cage in excite-ment.  She looked to the contents of her modest apartment for support and casually drew water from the tap for their water bottles, picking a sweatshirt off of the closet door knob as they exited out the front door.

Stepping up into his truck she noticed how high it was from the ground, how much a different world, so different from her tiny Volkswagen.  He turned on the radio and they headed toward China Beach.

China Beach had once been used to house Chinese refugees, but now it was a recreational site where people came to fish,  sunbathe, some swam, to picnic and to drink beer.  There were usually children playing along the wet lips of the sea but they only dotted its edge and remained always secondary to the vast workings of the sea and land.  Sometimes she rode her bicycle to China Beach alone and she would sit watching the people, the parents lulled and silent, and the children at the shore, deep in their fascination, tiny limbed and shivering.  She often drew.  In off seasons, she'd walk the deserted beach or occasionally even sit at one of the picnic tables, reading, wrapped in a blanket.  It was often windy and a loneliness pervaded the spot, even in the summer, and, there was a yearning there that attracted her strangely.

The bay arched in a broad semi-circle and a long skinny dock originating left of the bay's center reached out perpendicularly precisely as far as the physical limits of land on either side, but not as far as the completed shape which the bay's arch implied.  Thus the dock completed itself.  It was a wonderfully rickety dock and this further denied and reiterated the length being just sufficient to echo the shape nature had made with the bay, or rather left unmade.   There were several old wooden buildings along the shore and behind the land rose sharply and was covered with thorny growth, berry bush, primrose, cypress and eucalyptus.

His driving pleased her.  She noticed a new song on the radio, "Woulddayoua  kiss  mee-in---th'night, could I hear yasay averathinns awwright.." and something about Southern kisses sweet as wine.  It had a "feel" about it, she liked the song, he was from the south.

He turned the truck down the steep pot-holed dirt road leading to the beach.  He drove very slowly and she could feel each bump-thump beneath them.  He maneuvered the truck around and backed it up onto the telephone pole which marked the edge of the parking space . There was a light mist still in the air and the beach appeared empty.  He untied the boat, put on an extra shirt and ate a protein bar offering her none of it.  She thought it might be his breakfast and she wondered if she should have fixed him some eggs.  She occupied herself walking down to the beach to give him privacy.  She was beginning to feel overcome watching and waiting, when he showed her the Chinese coin he had just found in the sand.  She'd seen them before and the diversion did not lessen the feelings which swept over her.

An older man came up out of the mist from the north beach accompanied by a gray-faced red setter.  The dog ran clumsily back and forth sniffing the ground and whatever its nose bumped into. The two men talked. She watched them, men talked like this.  Why were women so different, she wondered. Then the older man was gone and he, the younger, was asking her to help him with the boat.

The boat was heavy and she enjoyed using her body. Together they turned the boat, carried it to the shore and placed it neatly at the water's edge.  She stayed with the boat while he went back to the truck, moved it to the  back of the parking lot,  ate another protein bar,  got the water bottles and the maps, and locked the truck.  She stood listening to the morning and smelling the moist air, dreaming about the day to come.

When he returned, he removed his shoes and placed them in the boat.  He rolled up his pant's legs and showed her where to sit.  She wouldn't have minded taking off her shoes and helping him, but she didn't feel slighted either;  he drove his boat this way, she understood.  He lifted the boat up off of the sand and waded it and her out several yards.  Then barely tipping the hull, he gave a final shove and  boarded the boat himself.  He used one oar to pole the bottom.  The boat moved seaward in smooth lunges.  Next he placed the oars in the oar locks and began to row.

She could feel each stroke now as the oars dug into the heavy water, small ripples forming in the lightly rippling water.  He turned the boat with one oar and then rowed with both for a few minutes.  After, he cut diagonally out the other way.  At last he began distance rowing until they were out from the inlet, out into the sea proper.  He stopped and put his shoes back on and afterwards he began again in earnest, and, he did not stop.  It was hard work.  Stroke and the boat would lunge forward, pause,  the oar locks would whine, the boat creak and lappingly the glide forward would slow before the next stroke.  Stroke, lunge, creak, slow, stroke, lunge, creak, lap.  Stroke - lunge - creak - lap. Stroke lunge creak lap.

The day was still covered with morning; the air was still wet, the sea smelled sweet through the wet air.  It was wonderful this rowing.  She watched him and she knew he was testing the currents as he went, responding to changes under the surface with changes in his rowing,  slight shifts in his pull.  After awhile, she imagined that she too could feel the currents.

It was hypnotic watching him row, watching the sea advance in steps.  Sometimes she moved toward it, into the slate blue and silver sea, the sky now one shade greyer, and at other times she felt almost as if the sea itself was that "moved".  Occasionally she could hear the wings of a bird beating out its flight across the airways, or another calling perhaps to a mate, and always the soft lapping of water on the wood hull.

She thought about how deep the water was under the boat, how many currents must be there, and sea creatures, fishes and the undulating sea weeds.  She hadn't looked back.  She knew they were far out in the bay now and there was no land ahead either.  She wasn't afraid, it was too beautiful for fear.  Besides, he was navigating, and they had a destination. He had the maps, a compass and a watch, and he knew how fast he rowed in various conditions.  He was an experienced rower.   It wasn't rudimentary at all, and yet it lacked sophistication.   It pleased and impressed her hugely as she came upon these facts watching him row.

He rowed perfectly evenly, never faster, never more slowly, and never, never stopping.  She marveled at him and, too, how much she had always wanted to be "at sea".  He talked a bit now, telling of his early adventures, in Florida and  around, "sea stories".  He talked about pearls and pearl diving.  His words spilled over her and drifted out leaving the immensity of the sea undisturbed.  She heard the words like a soft breeze, it was fine.  He was fine, all pink and blue, blond and twinkling, and rowing.  She watched him row and she watched the sea advancing in steps.  He faced her, her watching him and the sea moving off in steps, only sometimes, it seemed to reverse.  Then he, by the strength in his arms, would "move" the sea, the whole ball of the sea.

He took off his shirt.  She watched him row.  His arms and chest were nicely curved and expressed his person.  He was strong and lean and finely shaped like the crow's feet that   exaggerated the sparkle in his blue eyes.  It was nice watching him row, hearing his stories.  He had a clean open smile and just now the sky and sea were changing colors rapidly.  The smell was different too, saltier, dryer.  He spoke of weather now, of how the currents beneath the surface even reflected the changing weather, the smells too and the bird calls and their flight.  He spoke of being "becalmed".  He said it was like being on the surface of a mirror, how the sun beat down without relief.

And then it was so!  They were becalmed!  It was wonderful.  It was like being on the surface of a mirror.  The sea was now a teal blue silver, the sky lighter and brighter.  He stopped rowing.  She wondered how he could have kept rowing for so many hours and she knew that he had only stopped now to allow her the full impact of the stillness.  She thought it was eerie, this "being becalmed".  The sea stretched out perfectly flatly in all directions and there were no sounds, no movements what-so-ever.  She considered the immobile fluidity of the ocean and its depth.  She felt it more solidly now and the sky became thicker too, spun apart, she thought.  She imagined it was filled with a kind of fog made of particles of sunlight.  They were slightly sharp and stung at her eyes and lips, and they seemed to be suspended in a pure nothingness.  She thought the atmosphere was more of an ether with solids in it here, rather than the more liquidy stuff that was so easy to breath.  And the sky was somehow insufficient, less capable of completing the sea, the teal glass sea. The horizon remained slightly curved.

She told him her thoughts, how wonderful she felt it all was, and, how awesome.  He said it was "different" for him today too, special, different.  She felt complimented and she believed him.  He squinted in the sun, smiling.  She squinted back at him.  Neither wore sunglasses and yet both had excellent vision.  It was an attitude of intimacy they shared, and a disinclination for encumbrances, and of course, a natural state of good health.

For awhile they sat becalmed, then he began to row again. The oars creaking and the boat advancing cut the silence.  Soon a small breeze came up and the sun grew less harsh, its particles less pointed.  The ocean current became stronger.

They were almost at their destination, two tiny islands. On the map,  they appeared as two empty dots with fine line edges. They were labeled:  TWO SISTERS.  It was getting late and soon the tide would turn and hamper their return.  He rowed steadily forward while considering to himself the idea of turning back, weighing the possibility of having "missed" the islands.  But of a sudden, she spotted them directly in their path, and they were close, very close.

The Two Sisters were no more than jagged rocks which thrust themselves dangerously up out of the water.  They were bleak islands, small, 6 or 8 feet, and without any vegetation, covered with broken barnacles and white bird droppings. They got out on one, birds filled the air crying and circling overhead while the ocean swirling below crashed chaotically against the "island" and tossed the drifting boat held now by only one rope.  Everything was reeling to the melodious enchanting cry of displaced birds and the "thought" of fear was instantly translated to her body.  The movement of the ocean and its vastness made her stomach float alarmingly. The breeze was turning to a wind and the tide had changed direction some time earlier, which accounted for their sudden arrival.  He told her that they would have to head for shore, cutting across the  current, and then in the slower waters, they could aim more directly toward China Beach.  His words reassured her, and getting back into the boat gave her stomach something more tangible.  The boat heaved up and down with the swell.

She watched him row out away from the turbulence of the islands.  She saw how hard he had to work, how the tide was moving.  He aimed across the current but nosed the boat a little bit into it at the same time. Only his constant rowing kept them from being swept out to sea.  She fantasized about it, floating out under the Golden Gate Bridge in this tiny row boat.  Passing the spot where so recently the barge had run aground. The  barge carrying the chlorine and how on the news  they said it might spill, might foul the bay.   She remembered too, the night the bay was mined. These thoughts passed through her head, again as unsolvable mysteries.  How the herring had run that night and fishermen's lights had dotted the bay, except, that some of them  were not fishermen at all but were "patriots" mining the  bay!

She thought about her grandfather, now dead, who had been the Vice President of a chemical company that had produced chlorine.  Was this why it all seemed so personal, so threatening, the "trouble" in the world, and the difficult time she'd had teaching"?  Was she especially guilty?  Or her father's career in the military, he'd been an officer, once, but he was retired now anyway.  Or was it her friends, the ones in Taiwan?  There were reports on the news of riots there.  She'd been so worried she'd even imagined herself as a 'Fou Dog' or some other auspicious creature guarding them. They were teaching there, where the riots were, but it was here, here in the faculty lounge that the teachers had labeled their own portrait "the boat people".  What was it they wanted? That had bothered her, as if they were stealing.  And they had become so insinuating and posturing and menacing.  And they didn't even know about her  friends in Taiwan!...it was hard to figure...riots there, disjunction and terror here. The sea seemed made of rivers now, he rowed unyieldingly against them.  He had his T-shirt back on and a headband to keep the perspiration out of his eyes.  He was laboring, pure physical labor, harder than before, steadily and keenly.  She didn't see how he could keep rowing, he had rowed straight for four hours already and now contrarily to the heavy tides! The progress was slow and halting, and the boat had no glide left at all but instead would drift sideways between strokes.  His movements remained smooth and rhythmic and undefeated while tiny beads of perspiration formed above his upper lip.

Then they were in sight of land, and near land.  They came to a tire-edged dock of some factory.  It smelled like tar and the current was doubly strong there because of the unnatural depth.  He turned the boat and headed directly upstream, increasing his effort.  For the first time he asked her for assistance.  She was to stay alert and be prepared to catch the edge of the dock so the nose of the  boat wouldn't ram into it as they over took the far corner.  Rounding the corner was all consuming. The water moved so rapidly and with such force that it seemed to be visibly lower.  She grasped the edge of the dock with both hands feeling the oily splintery pungent wood and shoved with the full force of her  body away.  The boat lunged seaward while he rowed energetically as the boat was sucked back toward the dock.  Again she caught and pushed and this time his effort proved sufficient to break the hold, the small craft floated freely out into the wide slow inlet.  They were far from the shore and the water was only lightly rippled.

They would have protected waters from now on, inlets mostly.  He settled back to rowing and she watched patiently  amid her own still turbulent energy.  She sat silently returning into herself following the play of light upon the water as it changed color with the late afternoon.

And then they were back, putting the boat up onto the truck, and driving back to her apartment. They stopped at a grocery store and bought beer.  At the apartment, he took a long shower.  He listened to music on the radio, drinking beer and cracking open peanuts, while simultaneously writing notes in his notebook, followed by massaging his feet.  He stretched periodically.  She knew he felt good.  She felt good too as she went about preparing dinner.  She hoped he would like it.  They were going to have ginger-garlic tofu with green peppers and onions, a mustard green salad with dark sesame seed oil dressing, rice, of course, and beer.  She opened a beer for herself and joined him in the main room.

She asked about the coin he'd found and he said he'd lost it.  She sat down beside him at the table, thinking of a line in a poem which she remembered just then, about "eternally valid coins of happiness", and "assuaged lovers" on some carpet "where the light from the suburb had hurt the sky", or maybe it was  the carpet that was "assuaged"  ...no, it must be the lovers, yes, they  who were "finally assuaged".  He lost it. Then she thought of China Beach and its one  time inhabitants. They went outside and watched the sunset and it made her sad.

Then dinner. They ate with chopsticks and smacked their lips in appreciation, sipping the cold beer between dishes. After dinner, they sat at the table and talked.  He told her more about Oriental medicine and about a book he had  been given special  permission to read.  She had never heard of having to get permission to read a book before, she thought it was always the other way around, them trying to get you to read them.

It was an ancient Chinese text which contained wonders unknown to the Western world.  He spoke of secret societies and of international organizations which "ran the world".  (His matter of fact nonchalance dispelled the unreality of his subject matter somehow, as she listened quietly, her eyes growing large with wonder.)  He talked about art and architecture and about one architect who worked with tile and who had built a whole city.  He had formed pleasing curves by suspending weights in stretchy material attached to the ceiling. The curves formed by gravity this architect had taken as his principal aesthetic, creating tile towers that rose up into the sky as if pulled by some great object in the heavens.

She thought it sounded a bit like stalactites and stalagmites inside a cave, and then she remembered the people in Plato's cave who could not see beyond the door of the cave because their eyes were accustomed only to the small light which filtered into their cave. Then she considered the stalagmites and the stalactites inside the cave and she turned the whole thing inside-out, somehow fitting heaven into her computations and came up with a notion of this strange architect who had reversed gravity and plucked towers into the sky.  She thought of the pyramids in Egypt and how she had once had the idea that the Egyptians had raised the sky as if it were a cloth and so had been able to fit the pyramids up into it.

The word "pinnacle" formed in her mind.  She liked the word still it had a dangerous quality about it like "sinuous" but it was rounder and more playful.  She thought of the soft delicate sea plants which had that shape and which also had lacy membranes atop them like fans that moved with the ocean.  An ever so slight friction allowed them to filter out their dinner of diatoms, tiny seaweeds with the shape of crystals and stars.

They went outside and looked up into the sky, it was like a cloth, a very deep, very blue cloth, within which was light of stars, clear and bright. The constellation Orion particularly stood out and was high in the Southern sky.

He pointed out a glowing red star and told her it was really two planets in conjunction, Jupiter and Mars.  He said it was a rare event and that it meant something.  She stood obediently listening and waiting to hear what "it" meant, what he meant, and generally in awe.  He said that the sky was changing a lot in this "age".  In the Chinese text, he had begun to read about astronomy, and he declared importantly that he'd be watching the heavens carefully from now on.  She was too in awe to feel left out, and he continued talking, now about the moon.  Later toward morning, it would emerge completely full. It was the first night of "the full moon", there would be three full moons nights, right in a row.  And they would cause the highest tides of the year.

He pointed out galaxies and double-stars and the great stream of the Milky Way.  Together, they noted the stars' colors and compared  them.  They described them as "blinkers",  "wobblers", "twinklers" and "constants".  She might see a "yellow blinker" by a  "white constant" just below the "bright blue wobbler" and an inch or so right of the "small white twinkler". But he would insist that the "yellow blinker" was an "orange wobbler", and that the "white constant" was blue, and the "blue wobbler" was a "white pulsar", and that the "white twinkler" didn't twinkle.  At last she wasn't sure if what she saw was in the sky or in her eyes, so hard she kept looking.  He pointed out more constellations, she could only remember a few herself, and then they returned their attention to the bright red planet.  He remarked again about its rareness and again its significance eluded her, and she awaited his recitation sifting through her own knowledge and reasoning this way.

In mythology she remembered that Jupiter and Mars were both gods.  Jupiter was the ruler god, and Mars was his son by Juno, and also the god of war.  She wondered if that were the sort of thing which he meant or if maybe it was something more scientific?  Two planets in conjunction, she reviewed, would make a very small difference in the gravitational pull upon the earth,  but in comparison to the moon...and  especially this one.  Perhaps he meant something else altogether.  She looked at him gazing up into the enormity of the sky and thought that he might even mean that "it" meant something yet to be revealed.  She sniffed in the delicate night air, satisfied to ponder without destination.  It was a nice idea, a rare event, it was a pretty idea.

They went inside, filled with the night sky, and they went to bed.  They both went to the same bed, to the bed with the smooth cool sheets under the turquoise bedspread, in the room with the window and the white cotton curtains and the plum tree, outside in bloom, whose branches strummed softly on the screen.  They kissed once or twice barely touching and then they fell asleep.  She awoke however, in the middle of the night.  He was warm beside her and a bluish glow was coming in the window. She was filled with the sea, with him rowing.  And then she was beneath  him, desiring, and he  was above her.  It was the sea again, the colors, the slate blue sea, the endless expanse of the sea, the sea and the sky and the movement and the horizon line extending out, slightly curved,  wobbling and the colors bleeding off into infinity, and the plum tree, like water lapping, in bloom, and the pale bluish glow through the window.  And she awoke, and he was already awake beside her.  A pink light was coming in the window, it was morning.

"THINGS"

    Chapter Three

He was sitting up in bed, leaning against the pillow and the wall,  the sheet and turquoise bed spread to his waist.  He had already put on a cream colored T-shirt and was writing busily in his notebook.  He stopped writing as she stirred beside him, and peered down blankly at her rotating head.  She blinked up an open gaze and his face formed into a confident smile and he said, "I think I dreamed your dream last night," and he returned his attention to his notebook unabashedly.

It was a strange idea but in the early morning it was pleasant to think "things" though this particular "thing" had a startling quality which rasped slightly against the newly formed intimacy.  To dream someone else's dream?  Had she missed something?  She looked back at him for a clue.  He closed his notebook suddenly while his thoughts lingered upon his recent entries.  He sat staring "unseeingly" atthe painting on the wall.  It showed off nicely in the morning light. A landscape from an earlier time, blue and green with small touches of turquoise and it was all moving and swirling around itself.  It had two vortexes which fit together as nicely as two cowlicks and a swatch of smooth grey blue paint ran horizontally across the top suggesting a murky but quiet sky.

She was still hoping for more details about his dream when he turned abruptly and announced that he wanted to go hiking. They could go to Point Reyes, she answered in her mind and her previous thought disappeared.  Yes, it would be nice to return now, and with him.  When she taught, she'd gone there almost every weekend, alone, to think and sometimes to cry, to walk all day long, settling with the previous week and preparing for the coming one.  It was a kind of half-thought that would possess her as she'd trudge along unconscious of her surroundings, each student's face seen, fitted with a new assignment, each class reviewed, energies smoothed or accented. Till a change would come over her, restraint and enthusiasm would merge, and a calm confidence would prevail.  Then she would sniff a fresh scent of damp eucalyptus, feel the tall trees overhead, admire the shiny leafed wintergreens, the delicate ferns, the path winding prettily through the woods.  And to go there now with him, show him this part of her too, she smiled happily, but then she remembered her job search.

It had taken time to get over teaching and to set forth anew but she'd begun and persevered too, still each set back would increase the ominous shadowy feeling which she had acquired, and it all threatened to pull her back into trying to understand what apparently had no possible "understanding".  Simply a clash with "something" and some "thing" that had happened to her because of it - like eating some thing bad.  She couldn't make it "smooth" so she didn't like recalling it. She was even beginning to suffer from a strange stage fright at interviews.  At those times, her face wouldn't smile right and a strong desire to cry would rise in her body leaving a lump in her throat and a hot watery feeling around her eyes. Naturally they wouldn't want to hire her.  Her qualifications were somehow rendered null.  And her effort, she'd gone to job banks, job counselors, and made lists and more lists.  She'd watched the papers, gone to interviews, some had been awful, some were down right weird.  She'd even gotten an interview at a junior college,  but the man interviewing her had  been called away suddenly because his daughter had cut her foot at camp.  It was an arbitrary kind of violence  which kept shutting her out, and it made it difficult to imagine a future at all.  But then she'd come across a drafting job, it was a skill she already had and it was part-time.  It paid well too.   She'd  been to one interview and she had good report with the man who was to be her boss or so she thought.  It was practically certain that they would hire her, and if they phoned today, well, they'd call back tomorrow.  There was no reason not to go to Point Reyes and to enjoy it with this man.  She was glad she had met him, glad they had gone rowing, glad...that they'd made love. She wondered briefly about tomorrow but today she was happy.

She fixed coffee and eggs, toast and salt herring. She brought out fresh butter and English marmalade.  He went outside to "feel" the day as was his custom, and, as if he had always lived here, as if even her acts were a matter of course.  It was a fine bright day. They took their coffee outside and ate sitting on the back stoop, their feet on the hard weedy ground, the flavors of the meal mingling with the clear bright air.

She did the dishes, he made some more notes in his book, he adjusted the contents of his truck, she put together a small lunch and filled the water bottles.  She put it all in one backpack; hers, and they'd take her car too.  He put his notebook and a long sleeved shirt in the back seat, she set the backpack beside it.  She warmed the engine while he twisted the knob of the radio.  She backed the car out of the lot and turned left onto the street.

It was the same route that she'd taken for the last six months. The street wound around to the right and passed between two second hand stores where she did almost all of her shopping.   One was a Catholic charity and the other gave its proceeds for the care of the mentally unbalanced.  She preferred the second.   It had better things and their prices were embarrassingly low.  It was fun hunting through the items, and, the people who worked there were spare in a way that pleased  her.  She wondered if she ever chose things that had belonged to a student's mother and if they recognized them.  She didn't mind the idea nor did she favor it, she just wondered.  Sometimes she would change the buttons or make some other alteration or repair, often she would donate the item back after just one wearing.  Eventually she bought less until even a "find" had seemed to become a burden, as if she "owed" it something.  It was simply the constant caring for "things" that bothered  her, it took too much time, from what she wasn't quite sure just now,  but it had made her sad.  She'd gotten most of her furniture here too and her dishes. There were so many lovely things.

Then the road made a 90 degree turn to the left at a place where they repaired school buses and on the left was a seedy bar and an equally lousy Mexican restaurant, or was it the person  she'd  gone there  with?  She wondered why she hadn't said "no".  She'd seen him just that once and only for dinner but still it bothered her, being aware of her own dislike for the man. The radio wailed and she heard the melodies as she considered how her loneliness had often taken her to places that inevitably turned out all wrong.  She turned and looked at this man.

She slowed down as she passed the HUD houses. The houses were large and old with paint cracked to a fine woolly texture and whose gardens were filled with children, dogs, cats, tall sunflowers and large blue morning  glories.  Then the second hand book store, and he pointed out a tile shop upstairs and said that he'd have to stop there and see if his job had come through.  She wondered how long he was planning to stay in the area and if she had had anything to do with his decision. Then they passed between the Safeway where she did her food shopping, before the strikes that is, and the 7-11 where they had bought licorice.  Then the coffee shop where they had met, and again she turned to the left and they were downtown in the business district.  They talked now inside the car, businesses and shops blurred together.  She noticed the fancy French restaurant in the white Victorian as she nosed the car to the left into what was called "the  Miracle Mile".  It was a mile of shops, light industries, and gasoline stations. There was traffic now, Miracle Mile always had traffic.

Then they came to the big intersection that she could never negotiate without paying close attention.  It had  too many streets, going off in too many angles ...and it held you in lanes as if you were on a  freeway.  The street they were on was double and a third paralleled it.  There another street met these three at a 90 degree angle and terminated.  That street led to a castle, a divinity school, a junior college, a park and a lake and many other mysterious wonders, all of which she'd left almost completely unexplored.  The street they were on bent slightly to the right and continued as a double road and then there was yet another road which led off from the intersection in a diagonal between the double road and the one which went off toward the castle.  There was a business area directly to the left of the diagonal street and there, numerous one-way-streets filled with automobiles, moved at a snail's pace.

She always went through this intersection in exactly the same way and still she had to pay close attention.  Just beyond the intersection, on the right, there was a shopping mall. She avoided it too.  She didn't like the way the lanes in the parking lot backed up, how there was no proper entrance or exit. It always meant being stuck and waiting there was somehow more uncomfortable than in other places.

Then they were in front of the school where she had taught, first the alternative school and then the regular school.  She bit her lip and felt weak.  Since school had ended it had become increasingly difficult to pass this point.  It was as if a part of her still remained inside and was being held and tortured.  The buildings and grounds vibrated oppressively and the passage of time only made the feelings worse.  There was a quiver of nausea high in her body, her spirit sank desperately and then she brushed it aside, mumbling something about this being the school where she had taught.  He nodded. The radio had one of its intermittent failures and then a bump cleared it.

There was a redwood church on the right side of the street that had what she thought was German architecture.  It always looked like it was boarded shut to her.  On the left side of the left street across from the church was a library on a hill.  In front of the library was a large usually empty asphalt parking lot.  She had been to the library only once.  She had gone to see a show of paintings done by one of the teachers with whom she had worked.

The paintings portrayed many scenes of China Beach.  She tried to look at them but it was  difficult that day, and she could tell that they had been painted from photographs.  A sculpture caught her eye.  It was a bit like the tiny ivory sculptures from the Orient except that it was large and carved in wood and it had a distinctly Western feel, Biblical maybe.  She thought it might be about creation.  Something was exceedingly difficult about the day however and she couldn't look at the sculpture for very long either.

Then she noticed a map tacked to the wall behind the book drop and the check-out counter.  It was an old portion of town near the castle.  One corner was bent or missing she remembered.  For some reason, on that day, she thought that perhaps the map showed the whereabouts of the Nazi criminals that the radio had been talking about lately...it was a weird thought to have and it made her uncertain of the workings of her own mind, which was in itself even more disconcerting, and then a liverish librarian came out from the inner office and began a conversation but the ventilation system let out a foul blast and her breathing got upset.  She excused herself and sought refuge in the outdoor porch balcony.  A man, about her age, was sitting at a table there reading a history book and smoking.  He set the cigarette on the table butte-down like a tiny projectile and it continued to smolder while he turned the pages of his book.

Then the strangest thing of all happened.  A burst of tiny birds, tropical and of a variety of bright colors and types flew near to the balcony.  They hovered in mid-air in a clump, for a moment, and then they flew away.  It seemed a most magical event, and she looked at the man reading and he sneered arrogantly and flipped the pages of his book without interest.

She could never make sense of that day, she had felt so strange and the strangeness had not left easily.  So she always noticed this place when she passed and always shivered with the memory.

Then they were on the road  which she associated only with her weekly pilgrimages to Point Reyes.  She liked the road.  She liked driving on it and today she especially liked it all.  She turned and smiled at him, at the reassuring simplicity of his presence and his power to dispel the fears which still bothered her.

He told her stories about the places which they passed, places he knew, places she could go to another time, with someone else. She heard the words repeat in her mind "with someone else", "with someone else".   With some effort and an almost conscious pain, she accepted the words, and then, by some practical grace she forgot the words.

And she drove on.  They came to Point Reyes Station, stopped and inquired about the tides.  He wrote down the hours, and they drove on, out over the rolling hills, out past the hostel, way out on the curving narrow road, out past all of it, to the very tip, to the beach, the beach beyond the estuary.

A RHYTHM FOLLOWING OBEDIENTLY AFTER

Chapter Four

She parked the car in the middle of the parking lot.  They got out and stretched.  There were other cars parked there, she wondered how many belonged to people who had spent the night camping.  There were people carrying coolers down to the beach, women in thongs and terry cloth robes.  A breeze was blowing and she felt mildly off center, disheveled making the transition.  She put on the backpack, he carried his shirt in his right hand resting it on his right hip.  She closed the car, took one more look at the parking lot, cut across the sand a short distance to a  walkway that became a low bridge and passed over one arm of the estuary.

It was nice walking beside him now.  She felt his walk, his limp.  It was the limp of an old man.  Yes, she thought, it was almost like he was two men at once.  The old one who lived inside the foot and the young one who was in constant dialogue with the older one.  How a strange music surrounded him coming from this continuous conversation.  She was pleased walking beside him.  She was proud too.  They were in the sand now, nearing the rows of dunes beyond which she could already see the waves breaking on the shore.  And then they were on the beach.  There were people, some huddled together in the morning breeze,  some walking or running and others already laying out in bathing suits.   She knew that even on a day like this heading up the beach, they soon would be alone.

The ocean waves brought a sweet damp smell that made her feel good.  They were headed south she knew but it felt to her as if the direction was north.  The beach was broad now,  the dunes low but soon the land would rise into cliffs and the beach narrow.  He calculated that they would be able to walk all the way to Arch Rock without being caught by the tide. They came now to some people tossing a Frisbee, it was slightly oversized.  It landed at his feet, he picked it up and threw it back, she got a turn too.

And there were dogs.  She loved to see dogs on the  beach.  To see them prancing alone on the waters edge, darting after the tiny sea birds.  The sea birds who ran with such minute steps that they seemed to be on wheels and who resisted flying as though they could only think of one thing at once.   As if they would fall down if they unpoised their wings, altered their shape.  And the larger ones too that were slower and therefore quicker.   And the seagulls crying a sweet sea song, reeling about in circular flight.

Fifty yards or so ahead of them, a large dog stopped and stood motionless.  Another rushed by them from behind and off to the left.  She tensed as she always did when two dogs met.  The second dog, also large, was followed by yet another, a smaller one.  The first dog advanced one step only, precisely as the two dogs met.  And then all three, all stopped, were now facing one another.  They circled around an imaginary center, counterclockwise.  They stopped again, closer this time and stiffened.  The two larger dogs were now side by side sniffing each others tails, the third slightly off to one side.  It did not move at first but then it ran to one side and instantly all three moved off diagonally.

She had stopped walking and stood watching.   He too had stopped.  The three dogs again stopped and again they moved around only in a half circle this  time.  The two larger dogs again smelled one another's tails and then they half romped, once, twice, and again they sniffed.  The first dog then sniffed the third dog, while the second dog followed the first dog's tail.  The third dog was now still.  Then the first dog went back to smelling the second dog, the third dog sniffed the first and the second turned and sniffed the third dog.

She thought that maybe the second and third dogs "knew" each other.  The three dogs toppled over one another a few times and then a fourth dog appeared, also large and heavy like the first but older. This time it was the first and fourth, the second and fourth, then the fourth continued on its way and the three again romped, this time fairly frolicking, moving toward the water where the first dog's woolly feet caught the wet sand and sent it flying through the air.  The dogs and waves collided and a white froth clung to the newly moistened sand.

She turned to him and smiled, he had a matter of fact look.  She looked down at the sand beneath their feet, she wanted to be "with" him.  The sand made a "squench" sound as they walked.  It was lovely, "squench"!  They stopped and took off their shoes. Tying the laces together, she hung hers over one shoulder, he looped his onto his belt.  "Squench"!   She felt the sand going in between her toes and all along the arches. She felt the sand scrape away the lint left by her woolen socks, and the dents and the softness of confinement.  She felt her toes expanding out to meet with the sand.  "Squench"! It was warm on the top, "squench", and cooler underneath, "squench".

Next, there were two old fisherman in straw hats, bundled necks, heavy clothing, their poles slanting out, supported by small mounds of sand.  They had low cotton beach chairs but were both standing sipping from small pocket flasks.   He asked them  what they were using for bait and if they'd had any bites.  She watched the way he spoke to the men.  His eyes twinkled.  The men looked over at her, looking her over, then back at him.  She felt slightly sullied. She wondered if he had ever fished here himself, she deemed it possible.  She watched as the three men talked, the two and the one.  She thought he was quicker, more alert, when he spoke with men.  She looked beyond them way up the shoreline, along the wet sand, and she could just make out a solitary figure approaching.  She thought it was a man, maybe carrying a stick with something tied on the end of it.  In the  distance his image wobbled in the light and ocean mist reflections, the water in the sand.   She looked back at the land and she could see two hikers on the trail above, heading back toward the point, laden with heavy overnight packs.  She turned clockwise toward the men and walked straight past them to the water's edge.

The wet sand was solid and cool.   She looked down and saw circles blooming around her feet, as her weight squeezed the moisture from the sand.  She looked out to sea.   Just beyond the breakers and beyond where the men's fish lines entered the water, there were eight or ten seagulls bobbing up and down in the waves.  She looked back in the direction that they had come from and she could see the dogs again. Now the second and third dogs were prancing together and the first one was not to be found.  She enjoyed the scene.

The beach had just the right amount of activity to please her.  She watched the men and women and children and dogs and birds and Frisbees move, all at their own pace, each in their own direction, and every figure had a singular shape and rhythm.  She thought it was like in a film how they moved.  In the light, the thick wet ocean light, on the flat wide ocean shore.  As if they were all in one great room, a majestic enormous dance hall whose edges were only described by the limits of her own vision and the thickness of the atmosphere.

She turned back toward the fishermen and discovered that he was no longer among them.  She spotted him quickly.   He had left the two men and walked not in her direction but rather back up toward the cliffs onto the dry sand.  There he stood looking up the coast.  From where she stood, she looking at him and he looking up the beach,  their vision formed two rays of a right angle with the fisherman centered squarely inside.  Then he turned and looked at her and the effect was broken, the two fisherman were no longer part of their relationship but once again  simply two fisherman fishing at the sea.  She shuffled past them and hurried on to meet him.