"PERFORMANCE:  A BIRD CARRYING A BONE"

Chapter Nine

As they entered the apartment, the phone rang.  It was about the job, she'd have to go to a second interview, some doctor in the city.  She wouldn't be working with him but he was a part owner or something.  The idea gave her pause and the interview was to be at his office.  Tonight was the performance too, the one being put on by the kids from the alternative school where she'd done some of her practice teaching.  That made her anxious too, thinking about it, but she wanted to go anyway, and he'd be there.  She was proud of him and he knew about the obstacles she'd encountered, and his attitude was right.  If anything weird happened, she wouldn't have to explain it, and besides the teachers weren't so much part of this event. The kids had done it all themselves.  It would be fun.

There was still some day left, so she began work upon the painting in the corner.  It looked so different now.   Now its cheerfulness and the oddity of the still life elements shut her out and denied her original reasons.  She wasn't in tune with it.  lt made her worry wondering at the new perspective (maybe it was because she had gotten "stoned").  She was not interested in ruining the painting, she remembered that much, and so instead of painting,  she whiled away the time "pretending" to paint.  He sat and read, occasionally jotting a note into his notebook.

At last it was time to get ready. They took turns showering and they "dressed-up".  He wore a very clean pair of jeans, a brown T-shirt and a blue and green fine wool plaid over-shirt, unbuttoned.  His dark blue sea cap was set in readiness on the table.  She put on an outfit which she had worn for teaching, during the time when she was teaching "color".  Her pants were red, cherry red, her shirt was also red but a lip-stick red.  This with a bright yellow orange chiffon scarf and a bright cerise silk Chinese jacket, that she had bought brand new in Chinatown.

Again he asked, "Do you want to get 'high'?"  She shrank at the suggestion  but acquiesced out of some confusion within herself.  This time they smoked only a little.  She had only two medium sized puffs, which was enough, and, they were in a hurry anyway.  They stood in the fading light passing the little cigarette back and forth like a couple of shadow people she thought wistfully and then they were off.   He drove while she practiced her coordination, again.  She made a conscious note not to get "stoned" for a long time and this softened the sadness she was feeling beneath her growing excitement.  He sensed her mood and accommodated for it.  They both had a very dignified demeanor when they reached the door of the auditorium.  She felt into her pocket for the tickets and pulled out not only the tickets but also a small yellow orange ribbon that a girl in the geometry class had given to her the last time she'd worn the jacket and scarf.  It seemed a prize now to her, a secret honor and award.  She carefully separated the ribbon out and put it back into her pocket, handing over the two tickets.  The ticket-taker tore them in half, returning the stubs and smilingly motioned them in.  A girl with a long skirt and pink cheeks and a flashlight directed them to their seats  which were in the last row near the left aisle.  They sat quietly as their eyes became accustomed to the dim light.  She felt exhilarated beside the man, and she also felt free.  The teachers could not touch her now, and the students who she knew would never suspect that she was "stoned".   She enjoyed her perspective, that of privy outsider, and was further buoyed up by the man beside her.  He knew and he was here with her.  She was safe beside him, all of her, even what she thought.

And as if to make a gestalt, to give the performance a personal touch, she let her mind float.  She did see the performance in an ordinary way without additions and revisions of her own, but she also considered small "edits"  and "augmentations" and generally allowed her own directorship to have a greater role than reality could attest to.  That is, she "saw" the entire performance in a slightly alternative mode, greatly squeezed in time.  She was not ignorant of the true facts and sequences, still her rendition did conform to the tone and truth and in fact piqued its true flavor, at least as she perceived it.  As an artist, selection, juxtaposition and even transplanting were not outside of her scope, her more teacherly responsibilities (or any motherly instincts) had now lost all hold.  She looked at the man beside her, he looked just exactly "right" to her and also he looked different from everyone else in the entire auditorium.

The lights began to wobble bright and dim, and the students in the audience, many of whom were accompanied by parents rose up and down irregularity with wave like motion until an emphasis upon the settling down predominated.   A spotlight ran back and forth over the undulating crowd.  Still amid confusion, it came to rest upon three standing women in the front row.  They were whispering and pointing. They were the main teachers from the alternative school.  Their pointing zeroed in upon her and their whispering became all the more furious, so furious that they did not perceive the curtain being cranked open behind them.  Horns tooted and the audience began to clap.  They sat suddenly as if in "fast motion" film.

The stage was brightly lit and filled with people, all standing motionlessly.  When the applause died down and stopped altogether, a small boy with a cast on one leg limped out to front center stage, the cast grinding across the wooden floor.  "Thank you for coming," he said in a frail voice.  Then his tone changed to a suggestive Lawrence Welk kind of voice, "Naugh, an one aan' a two an' a three..."  and he stepped down the steps in the middle of the stage and sat down in the front row.

At precisely the "an' a three" the stage burst into motion and song or rather songs.  There was a young man playing a very nice piano piece on a grand piano at the far left of the stage, kind of a Keith Jarret sort of song.  To his right, was a couple.  The guy was playing a melody on a guitar and the girl was singing a tender love song about parting from her lover on the windy cliff coast of Portugal.  The girl was wearing a sparkling white man's painters' work suit at least three sizes too big.   Beside this couple was a second couple, also doing a duet.  She was miming a Julie Andrews' voice which was coming from a small record player on stage.   It was a song from Camelot.  She wore a long dress and had a high pointed hat with a piece of bright filmy material streaming out of its tip.  Her partner wore ordinary clothes and had a chair and some artificial flowers that he kept trying to present to her as she moved about dramatically gesturing, apparently unconscious of his prostrations and wooing.  "Where are the simple joys of maidenhood?" she mimed, as he'd bow before her offering her the bouquet. "Where are all those delighting little thrills?"  He now knelt before her unseen, "Shall a man not weep for me?  Shall men not leap to death for Me?"  and  she walked forward barely being missed by her suitor who now leapt from his chair landing just behind her upon his belly.

In front of and between the two couples, there was a low draped table.  A large eyed girl face rose above it.  The table was covered with numerous cosmetics.  Stretching out from under it were a pair of long hairy male legs which hung off the edge of the stage.  The face above was moving back and forth without coordination with two arms (also long and hairy) that were applying the cosmetics.  Sometimes the face would preen and at other times it would try especially hard to cooperate with the hands' efforts, but usually it gave the impression of a dash-board -dolly, bouncing up and down.

These acts continued simultaneously creating a kind of visual and sound cacophony and then without any warning the lights on stage went out and the songs, dances and acts stopped abruptly. At that moment the roving spotlight came back over the audience.  It swept over the crowd several times and then came to rest in the very center of the hall.   A tall attractive woman stood up and said in a loud voice, "I'd bend over backwards for a man!" and then laughed a loud raucous laugh, tipping her head up toward the ceiling in a graceful arching movement.  The audience was momentarily stunned and then they burst into laughter as if at a bawdy joke.  Then a small boy, this one without a cast, came running down the main aisle and presented her with a glass slipper. The audience clapped, she thanked them heartily and sat down. The lights came back on on-stage.

Now the stage was bare except for the small boy with the plaster cast on his leg.  "Thank you for coming," he said in the frail voice and he turned and limped slowly off stage to the left wing, the cast dragging plaintively across the wood floor. The curtain struggled in uneven thrusts to close.  For a minute or two it bulged this way and that.  When it opened again, the entire "guild" stood beaming in a very straight row while confetti and serpentine fell from above and rained in from the wings.  They bowed repeatedly as the audience clapped, squealed, stamped and tooted horns.  She turned to him and smiled with excitement and satisfaction, and squeezed his hand boldly before letting it go as they rose and filed into the aisle.  She felt certain that he had enjoyed the performance as much as she.  In the lobby they met a student she especially liked.  She smiled at her good fortune and he gave her the "high" sign (thumbs up) in greeting and asked,  "Are you staying for the Rock and Roll?  It's a real good band, I've heard them before,"

"I didn't know there was one.  We're on our way to dinner," then she added, "It was a great show!" and he agreed enthusiastically.  The man stood beside her the whole time composed and she was about to introduce the two but the crush from behind pressed them all into motion. They were off, walking into the fresh night air, just ahead of the crowd. Climbing up into his truck seemed cozy to her now and she liked its height from the sidewalk.

It was dark on the densely forested road  which led to the freeway.  She sat quiet and content. "Are there still good places to eat in Sausalito?"  he asked as he turned to the right onto the ON-ramp.  The car lights whizzed by excitingly.  She didn't know about the restaurants.  He found a parking space near the docks where all the boats were moored.  They walked up and down the streets, peering into the brightly lit windows at all the eating people clattering silverware and tipping up tinkling glasses.  They read numerous menus posted beside huge heavy wooden doors.  They walked back and forth and finally chose a busy restaurant that advertised fresh fish, crustaceans and had a long oyster bar running along the parking lot-wharf windows.  They were seated in the second of two large dinning rooms at a small table spread with a pink table cloth, a complete table setting and a red globe candle, already burning.  The table was situated in the very center of the room.  There was bustle all about and the strong smells of broiled fish and fried shrimp wafting by.  When the waitress came, he ordered red snapper and then she ordered red snapper too.   Being waited upon and eating the warm food lulled them into a nearly animal quietness.  During the meal, the candle burned out and the waitress exchanged it for a lit one.  Then they were back outside.

They walked along the wharf looking at the boats, listening to the small waves jostling the boats and the dock.  They looked into the boat supply store windows and he began telling her various facts about boating and boat equipment, signal flags, port and starboard and a system of colored lights which indicate which way a vessel is traveling.  He told her it was important to know even if one wasn't a sailor.

She listened to the sound of his voice sleepily, partially  blaming the dope for her current lack of alertness ...at least all the excitement.  She was spent.  He quizzed her twice about right and left, red and green, and port and starboard, and twice she got them wrong.  He didn't bother to ask any more.  They retraced their steps ending back at the truck, drove back to the apartment and went right to bed.   For the third night they slept under the light of the full moon.  They slept without dreams and without stirring.

SCRABBLE

       Chapter Ten

The next morning she awoke kind of woozy.  After breakfast she sat dawdling at the table doing nothing and not even pretending to be occupied.  He carried out his usual examination of the day, the weather and what ever other properties he might be able to glean from conducting tests like sniffing the air and looking at the kinds of clouds, massaging his feet and putting on his shoes.  She continued to sit leaving the breakfast dishes right on the table.  He had taken his into the kitchen, but there she was fifteen minutes later.  He went out to the truck looking for a clean pair of underpants and saw a man he knew going into the hardware store across the street.  He hailed him, chatted about this and that, and asked him about work.   He invited him to come have a cup of coffee, after he finished at the hardware store.

Returning inside, she was still sitting at the table.  He told her about the impending visitor and asked if it was all right.  She said it was and got up, cleared the table and made a new pot of coffee.   The man arrived and he introduced him saying that they used to work together.  She served the coffee, attempted to be cordial, but she thought the man was giving her the strangest looks, like he was judging her or something.  She withdrew and left them to their "man talk". The man left as soon as he had finished his coffee and once again she returned to the table and simply sat.  He commented upon her sluggishness and teased her into joining him for a walk around the neighborhood.

They walked up and down the streets.  She showed him her usual routes and then he guided her down streets she had never taken.  They passed fenced dogs barking and children playing in the streets. They passed two little girls playing "old maid" sitting on the sidewalk.  They passed kids working upon cars, and past vacant lots, apartment buildings.  It was spring and they looked at the new buds appearing everywhere.

They came to a fenced in yard where an old woman was working on a very large though homey garden.  It had chicken wire separating the various rows.  There were stakes along some rows of plants and a rather quaint arbor ran along the back of the yard and edged the back side of the house.  There was a huge plot of pale blue flowers with dark shiny leaves near the fence and the woman was beyond this bed working on some taller wilder looking plant, vines which she was transplanting.  The garden was a whole "lot" wide and had a rustic appearance as if the little old woman had done it all herself.  She concluded that the woman must work full-time, on her garden.

He engaged the old woman in conversation.  She looked up from under a straw hat with a hole in its brim.  She had bright blue eyes, rouged cheeks and a wide smile.  She welcomed the interruption.  They chatted about the season, the unusual weather this year (every year is unusual), the plants in her garden.  He kept using botanical names and the old lady seemed to know them too, but instead she would call them by their familiar name without noticing the difference. She never stood up or even lifted her hands from the flats of scraggly vines.  They chatted about how good gardening was for the "soul"  and that kind of thing.

She stood by his side watching the old lady and following the conversation, but then she got gazing at the pale blue flowers so near to her, that she lost track of the talk, and too, she was thinking on her own, about various things.  Abruptly, she heard the old woman say in a triumphant voice, "You win some and you lose some".  He nodded and waved and they walked away on down the street.

She felt even more pensive now and she pondered over the old lady's words.  She wondered what the blue flowers were, she wondered why she was so tired, what the interview would be like, and, why were all these questions falling back upon her.  She turned and looked at him.  He didn't like her mood either.  She tried to shake it and resolved to try harder but something felt defeated before she began.  She reviewed the fun they had had yesterday; yes, she would change her mood.

The street they were on suddenly terminated just a half block from her front door.  At the apartment, he admired her plum tree.  She went up to it and picked a snail off and threw it into the ivy that covered the front face of the apartment building.  The two examined the tree for more snails being careful not to disturb any of the delicate blossoms.  Each time he found a snail, he would drop it onto the cement and squish it.  She didn't mind and he asked her why she threw hers into the ivy, saying they'd just multiply.

She said she knew and then she told him a story on herself, she knew it was stupid.  Her method of snail eradication was to put tuna cans, embedded into the ground so that their top edges were level with the ground.  Then she would fill them with beer.   The yeast in the beer smelled good to the snails and so they would go to the beer and stay off of the tree.  He asked her if it worked and she answered rather lamely that she didn't know and anyway, there was only the one tree and she liked hand grooming it.  He said that still didn't explain why she threw the snails into the ivy instead of smashing them.  So she answered that she didn't know and she dropped one onto the ground and stepped on it, turning her foot slightly to be sure it was dead.

"I'm just silly," she said and she took out her keys and unlocked the door.

They went in.  She washed her face again slapping her cheeks.  He got a beer out of the refrigerator and sat down at the table.  She got a glass of water and the bag of peanuts and joined him at the table.  She drew open the curtain with the cord and light flooded the room.  They sat munching on peanuts and looking out the picture window at the empty court.  The apartment was in a U-shape so she had a view of the entrances of nearly half of her fellow apartment dwellers. She sorted through the backpack and found more peanuts, some wilted carrots which were still edible, and also the stones they had found in the streams and along the beach two days earlier.  There were some pieces of shells, the soft grey "Indian" stones with the smooth holes in them and also the round flat stone that was green like jade and red like bloodstone and swirled like a yin-yang symbol on one side, except, without the dots.

He picked it up and rubbed his thumb across the yin-yang side and set it back down.  Then he started talking about Taoism and the Tao and the yin-yang symbol, and the dots.   He said the dots were not always there, but that they were important.  She leaned back listening, thinking about the little dishes with hot mustard and hot catsup that are arranged like the yin-yang symbol.  He said it was all about change, and he drew a yin-yang symbol on a piece of paper, including the dots.  He took special care to color it in so that the dot on the one side was solid and dark like the swirl on the other, and so that the dots, the colored one and the empty one, were the same size.  Then he set it in front of her and turned the paper, rotating it round and round:  "Change."

He explained that in Taoist thinking, change was neither gradual nor abrupt.  She looked at the paper.  He went on talking about the two sides of the symbol and their tendencies; maleness, femaleness, and so on  ....all in apparent opposition.  Full-empty, day-night, creative-destructive, heaven-earth, and he reeled off a long list. Then he said, "but they are not opposites, just as change is neither gradual or abrupt."

She spun the drawing again in a slow circle.  She noticed that the two swirls seemed to be moving but they could also be displacing one another, sort of bulging up and down.  And since she was a painter she decided to look at it with depth, that is as if it had depth.  Immediately it became a sphere, she continued spinning the piece of paper.  And then he said,  "but there is no change," which made perfect sense to her at that moment because the sphere was empty one moment and full the next ...except it was always both at once. The dots were on their own orbit, it seemed, moving either primarily or secondarily to the first.  She asked him why the dots were so important and he said, "Because of change,"  which as contradictory as it sounded, made sense again!  Then he said that way back at the origin, there weren't any dots,  "....before it moved".

She looked at him thinking about how easy it was to put the catsup dots on the mustard, but how hard it was to get the mustard  to sit on the catsup and then she thought about the stars.  She remembered as a child trying to figure out how the stars got there and where the edge was.  She had left off on that subject around the time she decided on the notion that once it was all the same: smooth.   And it had gotten "wiggly" and caused form and space.  Time was because of "wiggly".  There hadn't been any intervening idea that had ever pleased her quite as much so she had retained the thought.  She now accepted the dot-less state as a symbol for the "smooth-unwiggledness."

He was relatively satisfied with her understanding of yin-yang and he returned to the subject of Tao, which meant "way".  And the "way" of Tao was the way of change.  It meant harmonizing.  Being here and alert, and being able to change or being "with change", but he emphasized being broadly  here. And he talked on for a while about it.

She sat listening and looking out the window, sometimes she would think about her interview on Monday.  His consciousness of her changed mood added to her sadness.  He got another beer and she made herself some tea.

There was activity in the court now.  The next door neighbors, all four of them, pulled up in a yellow car next to hers, got out and went inside.

"They're Viet Namese." he said, as if to tell her.

"I know," she answered, "they live there."  He wasn't too surprised or anything but he found it worthy of comment. "The oldest one just got married," she said adding that he was the nicest, gentle seeming.  She didn't know them though, they'd only lived there for a few months.  "The middle one's a little spooky, he  has a strange piercing laugh a little like an old boyfriend I had except.different,  scary sometimes, through the wall.  The youngest one has really crazy expectations about life in America."  And as if to explain, she said. "He's from  LA."

Then he suggested they play a word game.  He got out a piece of graph paper and started explaining the game. "It is a little like scrabble except you can use any letters you want, but you have to have a reason for the words you play.  To start, you might use a topic like trees.  One person might play "cottonwood" and then the next could play "deciduous" or they could play "alder" or "birch".  If they played "deciduous", "deciduous" is a different category, so the next person could go "conifers" or they might want to switch it again to "temperate" which means the kind of region whose main growth is "deciduous".  But you can make up rules as you go too. You can play a word if it is the same or the opposite or anything....IF you can give a reason that the other person accepts.  The more reasons why the word relates; the higher the score.  You can use the dictionary and you can invent words."

She looked perplexed.

"You'll see, it's fun, it kind of happens by agreement." Then he asked her for a category for the first word.  She thought for a minute and said 'rivers'.  Then he thought for a minute and pronounced the word "Pactolus", saying, "That will be our first word."  And he wrote  PACTOLUS starting with the P in the middle square and running vertically down the page.

"That's the river the old man told about, isn't it?" she inquired.

"Yes, where King Midas regained his mortality."

She sat looking at the graph paper and suddenly she got a thought.  "I've got one," she announced.

"All right, you go first," and he handed her the pencil.

On the L in PACTOLUS she attached an 'ETHE', and said the word aloud, "Lethe".

"The river of forgetfulness.  That's good, and a good score too."  He thought for a moment, "Let's see, you get one because it's a river, one 'cause they're both myths, and a third  because they both alter consciousness.  Three is a high score this early in the game ...it's  easier to score later because there is more to play on."

She was pleased.  He took a second sheet of paper and drew a line down its center and a cross piece at the top. In the upper rectangles he wrote HER in one and HIMSELF in the other.   Under the HER side he wrote 4.  She corrected him and he said he forgot, the person who goes first always gets a free point.

Then he put an S above the T in LETHE and a YX  below. "Styx, the river one crosses to the underworld.  And I get 4   points too."  He explained it, "I get the same three points you got plus it's a series of three for one more.

"Oh, " and she thought trying to think of another river.  She thought of the Nile and the Mississippi and the Crocodile and several others but she wasn't satisfied, and then another angle came to her.  She picked up the pencil and on the C in PACTOLUS  she connected  a HARON  and pronounced, "Charon, who ferries the dead across the River Styx."

"That's good.  How many points do you get?" He asked. She was taken aback and hadn't the slightest idea, but the way he asked made her look back at the paper, trying to figure it out.

"Well," she began slowly.  "It's from a myth,  a myth about a river, and a myth about a changed state of consciousness, and they are all four in a row."

"Actually, it's three and one and four, so for the series you get two, and the three which makes five," and then he added, "I'll  help you in things you haven't seen before but if you don't call your points then you lose them and the next person can take them, when it's their turn.  It's part of the game."  Then he got into explaining it again, "There are all sorts of variations on how to score, sometimes we even score the letter values using scrabble numbering, divided by two, but only as another category.  It all depends on who you are playing with."  He glanced at the paper, it was his turn.

She went out to the kitchen to turn on the water for more tea, he requested a beer.  When she returned with the beer he had written the word SPHINX extending out from the S in STYX and had written down the number 5 in the HIMSELF column and was cracking open a peanut and watching the apartment manager trying to coax a cat out from underneath a car parked directly across the court from her apartment. She was talking to him in baby talk and squatting down reaching under the car.  She was dressed in her gardening clothes and had a small bucket with gardening tools sticking out of the top. "My 'ittle itsey bitsey kitty, come here, come to your momma baby." And then the cat who had the coloring and markings of a Holstein cow darted out on the opposite side of the car and disappeared behind some shrubberies, reappearing further back inside the court.  She was a tall rangy woman with medium length brown hair.  She rose, brushed her hands and the knees of her pants, picked up the bucket and headed off after the cat ambling slowly and swaying, singing a pop tune, her voice miraculously changed to a full melodious ripeness.

She set down the beer, looking at the paper,  "Sphinx for five points," and she sat down awaiting his explanation.

"Five, I get one because it's a myth, another because it's a changed state of consciousness, another because they're both characters who embody a similar function (delivering death), and then it's 3 and 2,  2 and 5, which makes two,  so that's five."

She wasn't too sure just how he figured the numbers part, but it was a good word.  She puzzled over what word to chose but finally she wrote BIANC in front of the A in PACTOLUS.  He looked at her smiling waiting for her explanation.  "Bianca is a mouse, a white mouse," and she stopped, giggling.  He laughed, amused also. "She's a mouse in a book,  she was unjustly held in a prison and the book is about her rescue.  It's a kids' book.  But it's a series, dog-cat-mouse, Charon-Sphinx-Bianca,"  and she laughed again.  Then she said,  "and dog -cat-mouse is sort of  the same subject, so that's two, 3 and 1 don't count,  do they?"

"No, but you can have three, for causing laughter."  and he wrote down a 3 for HER.  Then, without setting down the pencil, he switched to the graph paper and placed a P above the I in BIANCA and  a CES extending down below, and he said that's three."  She waited to hear his scoring, which was forthcoming,  "One for series dog-cat and fish-mouse," and he paused for her reaction,  explaining further, "see how  Pisces and Bianca are in a cross form and Charon and Sphinx are just horizontal?  Well, there is a difference," and he continued, "It's customary to think of dogs and cats as predators and mice and fish  as what gets  eaten."  He saw that she was satisfied with his explanation, so he went on, "so that's two, and fish are common symbol of Christianity, so that's three," he concluded.  She was not precisely able to follow the logic behind his scoring, still she couldn't dispute his reasons, and besides they had scored the very same score on every single turn."  And," he said, "4 and 2 is nothing, so that's all I get."

She puzzled over this fact as well, gazing out the window. Her thoughts were interrupted by the woman who lived directly across the court from her.  The woman lived there with her mother and she had been the apartment manager before the woman who had chased the cat a while ago.  This had all been before she had moved in, but she had heard it from someone.  Now, the woman who lived with her mother, did odd jobs like cleaning old people's ovens and that sort of thing. She was a heavy girl with long thick healthy hair that she could arrange in the most complex hairdos.  She did that only for Renaissance Fairs however. They were her only luxury.  She had no boyfriends, or even girlfriends for that matter.  In fact, her mother who wasn't particularly attractive at all, had a series of boyfriends while she sat home.  The girl's face was near classic,  beautiful in some lights but plain ordinarily, but she looked like a woman in a painting.

Now, she came out of her door, carrying a large bundle, and, she was accompanied by a short nun wearing a half habit.  She wore regular street clothes below her shoulders.  The nun stood on the porch, watching as the girl set her bundle on top of the car, and with a cloth she was holding began wiping some bird droppings off of the front windshield.  She took special care to scrub any places where they stuck.  Then she opened the door on the passenger side and the nun got in, closing the door herself. The girl walked around to the other side, taking the bundle from the top of the car and climbing in.  They drove slowly out of the court and away down the street leaving the court once again quiet.

It was her turn, she remembered, and looking over the last few words, picked up the pencil,  but just then the tea kettle began to whistle.  She set the pencil back down saying, "I've got one, but let me get the tea, you want anything?"  And she got up and went into the kitchen.  In the mean while, he turned on the radio, switching it back and forth, slowly twirlling the knobs.  Static, loud bursts of nonsense syllables filled the  air....until he settled on an AM station that was playing an 'oldie,  "as ahdmit that-tha-wahdert ah'ron u has grauwn, fah thaa' times thay is  aa-chan-gin...."  It was an old Bob Dylan song and they both joined in celebrating their mutual age, their cultural roots.  She sat back down and wrote in VERONICA crossing the N in BIANCA.  The announcer came on in between songs, his volume nearly twice that of the proceeding song so the man went into the other room again and adjusted the radio.

      Returning, he looked at the paper, seeing her word VERONICA and he glanced expectantly at her sipping her tea and waited patiently for her "reason".  She began, "Veronica:  Veronica gave Jesus a scarf or cloth when he was carrying the cross up the hill.   The same cloth later bore the image of his face, that's a 'veronica' too.  Pisces is fish and fish is a symbol of Christianity,  so that's another, for two,"  and she stopped.

"Is that all?"  He inquired, and she knew he must see more points.  She scrutinized the piece of paper.

Oh," she said, "and VERONICA crosses BIANCA and they are both feminine given names,  so that makes three,"  and she smiled.

"My turn," he said chuckling, and wrote down a 3 for HER, and immediately wrote SHEBA crossing the E with the E in VERONICA, and, also without hesitation, he wrote a  3 in the HIMSELF column.  "Sheba discovered the  wood of the true cross.  It was used to construct a bridge after the crucifixion. Sheba discovered it when she crossed the bridge herself.  Later it was used to bring a dead man back to life," he reported. "So I get one point because they are both legends, and another because they are both about crucifixion or some thing related to the crucifixion.  He waited and she said,

"But that's only two, you wrote 3."

"And I get one point because you missed one."  She looked up halfway confused, turning the paper back so she could see it straight.  "Although Pisces means fish and fish is a symbol of Christianity, they are from opposite disciplines, astrology and religious studies, so you could have gotten a point there, but you didn't, so I did," and he smiled, "for opposites."

There was something vaguely contradictory about his  reasoning but she couldn't place it,  besides it was her turn and they were still exactly tied.   She looked at him bemused, so this was what the "whole-wheat" crowd did in their spare time....how lucky he was, and she wished she ...and she stopped ...and she remembered her interview ...and she began to worry ...and she stopped ...and she dimly thought about being alone and quiet ...and she stopped.  She stirred her tea adding more hot water, another 'oldie' was playing, maybe it was an all oldies station.  This time it was "Strawberry Fields", followed by "Magic Carpet Ride".

It was her turn; she had to think hard.  Then she thought of a very simple word, but the only place it would fit, it would run along side of another word, and one letter would be beside another to form a word that wasn't a  word.  All the rest of the letters though when combined made words.  Once she thought of the word she couldn't think of anything else, and she got to thinking about how he said that you could make up rules as you went, and so she asked him about it without revealing the word.

"Try," he said and after a pause he explained that it might be all right to invent a meaning or even add extra letters to the non-words making them words.

Immediately she saw the solution.  Where the PICES and BIANCA crossed she put an IBLE running down from the B in BIANCA and therefore falling in the squares proceeding the CES in  PICES.  To this she added an REL horizontally in front of the IC formed by the 'ible' which she had put down first. She shifted the paper in front of him saying, "Can I do  that?"

"Explain it."

So she began, "Bible and Relic, both refer to Sheba and Veronica, so that's one."

"Two," he corrected.

"Oh, and BE is a word, and LS stands for 'locus sigilli' from the Latin", and she began thumbing thru the dictionary. "It means 'the place of the seal', and they are all words in the category of religion, well, sort of ..."  and  she slid the dictionary in front of him thinking about how BE was really a  rather broader category....He accepted her reasoning, giving her a total of six.  It was 1 in 3 and 1 in 3 which was two, plus the original two plus two for the two "incidental" extra words.

It was a very good play after all, and she regained her poise, still thinking about the idea of a relic.  The idea scared her and it also repulsed her in a strange sort of way and then the gardener's wife came out into the court and stood blankly looking over her shoulder every so often.  She pointed the woman out to the man who peeked out the window at her.  The woman was thin and shriveled, she had a sallow complexion and limp scant dishwater blond hair.  She stood erect and still, exhausted worn eyes peering out from her gaunt features.  She wore a shrill pink, almost day-glow synthetic knit blouse  which hung with its original shape emphasizing her ravaged patience.

"She looks like Donetello's 'Mary Magdalene'," she said to  him, "the wooden one; Mary Magdalene, after the desert.  Have you seen it?"  She inquired.

"G-L-O-R-I-A .....Gllllloooorrrriiiiaaaa...." was blaring out of the radio.

"No," he said.  And she left returning quickly with a large book which she opened to a picture of a statue.   It was a  'woman' in shredded wooden rags, a statue OF a woman, that is, with a hollow eaten face and body.  There was an inscription under the picture:  Mary Magdalene, Returned from the desert, Donetello, and then it gave a circa listing.

"G-L-O-R-I-AAAAA...." the radio kept insisting.

"She's dying.  She has cancer. She's been like that ever since I first saw her," she was  referring  now to the  woman standing in the court completely unaware of their staring at her.

"She does look like her," he said.

And then the gardener came out and joined her.  He was slightly thick around the middle and his dress was sloppy.  He had an equally unwholesome beaten look and a  vagueness about his person.  He took her hand in his and they walked out of the court and got into a car parked along the main street and drove away.

The scene brought to her mind another occasion when she had been crying and had looked out the window and there the woman had been standing just as today.  She had thought to herself, how silly that she should be crying, in comparison say and, suddenly she realized that the woman was herself too weak to cry...and for a moment she...almost wondered if she was crying because ...and of course that was ridiculous, but somehow, she kind of wished the woman would die.  She had this thought not quite out loud, but the woman's suffering seemed without any point.

She flipped to another picture, it was a picture of a woman holding a child, a Madonna and Child, and they were  surrounded by Saints and a kneeling man with a broken nose was in the front right of the composition.  The whole scene was inside a high vaulted arched cathedral.  Hanging inside the apse directly over the Virgin's head was an ostrich egg.  The child was asleep and the Saints and others were all anxiously awaiting his...awakening.

"The Virgin looks just like the woman across the way, the one who left with the nun...when they get back, you'll  see."  She had never told anyone about her private observations before, they'd surely think she was crazy.  It didn't mean anything, of course; it was just interesting.  He promised to watch and left the book opened to the page.

He got a new beer and returned readdressing the game commenting, "I'll have to  get six this time," and he placed a 6 in the HIMSELF column, in dotted lines, and then he looked at the page.  On the radio was an old Stones' song, "She comes and goes....she's like a raainnnnnbow, spinning colors ...in the air.... she combs her hair.  She's like a raaaainnnnbow."  He picked up the pencil and put an ARAOH vertically downward from the T in LETHE, adding an ATED to the right of the R beside the X in STYX.

"Pharaoh, is a human made into a god when he dies and becomes a 'relic', for two points, and it's connected to Styx, Lethe, and Sphinx, for two more, and Ya and X-rated are both words, so that's two more, for six total.

"What about the numbers?"  She asked.

"Well, I all ready counted them, that was the second two, it was 1 in 1 and 1 in 1 and 1 in 3  which is the only one that counts and 2,"  he said.  Then he tipped the paper back toward himself, and then spun it back to her saying, "I could have put down X-ray  instead.  Then I would have had a higher score since they X-ray the dressings on mummies, which are also "veronicas".  If they show anything that is.  In that case, it would have been 1 in 1 and 1 in 1 and 1 in 1,  plus two, and, the original six since two extra words are still formed, I would have scored 11 points." he announced.

"Why didn't you?" she asked, feeling sort of cheated and also dazed by his counting. 

"I didn't feel like it, " he answered matter of factly.

"Oh," she said for the third time and looked at the paper, feeling rather dismal.  Now she chose a word indifferently and began writing down the letters not paying attention to what explanation she would give. The last H in PHARAOH was the bottom mark on the page.  In front of that H she put ORP and followed it with EUS.  Then she stopped and gazed at it a bit longer.  She began slowly, "Orpheus goes into the underworld in search of Eurydice, and Orpheus is an X-rated movie, and the word is placed lowest on the page symbolizing the land of the dead," and she drew her breath, not willing to give up quite yet. The radio was playing one of her favorite oldies.  It was a group called White Rabbit.  After a long instrumental introduction, a dreamy metallic voice began, "The summer had inhaled and held its breath too long, the  winter looked the same as if it never had gone, and though an open window where no curtain hung......I saw youuuuuuuuuuooooooooouuu.  I saw youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, coming back to me."

"And," she continued tentatively, speeding up as she spoke contrapuntally to the melody,  "That song they are playing is Eurydice's and Orpheus' lament, "and I get another point for simultaneity, which makes a total of five, and it's 2 in 1, 1 in 1, and 1 in 2, which is one more point, for six."

He laughed.  The radio went on, "One begins to read between the pages...of a look, the shape of sleepy music and suddenly...you're hooked.'

"That's good, 'Eurydice's  lament'."

"Coming  back to me....I saw youuuuu"

And he wrote down a 6 in the HER column.  They sang along, each knowing all the words.  Before the song was over he picked up the pencil and wrote MELODIE incorporating the E from ORPHEUS which formed the additional word  OM  because of the O in Pharaoh.

Just then a motor cycle drove into the court and parked outside her door.  He looked at her carefully and asked quietly under the roar of the bike as it throttled down,  "Is someone coming here?"

"I think so," she answered, not certain just why his tone was suddenly so urgent.

"Is it OK for me to be here?"  He inquired further.  For a moment she wondered if he thought he was in some kind of immediate danger, but he added, "I mean, I don't want to mess you up with anyone....I could leave,"  and he indicated the back door as a knock was heard upon the front one.

"Don't be silly," she whispered respectfully as she got up and went to the door.

"Hello," she said, stepping back and opening the door wider, "Come in."  He stepped across the threshold, hesitating as if he was surprised to find she had company.

"Oh," he exclaimed sheepishly, "you're busy."  She assured him that he was welcome and that they were simply playing a  word game.  She introduced the two, offering him beer or tea.  He refused both and began inspecting the graph paper with approval.  He pointed out that they had misspelled Pisces,  P-I-S-C-E-S-, they had left out the S.  He followed things like the horoscope, so she didn't even bother to look it up in the dictionary, it was certain he was right.  He stood tall and straight refusing a chair and giving his reason for stopping in.  He had wondered if she was interested in going for a bike ride since it was such a nice day, what was left of it anyhow.  She thought to herself that he looked like Orion the warrior, how he might look that is, Orion.  And then he excused himself and left, lauding the glorious weather once more, and was gone amid the most tempered and dignified roar that a Harley Davidson is capable of producing.

"He's just a guy I know," she said, resuming the previous  conversation, "I met him because of school..." and  she considered again his tall straight form and just the excitement of having two men visit her at once ...not that there was anything to it.  Still it was a spring day and she felt flattered.  The day was almost gone now though, the sun would be setting in a few hours.  Already fine wispy clouds were beginning to form.  He pointed this out and said it would be a good sunset tonight.

They returned their attention to the game.  Both agreed that it didn't matter if Pisces was misspelled, since the game was by agreement, and neither of them had caught it, nor had it unevenly benefited either of them.  They had left off in the middle of his turn.  The radio sang, "How does it feel, to be, one of the beautiful...." and there was a pause followed be a staccato "People.....bump, bump.  Now that you know-oh who you are."

He began, "Orpheus was responsible for causing the sun to rise, which he did by singing more and more beautiful songs every night, and the word  "meolodie" is used affectionately in Chaucer to mean, "make love", "'il mak' a melodie al' aton es",  which fits too, and OM is a chant or song striving toward natural harmonies and balance, for four points, and, let's see, that's 2 in 1 in 2 and 1 in 1 in 1 which is two, for six total."  And he wrote down a  6  in the HIMSELF side and drew a line below  both their scores and began totaling them.  She thought it rather odd that they had both scored the very same score on every turn, and then she   realized he had done it on purpose.  He always went second and his figuring was sort of variable.  For an instant she verged upon feeling belittled but then she had to admit it had been fun and besides she really wasn't sure.

"It's an even: 27 to 27,"  he said smiling, "let's stop for awhile."  She got up and stretched, saying it was a fun game. She carried away the tea things and an empty beer can.  He asked if she'd like to go see "Apocalypse Now" tonight.  "It's playing all over town,"

She looked at him strangely. "No, I don't feel like it, " she answered, knowing it was about Viet Nam.  It sounded too exciting and especially with  him.

He made some phone calls for work, he said, giving her number for return calls.  The girl across the court came back. She was alone now.  He compared her to the woman in the picture, as she unloaded her car.  He agreed that there was some resemblance.  Then he went outside and began working on his truck, the valves or something.  She started preparing dinner and at last he came in, wiping grease off of his hands with a rag and announced that it was time for the sunset.

In the meanwhile, she had changed the radio station to one which played regular hits and it was now playing that new one about "Southern kisses sweet as wine."  She turned it up as he washed his hands three or four times.  She now felt a proud affinity to the song.

They hurried outside, not wanting to miss any of the sunset.  They went first to the vacant lot and watched it from there.  Then they ran to the overpass and watched it from there and lastly, they crossed under the highway and ran down the other side and out toward the sea, past an industrial park to more fields, and watched the last traces of sunset.

It was a delicate sunset, pink and blue and gold and then rose on the other side followed by a mauve lit with gold and the blue went from cerulean into the palest most transparent   turquoise before it turned a frail ultramarine which deepened and darkened gradually until tiny glows of star bodies began to appear.  There was a short 'between whiles'  when the buildings and trees all lost their color and became mute shades of grey before the still luminous sky.  Then all were but shapes in silhouette and the sky was a rich blue-black blanket scattered with points of light.

That's how long it took them to walk back to her apartment.  They ate and went to bed early.

                                      PEARL

                                Chapter Eleven

Both sat in bed reading for an hour or so.  Then they turned out the light and had lain down.  She was very aware of his presence beside her.  They both continued to be awake.  They had lain awake for an hour more, not touching, not talking, just awake.  Finally she spoke, "Would you like to make love?"

"No," came the answer, plainly and without hesitation.  It was what she had expected, now that she heard it, that is, still, it hovered in the air like an object that she could not quite grasp.   Her body filled with a controlled blankness.  Her mind moved forward in slow motion.

"Why?" she ventured cautiously.

"Sometimes you want a peanut, and sometimes you don't."  This time the answer came so quickly, was so glib, that she felt a flash of pain cross her chest.  He continued looking up at the ceiling.  Closed.  Her numbness pulsed into shame. Why was he here then?  She wondered to her self without pausing for an answer...He should leave ...Was she being selfish?  No matter.  He must go.  Confused in her certainty, she reviewed her thinking, and then she said,

"You should leave." And she added apologetically, "It isn't good for me."  Still vibrating with a strange frozen energy, she lay stiffly beside him.

"Do you want me to leave now."

"No, tomorrow morning."

"OK."  And after a short pause he rolled over on top of her.   Looking into her pale half frightened face and wide dark eyes, he confessed, "I'm sorry."   His gaze penetrated her frail composure and broke it.  Her face flushed red, grimaced into hot tears like a small child's, and she turned away as much as she could.  He held her firmly under his weight and eyes and she did not struggle, only the inner workings of her face did she try to shelter.

Now he was rather tempted by her offer but he had a strong hunch it was no longer a possibility.  She rocked with tears and soft noises while he continued to peer into her face and beyond.  He was not afraid of her emotions, nor was he ashamed of his part in them, in fact, he was feeling very pleased by it all.  It was time to leave and it had been good, very good.  And even now, here she was opening like a flower before him just as their ways were parting.  He had been here for a week almost and she had felt like a fairy tale girl to him. She was somehow insubstantial.  It was easy to lose her, forget she was there almost.  It wasn't that she had no shape but a certain tension which he associated with women was missing.   And her broken quality made her expression indefinite at times, unrelated.   Now, for the first time, he was getting close to her,  really close, as a separate  being.  And, he could see her clearly.  She moved tenuously from adult to child to woman and back to child.  The tears squeezed out of her eyes and he watched with a feeling that verged on contentment.  She had a purity and an innocence almost, or was it just defenselessness?  He did not think she was stupid, not exactly.  He found it pleasurable to watch.  He drank her in.  She was crying freely now, removed from all reflection.  He kissed her wet salty cheek and raised his lips only slightly to say, "You are a pearl."   She shuttered with a new flurry of tears and he knew she couldn't stop.  "A natural gem..."  His closeness mixed with her own being and she believed him.

A pearl, yes, only she felt more like the oyster, the smooth grey flesh and the knot of muscle in the back that lets it open and close...She breathed in...and she slipped back further away from him to a place where she was still undiscovered ...and it began to melt there too, slowly, and for herself.

He watched as her face became a window wobbling on from one shape to another.  And in a flash, he remembered a time in Viet Nam.  It was a time he had remembered before.  The memory came on him now.  He had been on an information gathering assignment with six other men.  They had gone forward the specified distance, made their observations, and were on their return trip.  It was not quite dawn and a fine rain was falling. The vegetation was thick, and so they were following a small dirt road with ditches on either side.  The ditches were filled with foul scummy water that shone dimly in the early morning light.

He had not been in Viet Nam long at that time.  He had been in combat only once and though he had killed a Viet Namese soldier, it had been at a great distance and during a prolonged and sporadic small scale routine (if such things are possible) sort of scrimmage.  He had felt something then, but confusion and distance and fear had preempted what ever it had been.

On this day, however, just as the seven men were beginning to feel like they might make it back for lunch ...a burst of machine gun fire had cut them off.   All but the lead man had made it safely into the ditch.  The lead man who had been ten yards ahead was now prostrate on the road, face down, dead, or dying.  The shots had come from the opposite side of the road and up ahead.

It was odd that the attacker had not gotten them all, this thought went through his head, along with, 'they couldn't really have thought that a lone American would be way out here' ...before panic closed in closing off all thought and fairly overcoming him.  The stench from the stagnant water piqued his revulsion to dizziness.  The kid from Toledo was directly to his right.  He'd been to boot camp with him and then to sabotage training.  He didn't especially like the kid much.  He scared him.  He had a lack of coordination that made him nervous and also a slight 'preciousness'.  He wrote long love letters with all his free time and hardly ever spoke.  And now, here they were, side by side, in a ditch, being shot at.  The rest of the men, all four of them were further up the road and closer to where the shots had originated.  He knew it was not a sniper, a sniper would not have fired unless he knew he could get them all.... and the weather was wrong.  It didn't make sense.  Perhaps a band of guerrillas headed in the other direction had been surprised...it was the most likely thing he could think of...still....

The kid from Toledo edged closer to him and he could see he was crying.  It sobered him to see the kid cry and he directed him to move up in the other direction.  Together they crawled through the slime toward the other four.  The kid fromToledo was 18 years old, he was 19, together their ages totaled 37.  His mind reviewed this sort of thing during times of stress.   Occasionally he would look up over the gully as he progressed silently forward through the scum, or he would check behind himself since he was the rear man.

Suddenly something made him stop...he felt like puking, he fought through a desire to fold in the middle and pulling himself out of a state similar to paralysis, he peeped up over the edge of the ditch.  He could see several figures creeping across the face of the road.  Again the paralysis wanted to take over and he could hear his heart pounding in his ears. There was a moment of horror while he groped for...and then a shot rang out- his.

Instantly, the air exploded in every direction.  He fired wildly, again and again, at the slithering shapes ... or in their direction, or where he thought he remembered seeing them.  And then the volley stopped and again silence.  The kid from Toledo was close to him now.  They were both alive, both uninjured. The other four were still further up the ditch, also unhit.  For a moment he stayed down feeling some relief, and then again the horrible feeling gripped him, and craning up to see, he was staring into the ear of a Viet Namese soldier who slumped over just as a double blast went forth.  He knelt gaping at this phenomena as something fleshy fell on him from the side.

He shrieked and pushed it away like some macabre apparition he had never seen before and almost fired on it when he realized it was the kid, the kid from Toledo.  He'd been hit.  He lunged after him, yanking him up out of the mire. His chest was chewed open and his eyes had a glassy dullness. He propped him against the bank and peered back over the edge. The Viet Namese was dead too.  The kid had got him. The face was turned toward him, blood trickling out of the mouth ...and it was a WOMAN!....no, they all looked like woman ...but this one really was ...it wasn't possible, his mind reeled.  He hadn't even fired his gun, he was still alive...or was this  a  dream?  The kid had saved him...and the kid?  He remembered, wheeling around, the kid's face was just sinking into the slime. Again he pulled him up and at this moment he thought he was going mad.  He wanted to scream and to run, yes run, run anywhere.  Boot camp had instilled a certain instinct for survival but this other matter was for his mind alone...and he hovered there on the brink of insanity. And something passed out of him and something remained; and the next moment came, and he knew he would never be happy again; never, never.  And this time as the kid from Toledo slipped into the murk, he watched numbly the face as it disappeared. The face now completely devoid of all emotion.

And his memory ended suddenly and there was her face in his hands, it was the same face.  She even reminded him of the kid from Toledo.  The poor kid from Toledo.  He loved the kid from Toledo.  And he loved her too.  He could see her clearly now, far away, in her own 'dream'.  She was no longer aware of his presence at all.  She was quite beautiful to him that way.

He thought about the week they had spent together. Much had happened.  She seemed floating now, the tears had softened and carried her away into sleep.  She did not even awaken when he released her and lay back down beside her.  He had loved her and now it was time to leave.  Yes, he was grateful that she had said so.  Jupiter and Mars were moving out of conjunction, he could go home.  Perhaps this would be the last trip, perhaps he would marry Tilly.

Then he pictured Tilly, asleep in their great oak bed beneath the patchwork quilt, her hair spread out across the pillow.   Ramus, the black retriever would be curled up on the hooked rug beside the bed; there, in attendance.  Imagine, it was five years now they'd lived  \together.  Yes, he'd known all along, he would marry Tilly.  He knew that she had gotten pregnant on purpose but it would be different now.  It was OK. It didn't even seem odd to him to decide to marry one woman in another woman's bed.

He glanced at the woman beside him, he wondered what would become of her and then his thought returned to Tilly.  He decided not to sleep at all that night and silently he slid out of bed and dressed in the dark.

He gathered his things together, including the book she had lent to him, wrote a short note, folded it twice and set it on the nightstand.  He surveyed the scene once more and turned, opened the door, pressed the lock key in, and walked out pulling the door softly shut behind himself.

It was still dark.  He felt clear headed and excited, he felt free.  He looked up at the bright red star beginning to elongate in the moonless sky.  He checked the ropes holding the boat, got into the truck and warmed the engine gently savoring the passage of time.  He released the break, pushed in the clutch, pressed the gear shift forward.  The engine engaged as he let out the clutch, pulling away from the curb. He sighed contentedly and headed for the freeway north.

THE FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

Chapter Twelve

The next morning, she awoke disoriented.  She lay in bed looking over the contents of her room in the early morning light half asleep and half awake.  She felt hollow as she breathed in the fresh spring air.  Then abruptly, she sat bolt upright and froze for a moment before leaping out of bed and rushing to her closet.  She put on a long winter coat that covered her nighty.  She went directly out the door and out of the court to the main street, and walked up and down in front of the apartment building coming to a stop standing before an extra large empty parking space.  She looked up and down the street distractedly.  No truck, especially no dusty red truck. She went back inside, hung up her coat, put water on for coffee and went into the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth. Her eyes were swollen.

Then she went into each room and looked for...well, it's hard to say, just for what.  In the bedroom she found a folded up scrap of paper.  She opened it slowly, her heart pounding, It said:  I LEFT, IT WAS NICE, Sorry, BYE  - all written in hand printing,  beneath which was scrolled in long hand:  Take Care.  In the bathroom, she found a smudge of shaving cream stuck to the mirror.  At the telephone table, she found another piece of paper with a telephone number.  She picked it up, looked at it as if it contained some cryptic message but she could discern none and dropped it into the trash.  Immediately she picked it back out and put it into the drawer of the telephone table instead.  There was nothing in the kitchen.

At the table, she found, the graph paper from their game ....missing - he had taken it!  Then she discovered he had the book she had lent him as well.

She fixed her coffee and returned to the room and reread the note, set it back down and looked again in the main room.  He kept his things on top of the bookcase.  Again she looked for the book that her brother had given to her, the one that had disturbed her so.  It was gone.  Well, she had lent it to him, after all, she considered to herself.

Then she noticed a piece of paper on the floor, it must have fallen out of one of his notebooks.  She picked it up, it was printed also.  It said:  CONSCIOUSNESS BREEDS CONSCIOUSNESS.  She looked on the floor for more pages, behind the bookcase, and finding none, took the note and her coffee and sat down at the table.  CONSCIOUSNESS BREEDS CONSCIOUSNESS.  It kept reminding her of something.

And then she set it down on the table, opened the curtains and had a relatively ordinary day.  She did the usual things.  She went to the store, she prepared food, she ate the food.She straightened up a few things, tried to paint but lacked the spark, she went for a short walk.   She didn't think about him, at least not much, and she even felt some enjoyment in her restored privacy.   She did notice a hot watery sensation behind her eyes.

When evening came, she got into her nighty and had a cup of "Ovaltine" and sat puzzling over his inscription: CONSCIOUSNESS  BREEDS  CONSCIOUSNESS.  She verged on prostration trying to figure out the meaning.   Finally she concluded, not wishing to injure herself further, that it was nonsense.   After all, he was just some guy who came by, who was going to write a book about a man who bites into a peanut and it turns out to be a pearl?   So he breaks his tooth.  How dumb?  She had just "thought" he was ...well, they had had fun.  Anyway it was only because he had been here, here with her.

So she took out a book and got into bed and read.  After awhile, she put the book aside, turned out the lights, and went to sleep.  And she dreamed a "watching" dream, which is one in which the dreamer only "watches"  but doesn't do anything.  It went like this.

Three little boys were playing the "fingers" game, scissors, paper, stone.  She could see into each of their faces as they would count 1-2 -3  and -phlet- display a new hand position, giggling and delivering the slaps that went with the game.  As she peered into the faces, she knew them.  Why they were the men in the bar.  The bartender, the old man, and the chubby middle aged man, except, that they were children, and they were also King Midas, Silenus and Bacchus.  1-2-3 and -phlet- display, and then they'd giggle and take turns slapping each other, until she could just see their hands forming scissors, paper and stone.  And then it was just the scissors, paper and stone without the hands....  The real objects, not fingers representing objects, but the objects themselves, like cartoons....Just the objects spinning in a circle.  Stone broke scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covered stone, stone broke scissors, and so on in a circle they went.   But then for some reason they wanted to go the other way.  That happened like this.  First the scissors became a set of teeth, like false teeth, and the paper became a leaf and out of the leaf grew a peanut, the stone shrank down into a pearl.   And they danced back and forth.  Now the teeth ate the peanut, the peanut turned to dust over the pearl and obscured its lustrous shimmer, and when the pearl came to the false teeth, they changed back into scissors and at the pearl's touch, split into two parts,  a monocle and a knife, which went sailing off in two different directions.

When they switched directions, the pearl fell off of the  peanut, the peanut moved the teeth, and the teeth became scissors and broke into two parts, a monocle and a knife at the touch of the pearl.  The two parts sailed off in opposite directions.   Each time it would progress and progress and then the third time instead of progressing, it would split into two, until only the peanut and the pearl were swirling around themselves,  faster and faster.  They spun and spun and spun, with monocles and knives flying out sporadically, but actually it wasn't sporadic at all, it was continuous.  In fact, maybe they weren't splitting and flying out at all, maybe they were just scissors all along spinning around inside.  And it all kept spinning and spinning and it never stopped.  And each time she thought to look,  all night long, it was spinning, spinning, spinning.

THE SKY IS FALLING

Chapter Thirteen

The following morning, she awoke slowly.  She lay in bed listening to the sounds outside, the passing cars, kids on their way to the corner store, voices and laughter, and bird calls.  The bird calls reminded her that she was sort of tired and she had a vague memory of running on a beach at night, with birds scattering all around her and crying surprised sea calls.  She thought about her interview tomorrow and she sat up in bed and made a list of things to do in preparation.  It was another fine spring day and at length she got out of bed reluctantly and began her day.

While she had coffee she discovered that her watch was missing.  She last remembered it on the day they had gone to Point Reyes.  Perhaps it had dropped out of the backpack, in the car, or at the bar maybe.   It could have fallen out in Vince's car, or where they had sat at lunch .  She rummaged through the backpack another time, just for good measure.  She looked through her car three separate times; she checked numerous pockets.  For a moment, she even considered the possibility of his taking it; she was ashamed of herself.  Still, she really didn't know him all that well, and he was rather 'free-form" in some of his thinking.  And then there rose up in her mind a fantastic image of him dressed in courtier's garb, like in a Shakespearean play, laying the watch on some stone altar in the Hall of the Mountain King to quell some angry goddess.  His face glowed red reflecting the flames bursting all around him deep in the mountain cavern.

  She laughed at herself and returned to the notion that she had lost it at the bar, or maybe in the parking lot.  She had used the watch all year long while she had taught, and it had become both cheerful and reassuring to squeeze the little button that activated the light and changed the delicate gold wash bracelet into an instrument of measurement.  It was nice to know the time, sort of, especially when you had some place to be ....on time that is.

Next, there was a rip in the skirt she had planned to wear to the interview, and after she had mended it and was ironing it, the heat made a previously unseen spatter stand out.  So she washed the splatter and ironed it dry.  That gave the skirt a slightly unwholesome feel.   She plucked at her 'mustache' and tweezed her eyebrows a little without any clear cut purpose.   She took a walk, she drove to the gas station and got gasoline, she bought a new pair of nylons.

 Around 4 o'clock, the phone rang.  It was for him and she thought it was the man who had come for coffee.  He wanted to know when he'd be back or if she had a number where he could be reached.  She said no and that she wasn't quite sure and they hung up.  Then a thought came into her head.  She opened the drawer of the telephone table.  There, right on the top was the scrap of paper with the mysterious phone number that he had left.  She stood fingering it for a long time and then impetuously dialed the number.

To her surprise and remorse, the voice on the other end was the same voice she had just been talking with, "Hello," it said.  Now it was her turn and she asked if he was there.  The man recognized her voice and after a short adjustment pause they resumed their conversation.   She asked as straight-forwardly as she could if he had his number up north, and then feeling too intrusive, switched her request to his mailing address.

"He did leave then?" the voice asserted.

"Well, for a bit, I think...he left something...I was going  to send it to him,"  she waited anxiously, hoping he wouldn't ask her what, or any more questions.

There was a thick pause, followed  by: "You know he's got a girl? She's a great gal too.  Been with her five years now."

"Oh, sure, I knew, he was just staying here...he's a friend," her voice returned without interruption, a little coarse in tone.

The man said 'OK' still suspicious of her, and was about to give her the address when she mumbled something  back into the phone about it just being some papers and  "....never mind, he could get them next time he's down, probably doesn't need them anyway."  And that was all there was to it.

She put the receiver back onto the phone and went into the other room and sat down.  Everything started rearranging itself and taking an entirely new form.   Now she did feel sick.  She decided to go buy some soda water at the corner store; the walk would be good.   On the way back, her friend, "Orion", pulled up on his Harley, throttling it rambunctiously until he saw the look on her face.

"Hey, 'Chicken Little', the sky isn't falling," he informed her over the now quiet purr of his bike.

Pushing back tears, she waved a "Hello" and a "Goodbye" in the same motion, and kept right on walking.

He rolled along beside her keeping pace and asked, "You want me to come by?"

"No," she replied firmly trying to regain her control, "I've got to get ready for an interview tomorrow."  And she went on down the street.

At her house, she extracted three snails from the plum tree and squished them, one right after the other, and then she went inside silently.  She lay on her bed pouting, sort of staring up at the blank white ceiling.

WIND

Chapter Fourteen

On the morning of her interview, she woke to the alarm clock.   She had plenty of time.  Over coffee she cried and couldn't stop crying and then her eyes were red and puffy again.   She washed her face for the third time, was ready early and decided to go on ahead.  The directions she had were clear, it was one block up from Cost-Plus on the Wharf.  If she was too early she could stroll around, maybe she'd cheer up.  She busied herself for another ten minutes loading her car, filling it with all kinds of "just in case items".   She took a change of clothes and her bathing suit, the backpack and some fruit, a towel, sneakers, toilet paper and a bottle of water.  Then there were the things for the interview;  a long mailing tube containing samples of her work, copies of her resume, a small  portfolio of artwork (if for some reason they wanted to know more about her) and then the necessities;  her purse with a small amount of cash.

On the way to the bridge, she wondered why she had to go to a second interview anyway, and why at his office.  As she drove, she didn't notice the marshes, inlets and rolling hills that she could never look at without feeling like she were driving through the background of one of daVinci's paintings, how the idea always tantalized her.  Today she only looked at the road and the passing cars.  The traffic was light, even on the bridge and she smiled at the man at the gate as she handed him a dollar and drove off into San Francisco.

At Fisherman's Wharf, she found the cross streets easily, parked beside an apartment building that had writing spray painted all over its walls, and holes where the plaster had been broken.  People were coming and going and there was an old trolley station, the turn-around.  She locked her car and found the address without difficulty and asked a passer-by the time.  She was over an hour early.  She headed toward Fisherman's Wharf where bleary-eyed vendors were just setting up their booths, sipping down coffee in Styrofoam cups or else from large clumsy handmade pottery.   It was the usual selection, wood things, leather, jewelry with bright turquoise, heavy wind chimes, mobiles and all manner of shell craft.  She stopped at one table where a rough burly man was selling kites.  She looked through them and decided upon one made of deep pink transparent mylar with a long multi-colored tail.   It cost $5, which she handed to the man and then hurried away, since his attention was drilling painfully into the thin veneer of her current preparation.

Down the street, she tried to regain her poise by admiring the kite.  She bought a cup of coffee but it tasted like dust and so she threw it out.  But then she had a bad taste in her mouth, so she bought a large bag of salt water taffy and put a green and pink stripped piece into her mouth, folded the waxy paper into an accordion fan strip which she stuck in her pocket.  At each shop, she'd search the walls for a clock, or ask the time of the shopkeeper if the shopkeeper wasn't busy.  She walked by a bunch of boys who were smoking cigarettes, just ordinary cigarettes, and suddenly, she felt "stoned" again, not in the fun way, but in the "what's going to happen" way.  She worked with her coordination for a minute and then started back toward the address, checking the slip of paper she had written the Suite number on.  It was upstairs and she knocked first and then entered.

The receptionist looked annoyed at her intrusion, so she explained politely the reason for her appearance.  The woman was in no way mollified and she brusquely ordered her to take a seat in the waiting room.  There were three chairs, all with the same design, plastic pedestals with coarse linen seats.  She sat stiffly becoming more miserable with every passing instant.  Finally a man came and motioned her into an office.  He had a piercing stare that was somehow out of context with the rest of his physiognomy.  That's what she thought.  She sat down and he sat too, behind a desk and asked her a question.  After asking, he swiveled his chair around so his gaze was out the louvered windows, his legs crossed in the same manner as a woman or an intellectual might cross theirs.  She studied his profile an then the light did something funny like fade or something which made her notice (or cease to notice....), and then she was standing on the street groping into her purse for her car keys.  It was over.  She felt odd and defeated and serenely sad.  She would not get the job now probably, but there was something even more imperative pressing her.  She thought back to being inside the doctor's office and she had the strangest feeling but nothing to accord them to.  She looked at the building in amazement.  She couldn't remember a thing, not a single question, she couldn't even envision the man's face.  A cold fear gripped at her innards and she nearly ran to her car, telling herself stories of possible explanation, that she only half believed.

By the time she was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, she had decided that she had had a "marijuana flash back" and that was the reason for her amnesia.  Perhaps it had not been so bad as she thought, they might still hire her even.  But her feelings contradicted it and they were not at all absent.  She felt violated and threatened,  she felt insulted, disgraced, she felt sad, very sad.  Still, she reasoned on, she'd be working with the people from the first interview, they were nice maybe, and they had liked her.  That interview had gone fine, it would be the most important.  Then she remembered one unsorted bit of information from the first interview.  Just as she had been leaving, a second man in the lobby had stopped her, inquiring about the interview.  She had chirped on with certitude about the fun she'd have working here and liking the man who would be her boss, but the man in the lobby had said, "If you can handle that sort of thing, So-and-so is a rather cool fish."  She knew at the time that he had meant "aloof" or  "detached" or even  "heartless", but it was so incongruous with her impression that she had dismissed it.  Now the two incidents stuck in her throat and her mind stumbled about trying to fit them.  She squirmed behind the wheel and arriving repeatedly at some painful threshold, she dispensed with the notion of comprehension and stuck a piece of salt water taffy into her mouth.  This one was red and blue and she thought that she would probably cry soon.  At least the interview was over.

She chewed her way out to Drake's Beach passing through San Anselmo enmeshed in her subsiding frenzy.  At the parking lot restroom she changed into her bathing suit, put on her sneakers and the sweater.  She took the backpack and the kite and noted to herself that the doctor had not even looked at her work samples, as she locked them and her shed clothing inside the hood.  It took several slams before the latch on the hood caught but the action loosened her body.

She turned and sighed and surveyed the scene.  She took the same path that she had taken with the man, the path beside the estuary, over the low bridge and through the cut in the dunes out onto the beach.  There were few people and the wind was blowing fiercely lifting the sand to the level of her face.  She retraced the walk that they had taken, listening to the rush and ebb of the tide in between gusts of stinging sand.  She even followed the stream up to the cliffs and stood looking at the trickle of water cascading down into the pool.  This time she felt no desire to return to the shore.  She stood mesmerized by the sound and the waters motion and the shelter from the howling wind.  She examined the tiny yellow and white flowers and the isolated swirling clumps of beach grass (the "nests" she had been painting).  She looked at the pebbles embedded in the fallen away cliff, the cliff made of sand.  And then her eyes did a double take, it was an image...someone had carved an image in the sand.  It was a Buddha image, carved in the fallen away sand cliff.

The form was small and simple, made of only three soft curves with a roundish form atop them.  There was the double curve of the legs, the smooth loop of the arms meeting at the lap, a suggestion of body behind uniting the two, and the roundish form above tilted reverently downward.  The features upon it were simple also, barely indicated but well placed and even.  It was carved just to the right of the pool beside the tiny waterfall.  She looked at the image for a long time and then continued on to the second stream.  She looked carefully for a  second form but found none.  She took off her outer clothes and lay on the towel in her bathing suit trying to read and then just looking into the sky.  Then she got up and on the right side of the stream, she began carving a Buddha image herself.  The cliff was a most responsive medium, dropping off in great chunks at the slightest touch.  It became tighter as she worked deeper into the cliff.  She stopped and looked.  Her figure was more described and larger than the one at the other stream; it embarrassed her.  It was too physical, too worried with considerations for how  the arms are shaped and how the legs should bend.  The other one was the bare minimum which was somehow correct.  She sat back down.  She didn't wonder who had carved the Buddha image at the first stream, she just thought about its form.  She didn't think about the interview or about the man or about the future.  She stood up and waded in the stream again looking out toward the ocean.  An old woman walked by noticing the image she had carved in the cliff, she stared alarmingly but from a distance.  She was glad when the woman left.  She sorted through the backpack for a piece of fruit and rediscovered the kite.  She'd fly it, but first she returned to the first stream thinking about the brevity of a sand Buddha on a wind swept beach.  With the same sense of discovery almost surprise, she found it again.  Then she returned to the broad blowing beach and ran until her kite sailed high over her head.  In the blue sky, the pink transparent kite became violet, its tail snapping red, green, blue and yellow behind it.  She nearly over shot the parking lot and she was suddenly surrounded by a group of  girls from the geometry class.  She gathered her kite in, chattering to the girls as they darted back and forth after their wayward Frisbee.  She hoped they could not detect her real mood and would only "remember-see" her as she'd been in geometry class.  She waved a good-bye and walked to the parking lot.  She was sad, prickly sad.  She got into her car and drove away.

EAST

  Chapter Fifteen

The next day was overcast and it rained a little.

On Wednesday, the weather was worse, misty, foggy, and cold.  After breakfast, as she was finishing the dishes, slurping down her third cup of coffee, and trying to reckon with the sudden and unfavorable change in the weather, the phone rang.   It was the man from the interview, it was the first man, from the first interview.  "No," his voice said, they had changed their minds. "Might not hire anyone at all," and so on, "Good-bye."

She hung up the phone, walked into the bedroom and sat down on the bed facing the window...A white cold light glowed through the curtain.  She did not think but only sat stiffly on the bed.  She did not look although her eyes were open.  She sat this way for a long time, then she stood mechanically.  She went to the closet and took out a light down-filled jacket.   She picked up her keys and walked straight out the door.  The door only half closed behind her.

She got into the car and warmed the engine indifferently.    She backed the car out onto the street.  She headed left driving with the skill of memory and an unconscious cognition both immediate and distant.  Like she was in a dream.  She took the same route that she had taken so many times.  The road which passed the school where she had taught and then out beyond, way out to Point Reyes.  She drove with automatic precision.  She saw each tree and building, each street, each pedestrian and shop with an uncanny clarity.  Everything had the appearance of complete ordinariness but there was no sense of familiarity in anything she saw.  She passed the school.  It felt like a building, that maybe she had passed once before, at dusk, in a strange city, on a long long trip.

Out beyond the housing developments and small hamlets, the rolling hills had a strange unearthly beauty.  She drove on.  The sky was opaque.  Its opacity gradually overlapped the land as she neared Point Reyes Station.

She stopped first at the bar where they had been and she looked around in the parking lot near where Vince's car had been parked.  She remembered dropping the backpack as she was taking it off to get into Vince's car.  She found a tube of cherry chapstick and a quarter.  There was no watch.  She picked up the chapstick and the quarter.  She returned to the car glancing at the bar, and drove on up the street to the parking lot for hikers where they had terminated their hike.  She parked the car in complete whiteness.

The trail marker was hard to find in the dense fog (Arch Rock Trail) but once she found that, the trail itself seemed to stick to her feet.  The fog moved around her as she walked and clung to her face and hair, dripping in great drops from her chin and bangs.  Sometimes she could see only a few feet into the fog, sometimes the fog would reveal a whole section of the landscape. Sometimes it would make a landscape of its own, and sometimes it would lift up from the ground showing the path but nothing of where it led.  Always the fog moved.  It separated and moved around her closing up again behind.  She walked into its whiteness, the floating white solid moisture.  She was not afraid, in fact, she was not feeling anything, except that it must be a  dream.  This was maybe like being dead...there were  sounds:  birds, occasional rustlings.  She both heard the sounds and also she did not hear them.  The silence was almost audible and drown them out, yet they echoed within it with inverted purpose.  She listened to the silence, noticed it, the silence in the whiteness.

Sometimes the sound of her own "footfalls" would rise to her ears, that sound alone bothered her.  Then she would feel something, something she did not like.  It was the footfalls, her footfalls, the sound of the footfalls continuing on, on into the white wet surging air.  That was what bothered her.  In this nowhere-never space which wrapped around her and bled off this way and that.  It was the footfalls.  She listened.

After two hours she was nearing Arch Rock.  When she heard the waves crashing below on the precipice, she stopped short.  She stood still for a moment listening to the waves crash far below on the shinny black ancient rocks that protruded up from the sea's swell, and then she left the path, walking the other way.  She walked through the knee  high grasses for a few yards and sat down.   She shook the hair and wiped her face with her hands.   She was completely wet, except inside her coat and even her coat was beginning to give way transferring the wetness.

She took a soggy Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose.  She opened the chapstick, wiped it once with her hand and then rubbed it onto her lips.  It had no flavor in the cold.  She thought of her missing watch with its friendly red light-up face.  She wondered what time it was and regarded the ridiculousness of the question here in the moving whiteness.  Now. Still, it was nice to have a watch.  It was gone, that's all...and he was gone too, and her job.  They were gone, simply gone.  She felt a pain in her chest like a wire pulling or turning.  She tried to breath smoothly but the pain increased.  What a disaster teaching had been!  It was the cool wet air...that's what was doing it.  She tried to cough.  She changed position.  The pain tightened, she shouldn't have tried, she felt kind of faint.

The fog cleared in front of her, there was the path and beyond it the broad grassy rolling hills.  Two large round stones sat side by side, there was an equally round berry bush to one side.  Then the fog closed in tightly.  They had had lunch there, yes, and he was gone.  She had always known that he would go; she could see it now.   She had only forgotten that she had known it, just for a while.  She didn't really want to go up North with him, and, he was too exciting anyway, and, he had someone.  Why couldn't she see these things...before.  And the interview.  It hadn't really been his fault that she didn't get the job.  She just wasn't who they wanted, they might not get anyone.  She didn't want the job anyway, not any more, she didn't even want him,  she didn't want anyone.  She wanted to be alone.  And she wanted the fog.  Just like it was right now, this was what she wanted.  It was peaceful. There was no time here, only the roar of the sea.  All was blank softly moving whiteness...perhaps she herself was not here at all, if she just didn't move, she hardly knew she was there.

She stood up, walked to the place she last remembered  seeing the stones.  Some peanut shells were laying before one stone.  She nudged them with her toe and turned around and began her walk back.  It began to rain thinly at first and then in a soft steady drizzle.

EPILOGUE

Chapter Sixteen

The next day it rained all day.  The following day it cleared, but was windy.  Saturday it was sunny but cold.  Sunday she rose to her alarm clock.  She was finally going to make it to that Buddhist farm near Stinson Beach.  She heard that they were open on Sundays and that they had a sermon or service of some sort.  It might be interesting, maybe she'd meet someone.  It started at 10 o'clock.

She had a leisurely breakfast and left in plenty of time to get there by ten,  but she was daydreaming and missed the turn.  When she realized her error, it was too late to turn back.  She accepted the mistake as providence and determined that she had another week to anticipate the adventure.  Instead, this week,  she'd go for a ride.  The road was pretty.  It wound around, high above the coast, up upon the steep sea cliffs.  She drove for almost an hour looking out to the ocean when she could.  There were marshes and bird flocks, grassy hills and broad stretches of land. Then there was forest.

She reasoned that she had taken another road to Point Reyes, one she did not know.  She came to a tiny town with   quaint little shops and novelty stores.  She drove slowly up and down the streets and decided to stop for coffee.  Then she saw it, a small sign saying:  TWO BALL BAR  and another below it:  OPEN.

She parked the car unable to convince herself that it really was 'Open', probably someone had just forgotten to take down the sign.  The door was not locked and a small bell clinked against the glass announcing her arrival.  There were no other customers and she again wondered if the place was actually open.  A man and a woman were in the rear of the space behind a semi-partition dividing the space both longitudinally and laterally.  There was a grill to one side but no sign of a bar, an ordinary bar that is.  There were booths and tables only, no bar at all.  Still, there was a seediness and uncommonly barren feel to the entire interior and she concluded that at night it was a bar.  Its lack of the physical representation only increased her imaginings concerning its unwholesomeness.  She sat down at a booth near the window, the first she came upon.  She did this mostly because she was so stunned by her own surprise and repugnance that only mechanical behavior came to her.  She could hear the waitress and the cook talking now.

"You know the one, out by 'so-and-so' road, right off to the side of the road, there's a ditch filled with water, you could almost call it a pond, you know the one ...well, that's the one!"   Her agitation was tempered by a flat nearly impatient delivery. 

"Who found him?"  The cook wanted to know, and the waitress replied that she didn't know,  'so and-so' had told her, and then she walked away leaving the cook dangling, and closing in upon the young woman sitting at the window booth.

The woman squinted up in obedient compliance at the waitress who now stood before her.  The waitress was fiftyish, a bleach-blond, taller than average and slightly broad in the hips.  Her entire weight rested now upon one leg and the opposite hip was thrust out to serve as a writing surface for her order book.  She looked down imperatively at the woman who said,

"A coffee please."

"That's all?" The waitress asked, and the woman apologetically began explaining that she had already eaten breakfast and had just been on a drive and thought she'd stop for coffee.  The waitress gave her a suspicious look and moved away, and the woman sat wondering if the customers, the usual customers, whoever they were, if they never ordered "just coffee".  The waitress brought the coffee and a creamer and returned to the kitchen.

"When did it happen?" the cook wanted  to know;

"When else?" the waitress replied, "around two thirty, of course."

Bright rays of coarse sunlight fell coldly through the window illuminating the grey air and slowing the woman in the booth.  She sipped at the coffee as if enclosed within a  shell but the  coffee wouldn't swallow right and the grim on all the edges of things was  becoming unbearably oppressive.  The conversation she was overhearing tumbled her already jostled person a step further.  Vince?  It couldn't be,  but ...it could be,  and she hoped they wouldn't say his name.  And when they did, it was a surname and she knew no surnames.

Abruptly the mounting discomfort broke through her semi-mesmerized state.  She sifted through her purse for change, and left the money on the table and walked out the door.  It was still Sunday outside but she was tired already.  Yes, next Sunday, next week, it would be different.

INCH TIME FOOT GEM

NOT TWICE THIS DAY

EVERY MOMENT A PRECIOUS JEWEL

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