THE HORN

For all Mariners

.....the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.

—Joseph Conrad

Preface

Cape Horn lies at the southernmost extremity of the Americas; no land lies beneath it but the frozen wastes of Antarctica. And between this hammer of stone and anvil of ice, as if nature’s literal rock and a hard place, runs a stretch of water so violent and unpredictable, as to be the last passage on earth that a man of the sea would normally choose to make. And yet to the early explorers it held the keys to a kingdom—the raw and untapped wealth of the Orient.

Here the two great seas of earth collide, Atlantic and Pacific, slamming together like opposed rivers in a trough. Here among the cold and merciless waves, both man and ship were tested, the pinnacle of the sailor’s world. Through this crucible passed the immortals, across torrents which now bear their names: the Drake Passage, and the Straits of Magellan.

But as always in life, there is a fine line between desire and obsession, determination and fatal mistake. The Horn claimed countless ships—husbands, fathers, loners and dreamers who would never return to the land of their birth.

Indeed, it was largely because of his obsession to make the treacherous passage that Lieutenant William Bligh of the ‘Bounty’ found his crew in mutiny, and his ship taken from him. Many others paid a far higher price, for facing its storms in inadequate vessels, or at times of turbulence that would not be gainsaid.

To ‘double the cape’, to ‘round the Horn’, these became the watchwords of success, and the yardstick by which Orient-bound captains were measured. Why? Why do men climb mountains, reach into Space, or go down to the sea in ships? Because a man must know what he has inside himself, and that he is, in the end, something more than a floating chip upon the swirling tides of fate. He must know that his efforts and his will, matter. For the mariners of that era the Horn provided the ultimate challenge, the ultimate danger, and the chance at least, for the ultimate reward.

This book will be a chronicle, a captain’s log so to speak, of one man’s attempt at such a passage—of the stories he feels moved to relate as the sullen waves crash against his bow, and the raging winds tear away both sail and rigging. The nature and circumstances of the battle are not in themselves important. The end—a real and meaningful life—are everything. Everything.

It will not be a first attempt, nor even the second or the third. The metaphoric Horn is well know to him, having wrecked his ship, and all but extinguished his life on three separate occasions. What makes this passage different is that he has vowed to succeed, or perish in the attempt. “Give me liberty or give me death!” cried Patrick Henry. He was not speaking in metaphors.

The book is yours, and its author makes you one promise only. He will not lie to you, or try to shade the truth that is, and always must be, the goal of honest literature.

Nederland

The place was as big and empty as its name, an unboundaried sprawl of huge hills and long deep mountain valleys. And in the near distance, the snow-capped giants of the Arapahoe Range. In the winter the thin air came down from them with the bite of ice and freezing streams; in the summer the winds could rip like thunder, or sigh in the pines like the souls of ten thousand Sioux.

The young man had come here to escape: he did not fear the vastness. It reminded him that there were still places where man was not yet master, and the primal rock forests still lived, among great hills like the backs of dinosaurs. And the stars at night, hard and clear and sharp, undimmed by pale city lights, and paler lives.

Only it made him lonely sometimes. To feel his own smallness against the loom of the land. To soak the earth with tears as he lay upon the new grave of a dog, while a weathered mountain woman watched in silence. To drink white wine and sit out at night, listening to the slow, sonorous wine of a mountain bluegrass fiddle. To walk alone through forests of pine which hardly seemed to know him, and to feel the hard struggle to survive in the rare glimpse of a rabbit, a black squirrel, or the night cry of a coyote. He had come so far, these twenty-seven years, and come to so little. To write honestly, endlessly, without once tasting the fruits of his labors, and send the innumerable queries, chapters, and whole manuscripts to men who did not read them. To offer his heart to a woman who would not take it. These things, he knew, were inherent in the life of a man—the desert, the failed hunt, the empty searching. He did not fear this place. Only it made him lonely sometimes.

He sat in an old chair on the wooden porch of the Sundance, two rows of joined, plank faced cabins, in which others more or less like himself made their stand. His dog lay beside him, peaceful but restless, as both breathed the free air and began to feel the day drawing to a close. The sunset would be beautiful but brief, like a farewell kiss. But for now the sky only deepened its blue, framed by the Arapahoe peaks, as the road before the lodge dropped quickly into the sunken spaces before them, winding out of sight. In three hours time not ten cars a night would disturb its gray stillness, cutting the forests in half, but only as a snake splits high grasses.

A small pickup truck approached, left the smooth asphalt for the rutted dirt and scattered stones of the Sundance. Pulling up to an adjacent cabin the truck door was opened and a familiar face emerged, and then another. Francis, who worked in the tungsten mines and had lived here half his life. Rick, his friend from New York. A dog in the back whom they had given shelter. Once beaten and abused, it trusted no one else.

“Francis. What’s up.”

“Going fishing at Rollins Pass. Want to come?” He thought for a moment of the unfinished pages lying on his desk, and of the girl who might visit but probably wouldn’t.

“Yeah. What time?”

“Right now.”

“Can I bring my dog?”

“Of course.”

He went inside to get a jacket, turned off the light, locked the door. Down the three steps and across the way to Francis’ cabin. He helped carry out the lantern, canteen, tackle box and other fishing gear. The tailgate was let down on the truck bed for his dog to jump in. The two animals sniffed each other briefly, settled in opposite corners. The three men packed into the front, closed the flimsy doors. Francis restarted the engine, pushed the stick over and back, and they were off.

Rollins Pass was a narrow, green grass, flat divide that ran straight across the first high ridges of the Colorado Rockies. For more than a hundred years it had been split down the middle by the steel rail and blackened ties of the railroads, carrying the fruits of the prospector’s labors, or taking his weary flesh and broken dreams back down to the lowlands and the great Kansas prairie, back to the east, back to defeat.

The road passed over the burrowing tracks at a small rise. Francis turned right just beyond it, onto a little used dirt road. The sun continued to set and the colors around them lost their hue and the truck bounced on the uneven roadway, as the dogs spread low to brace themselves, and the men bounced against one another. On both sides was the grass vale, then the darkening pines again as the land began to climb. The road wound first left, away from the tracks, then right to cross them. Here they were stopped by the rust brown steel cars of a freight train, empty, stopped dead, blocking their path.

“Son of a bitch,” said Rick, but Francis knew it would move again soon. The other said nothing, lost in his thoughts. Nothing else to do, the three got out, loosed the dogs, and began climbing on, or throwing stones with a dull clang, at the row of cars stretching out of sight. To the left, he knew, its head must be buried in the long tunnel that pierced the next ridge; to the right all was lost in the gloom and the narrowing distance.

At length there came the wail of a horn, the strain of couplers pulling tight, and at last the slow movement of the train. The dogs were put back and now, in near darkness, the three men watched the train move past, then the way open suddenly before them, then the last cars moving out of sight.

They crossed the tracks and the road bent left again, running parallel to the stream. It was neither broad nor deep, and the young man wondered if there really were fish here to be taken. But a mile further up there was a pool, formed as the waters came spilling through an enormous, spiral edged metal pipe, which carried the stream through a bridge of earth constructed for the road. It did not look entirely natural, but Francis said this was his spot, and they stopped the truck and got out and climbed down the rocky bank. Here there was a sandy clearing, bounded by smooth stones, and at the edge of it the pool. Its waters broadened again after the narrowing pipe, calming in a roughly circular expanse perhaps forty feet at its widest point.

They lit lanterns, to see by, and also to attract the fish. They would think it was the moon, and come up for night feeding. In the tackle box were the baits, salmon eggs and worms. The young man waited his turn, then stooped to examine them. It had rained fairly heavily the day before, so on a hunch he took out a worm, lanced it on the hook, and went to choose a place. Francis and Rick, who had been here before, had already taken theirs. The night was still and quiet and you could hardly see the pipe, except to feel the seclusion that its earth bank and the two sloping stone banks gave to the place, seeming a world apart, lost in the deeps of time, and in the heart of the Wild. There really was a moon, bright and nearing the full and streaked now and again by the clouds, dark gray and white against it. The songs of locusts throbbed gently, and the men did not speak.

After standing dumb in the same place without success, he tried to think. This nothing, was like all the failed hunts, the empty searching, and the men who would not read..... But that was not what he wanted to think. You are a fish, he said to himself, and you are hungry but also wary. How would the food come to you that you trust to be real and not a trap? It would come naturally, with the current, came the answer. Like the Tao, his mind echoed: the undercurrent, unseen, old as the earth itself, subtle and deep. He was not sure he believed it, but a worm that had been forced out of the ground and washed down by the rains, must come through the pipe, follow the swirls, and settle at last in the still deep water a short way farther down.

He reeled in his line, checked the worm, threw it into the water and got another. This he placed on the hook so that it was doubled and knotted in the middle, covering the bend of barbed steel, but with a length of body at each end to move freely and look alive. He walked up toward the noisy clear waters of the pipe as they spilled down, and let out a short length of line. Then he lowered the hook into the current and walked with it, slowly and carefully, as it swirled behind a boulder, came toward him, out again and down a shallow incline, then slowed into the calming waters of a second, hidden deep. The current had not brought him to the place his mind imagined, but that hardly—

He felt something hard strike the line, and the end of the rod dipped sharply. There was little time to think, but this was not a thing which required thought. Instinctively he pulled back on the bending rod, reeled in line, and brought the fish closer. Francis had already set down his pole, and was moving closer with the net.

“Keep him off the rocks,” he urged calmly.

“I know,” the young man said.

Still the fish pulled and jerked madly, trying to wrench itself free. Too much pressure, or too sudden a pull, and he would do just that.

But now he was very close. The man stepped back and raised his pole high. Francis plunged the net and swept it below him, and lifted out the struggling fish. He reached in, took firm hold of it, and removed the hook. The he put it into the fisherman’s bucket, filled with the clear cold water, and together they examined the prize.

A ten inch rainbow trout, weighing more than two pounds. Hardly a monster, but in these shallow, unstocked and unmanipulated waters, quite a catch. Its gills opened and closed rhythmically, and at intervals it would give a burst with its powerful tail, churning the water and spinning quick circles in the steel enclosure.

“Nice fish!” said Francis, his normally reserved face breaking into a broad, unhesitating smile. He held out his hand, which the young man took heartily, then turned away, wondering why large tears were forming in his eyes. He sat down on a stone, and let out a breath that seemed to have been caged in his body for years.

Later that night both Francis and Rick took a fish. But they were smaller, brown trout, and the young man did not even try to fish again. He just sat at a distance, watching the fire they had made with the dog nestled beside him, stroking its ear and breathing the fresh, free air. Alive.

No Way Home

The line had been crossed. Somewhere back there, he couldn’t remember. It was hot again after the cool of night, and sweat drenched the shirt to his back, beneath the pack and the strap of his rifle, as the torn leather band of the helmet ate his forehead. The men around him, his charge, kept peering into the trees and at the thick undergrowth as they walked, fearful of ambush. But there was something irrational added to their fear, as if they too felt intruders in a place forbidden, beyond the boundaries set for men in the living world. But Sgt. Ramos was not afraid. He wished he was. That at least would have been some kind of emotion. Vaguely uneasy, aching and exhausted, that was all that he could feel. He knew where he was—the green mountains of Laos; and who these men were—south Vietnamese soldiers. Only he couldn’t get the line out of his head, and it obscured all else in its monotonous delirium. He wasn’t delirious, really, just dazed with fever, and feeling at the end of the world. Because the line had been as invisible as the border he knew they must have crossed, somewhere back in the relentless, witchcraft jungle. But what did it mean, and why didn’t he feel any different? He was still himself, the mind housed in this, his body.

Yet something vital was gone, as if the life’s blood had been slowly leeched from him, leaving behind a bodiless wraith to wander damned among the skeletal trees..... He stepped across a fallen trunk, with half his mind heard the shriek of a monkey high above. But where, and how had it happened? For that he must go back, far back, to the other time. He knew it was hopeless, that there was no returning, yet there were many miles still to walk, and he was tired. Somehow he must trick himself into going a little farther. Into nothing. His mind looked back with a last shred of hope and real courage: perhaps this time it would all come out, and he would understand. He knew better, but there were many miles.

He tried to examine his childhood. But as ever now the memories would not come vividly, were not felt beyond a certain depth. They were like a kind of fiction he had outgrown, false and meaningless because of their softness and sentiment. The father and brother, the sheltered home and robust athletics. A three letter man in high school he had enlisted, and thrived because of his strength. In time he had become a Green Beret, in further time a sergeant, and sent to command his own platoon in the patriotic war on the other side of the world—the dark side, where humanity was not valued, and life and death chased one another like mad figures in a dream. The barber shop on Saturday morning, the hunting and fishing magazines, the brave talk, the shoe-shine boy, and the clean masculine smell of hair and razor oil and tonic. The mountains, the stars at night. Making love to Susan in the back of his Impala. It all seemed a thousand years, a million miles away. It was only with an effort that he saw these things at all, pale and evaporating like the mists through which he walked. Little Town, Colorado.

Infinitely clearer were the images of war, which had burst upon him like the swift percussion of machine-gun fire. The eight year old boy who had approached Pvt. Henley, holding something behind his back and saying, “Hey Joe, this good. You buy?” Then tossing him a grenade which had killed them both. The yellow terror of walking in file down a narrow jungle path, knowing there was a Viet Cong stronghold nearby, the land tunneled and booby-trapped. The sudden bursts of enemy fire, hitting the deck, scrambling for cover and firing back.

But these he had handled well enough. His mind had been strong, and he was proud of his fortitude. No, it wasn’t these images, seen only, but the series of shattering jolts, like stepping on a mine, that had torn his heart, like a severed limb, away from him. Yet these same episodes, pressing painfully on all the senses at once, which had haunted him both waking and in dream. . .even these had begun to fade. He welcomed them now, for they brought the memory, at least, of emotion. He smashed a stinging mosquito on his arm, looked back at his men, kept walking.

His second day in Nam, being flown by helicopter to replace a sergeant killed in action. They skimmed along, low and swift, above an undulating canopy of green, their shadow darkening, but never truly touching the sea of land beneath them. Suddenly the pilot turned to the man beside him, saying loudly over the roar of the engines, “You see what I see?”

“Yeah.”

“Shall we go back and get ‘im?”

“Hell yeah.”

So they circled their loud, nasty insect and returned to the place, where a man high in a tree, saw them and turned his rifle toward them in desperation. But the gunner had already trained the 8mm cannon on him and hoough—Bamm! the whole top of the tree exploded, and what was left of the body fell in pieces to the ground. One of the two said “Fuckin’ A,” and they both burst out laughing.

They they landed, to drop off supplies and pick up a prisoner. The captain in charge of the outpost gestured, and the co-pilot jumped out. The C.O. had said of the beaten and sullen V.C., “He doesn’t want to tell us where his friends are. Think you can help us change his mind?”

“Sure,” said the pilot, when the message was relayed. “Climb aboard.”

They had blindfolded the man, already bound, and taken off. They veered from side to side and rose a little, but then returned to the spot, not ten feet off the ground. “Now,” said the captain, sliding open the cargo door as the roar and blast of the propellers pushed in from above. “You tell us or you die.” The man struggled against the ropes that bound him, wrists to ankles, but said nothing. “Have it your way.” And the captain threw him out. The man had not yet begun to scream when he struck the ground, the chopper landed, and cursing and kicking, the men of the company bruised him into near unconsciousness.

“Well, we tried. He’s all yours,” said the captain.

“Mind if we try it our way?” said the pilot.

“Not at all,” said the captain, and gave him a knowing look. They loaded the prisoner as before, waved good-bye. And when they were perhaps a thousand feet in the air, moving north again, the pilot said to his companion, smiling. “Hey Dawkins. Show the sergeant here what we do to gooks with laryngitis.”

“Hell yeah.” The man unharnessed himself, threw open the broad door, and dragged the man closer to the opening. “Hey Gook!” he cried savagely. “Where’s your friends now?” No reply. Dawkins glared at him, snarled, then threw him out. After perhaps a second came the scream, barely audible, and somewhere below the man struck solid earth, and lay there.

Helicopters, always these were the messengers, strange dragonflies of death. This time he was on the ground, pinned down by fire at the edge of a village, and the thing had come to pull them out. But as it drew nearer a line of silent flame leapt from the enemy hilltop, a Russian anti-aircraft gun, and the chopper seemed to explode from within, flipping completely over, and crashing into a reed hut where an old man lay hiding with his family. This he knew because a woman had come rushing out, badly burned, but carrying a child nearly cut in two by the blade. Thump, whump. His heart came looser, as the woman looked down and saw that the child was dead.

But the girl. The girl had killed it completely. There was nothing left inside but a hollow space to reverberate the vast cruelty around him, so many layers thick, unfathomable, invincible. They were near the north, inside the unspoken DMZ. But something had gone wrong, the cease-fire failed. Or we had bombed Hanoi, he couldn’t remember. They came to a village, devastated as an act of vengeance. And this was no amateur job, but the work of Hanoi’s boys, the trained and disciplined demons of the North. He had felt a little sick as they entered, but really, he had seen all this before. Bodies were always hideous, in various attitudes of pain and final degradation, as was the stench of burned and decaying human flesh. He took in the sights one by one, telling himself it didn’t matter. But there seemed almost a subtle pattern to the killings, monstrous, unearthly, but at the same time darkly familiar. They seemed to lead, like the steps of an altar, to the naked heart of some inexorable purpose so grim and appalling that if once he looked upon it, even at the point of war’s merciless sword, his soul would be devoured, the last faint candle snuffed out. The lieutenant ordered him up a side passage, that the prophecy should be fulfilled, to look through a half burned row of huts on a shallow hillside. His head was hot and swimming, and after a few dozen steps he stopped to douse it with the canteen. And when he lowered it again he saw a bare leg, golden and shapely, protruding from the cover of high grass. “I don’t want to see this,” he said aloud. But some last pathetic hope—the word ‘alive’ played in his mind, an impotent contradiction to the accomplished fact all around him—drew him forward. He brushed aside a broad, covering leaf with the tip of his rifle.....

And there she was. Perhaps sixteen, very beautiful, she lay naked and a little on her side, multiply raped and shot through the head. But the bullet-wound was hidden, and only a little blood showed beneath it, darkening the earth as lovers’ tears might soak a pillow. But this. . .it didn’t. . .he had seen..... Only she was so God damned beautiful, even now, looking so soft and vulnerable. He took off his rifle and knelt beside her, feeling insanely the need to touch her. To make love, and tell her it was all right. Perhaps if he did the life would go out of his body and into hers, the spirit returning from its immeasurable distance, and she would get up, and weep as the others found him there, dead of her wounds. He touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and at the same instant heard a sound like the wail of a tortured dog. It startled him. Two men rushed around a corner, but the sound had come from him.

It’s not fair, he said to himself now, as he walked. These three words were all that remained, a final and unalterable pronouncement on all that he had seen, done, and become. Only they didn’t mean anything. Except that even now he wanted to make love to her, as in the dream. But when he went to kiss her, the lips pulsed blue with cold dead blood, and he woke up screaming.....

A rifle-shot rang out from the trees ahead. Two of his men turned to flee. He shot over their heads with the pistol and shouted wildly and the two men stopped running, more afraid of him, for the moment, than the enemy.

It was late afternoon, and the objective was in sight. The long, curving spur of the Ho Chi Mihn trail was now less than a mile away, separated from them by a deep recession that lay between two opposing rows of hills. His men were spread behind him in the covering growth. Through the binoculars he saw the trail, nothing more than a dirt road winding near the top of the long green ridge before him. But along this meager roadway moved the life’s blood of destruction—guns, ammunition and supplies—all that was needed to keep the South a living hell, until the Americans had had enough and went home. Without them there was not much fight left in the land: the people didn’t care which dictatorship ruled them. They were just weary, so weary of war and hardship, the endless call for recruits—sons they would never see again; and supplies—food taken from their children’s mouths to prolong a questionable cause, an insatiable beast. No one cared now but the leaders, who had a vested interest, and the American presidents and flag-waving fools, fighting dominoes in their sleep and trying to make some obscure point, wholly without understanding, and at the expense of an entire nation.

But Sgt. Ramos knew none of this, was not capable of knowing it. He was too close, and had been there too long. All he knew was the bloody face of war, the killing and the dying. But even these words, as everything else, had lost their meaning for him. By his very existence—living, instead of blowing his brains out—he had been pushed beyond all such distinction, beyond everything he had once recognized as human, lasting, or benevolent. Somewhere the living world had fallen away beneath him, leaving his limbs to dance feebly, like a marionette, upon the strings of some twisted puppeteer whose face he could not see, and whose sole purpose seemed the destruction of all that made life worth living. But he was too blinded even to see this. Destruction, in what was left of his mind, lay across the empty space before him, in the form of the steady stream of peasants bent beneath their burdens, leading ox-carts filled with heavy crates, or looking fearfully at the soldiers who had pressed them into service, and now ‘protected’ them from harm.

His orders, along with countless other units more or less like his own, were to disrupt the flow. But Ky had lost the mortar-launcher in fording the swift and muddy stream, God damn him, and the bazooka was all but useless at this range. He lay and watched helplessly the procession of arms, the setting sun, felt his body aching and exhausted as the first chill breeze of evening crept under his sleeves to attack the wet sweat that still clung to him. He shivered dully, and the word fever played loudly in his mind. Till something inside of him snapped. Knowing nothing but anger, irritation, and yes, even hatred, he ordered Deng to bring him the long-range rifle, bought on the black market, and the envy of any hunter back home. He lifted the scope to his eye, and the file jumped to distinguishable shapes. One in particular it was drawn to, an old man bent beneath a gasoline drum, mounted to a make-shift frame on his back. He gauged the angle and distance, discounted the wind. It would be a tough shot, but far from impossible. This, after all, was what he was here for.

“Sorry, old man. It’s either you or me.” He squeezed the trigger.

There was a burst of flame that filled the eye-piece, followed after a second or two by a dull explosion. Then came shouts of supreme anguish as burning bodies leapt from the road, lay broken and writhing, or rolled themselves in the dirt, itself alive with fire. Only the old man had died instantly.

The man threw aside his gun and stood up, astonished. Raising the binoculars once more to his eyes, he looked on in a stupor of disbelief. Twelve people at least had been killed or hopelessly maimed, and not a soldier among them. But how? Surely it was not because of him. Yet there lay the rifle at his feet, the convulsive figures at his face. A horror engulfed him, so complete, that it overwhelmed all languor and uncertainty, leaving but a single word.

“NO!” One of the broken figurines was a woman, little more than a girl.....

Calmly now, no longer grieving, he took a grenade from his belt. And with hands so sure and unhesitating that they did not seem his own, he pulled the pin and held it to his breast.

6... 5... His men scattered in all directions. 3... 2... “I love you, Momma.” The grenade went off.

Then all was silent, without pain, and totally black.

Patty

I never knew her well. But then, she was always something of a mystery even to those closest to her. Her parents had died when she was young, I think, or separated: some tragedy, great or small, of which she would never speak. In fact I couldn’t say for certain with whom she lived, possibly her grandfather, in an older house a short distance from the intermediate high school. It was here that I met her, talked with her; indeed, we ran in more or less the same circles. But she had a way of being right there in front of you, of looking straight into your eyes. . .but a part of her mind, or rather her spirit, was always somewhere else. Now that I think of it she often looked away, though her eyes did not seem to take in whatever random object they rested upon. But neither did they flit, and their occasional inattention was not due to personal weakness or lack of character. On the contrary, she was strong and self-possessed beyond her years, and showed no sign of the relentless insecurity so prevalent at that, most tender of ages. For I knew her from the time she was fourteen years old, to something just past seventeen. And now she’s gone.

I don’t know how it has fallen to me to be the teller of her tale, as I know only small fragments of it. Still, I was there at the end, and often think of her in restless, unsettled moments—in times of sorrow and longing both. I did not love her in life; we were not close enough for that. But I can truly say I love her now, and feel a sense of loyalty to her memory that binds me more closely to her than to many who fill my waking hours. No, I never looked upon her wistfully, and if now in a lonelier time I seem to do so, it is only because of the questions for which I will never now have an answer. Who were you, Patty, and where have you gone?

But if the task is mine then I must do it well. Somehow I must present a structured and linear tale, though my relation to her was anything but that, and life rarely unfolds in the disciplined order which the narrative demands. Yet I will try, and hope that somewhere among the rueful, superfluous words, some glimmer of her enigmatic spirit may appear, if only for the briefest instant, inside you. For you see, gentle reader, we who yet live are in the vast minority, and someday we, too, will exist only in memory.

I met her in the ninth grade, September, 1971. We shared Study Hall in the auditorium of Charles Boehm Intermediate High School, Yardley, Pennsylvania. It was a beautifully wooded, relatively calm and well-ordered suburb, some thirty miles north of Philadelphia, along the gentle banks of the Delaware River. But beneath the calm exterior there was unrest, a polarization between the young and old that has been inadequately referred to as ‘the generation gap’. It was more like a chasm. The common threads of her culture and mine were marijuana and dissent—the Vietnam War was in its full fire, and the threat of nuclear destruction had not yet become familiar enough to breed a zombie disbelief. Society and the police called us hippies, dopers, degenerates. But we were not. We were only trying to cope, to understand, and to find some better way. We may have been confused, but we were not hypocrites, and our greatest longing was for peace, though we seldom found it.

But here, the words to a song of that time.

Said the straight man, to the late man
Where have you been?
I’ve been here and, I’ve been there and
I’ve been in between.

You don’t possess me, don’t impress me
Just upset my mind
Can’t instruct me, or conduct me
Just use up my time.

I talk to the wind
My words, all are carried away
I talk to the wind:

The wind, does not hear
The wind cannot hear

—Peter Sinfield,
King Crimson

Patty Bartlett. Her physical appearance was one to immediately impress itself upon the senses, and I can see her as clearly today as I did those sixteen years ago. She had and straight dark hair, which framed honestly and without pretension a slender and finely chiseled face. Her eyes were those of a model—not as large perhaps, but every bit as striking. Their color was brown, but that drab word seems to imply a commonness in no way present. Her cheekbones were high, her nose straight and symmetrical. Her lips were strong, neither large nor small but well-shaped, and in perfect keeping with the rest of her face. Its skin was smooth and of a tanned, almost Eurasian hue, though there was little else to suggest the Orient about her. She had a slender figure, almost thin, which made her look taller than she was, and which did not at first suggest sensuality. But it so harmonized with the face, and she carried it so matter-of-factly, that you would never ask it to be otherwise. It simply was, like the rest of her, and she made no attempt either to conceal it, or to enhance it with clothes. She wore corduroy pants mostly, or jeans, and tight pull-over blouses that showed quite clearly her small, attractive breasts. The overall impression was one of lean, almost stark beauty. Yes, she was beautiful.

Her boyfriends were usually older than herself, possibly because of the lack of a father, but more likely because she herself was older. She didn’t play games; she didn’t get into trouble; and quite often you were left with the idea that, unlike yourself she was impervious to confusion, and didn’t really need anything or anyone. But looking back now with the hard wisdom of the years, there must have been a terrible void in her, some hidden wound which she concealed, not out of pride or fear, but simply because she had given up hope of ever healing it. She was alone, as all of us were, but she the more so, because she was surrounded by people who thought they knew her.

But none of us did. The proof of this lay in the overall reaction to her death. Now death is something that the young rarely understand, and it is to them a thing far more tragic. But there was more to it than that: an utter bewilderment, a simple inability to comprehend. And yet at the same time, those who had ever wondered what lay beneath the surface. . .were not surprised. Shocked and horrified, yes. But somehow not surprised. It was as if some dark figure from the land of the dead had slipped in through a hole in her spirit, and taken her away.

But here, I am ahead of myself. At La Bohème she still lived fully, and by all appearances, normally. One might even say happily, except that there was always that sense of suppressed uneasiness when she looked away from you, and, in my own case at least, a subtle and instinctive disbelief when she appeared to be on top of the world.

I would try to give you exemplary incidents from the two years we both spent there, except that to an outsider they would seem trivial, their true meaning obscured. The image that comes to me most strongly is somewhat disconcerting, because I cannot honestly say whether it occurred in the waking world, or came to me later in a dream—in years when my own black hole gaped ominous and wide, and I did not know with anything approaching certainty that my own secret assassin would not soon appear to carry me off. For I tell you, I was more nearly in her world than ours.

We stood outside her grandfather’s house, looking for her. I felt a hard frost beneath my shoes, against the gray, plank walls of the house and in the freezing, airless wind. But most of all I remember the door. A flimsy thing it was, like that of a ruin. And yet it was padlocked. We wanted desperately to get inside—was she there with us? But short of tearing the thing from its hinges, we could not. The frost on the gray planks, the windless air.....

Then we lost touch for a while. The senior high school was much larger, joining our somewhat sheltered suburbanites with the rougher-cut descendants of factory and steel mill workers. Our paths split apart, until they were brought together again by a cripple. That is a harsh word, I know, yet I do not use it lightly. Many are forced to live all of their lives with a physical handicap, and myself not least among them. But Ron I call a cripple, because he was crippled on the inside as well. He never came to grips with the muscular disorder that twisted his legs, never mustered the stark courage to face it and fight it. Or maybe he had not the strength left from childhood, where he was literally and emotionally beaten down by ignorance and rough surroundings. I don’t know the answer.

We must call a spade a spade because I too was on crutches for a time, though I did not recognize them as such. The time-bomb of guilt, and of servitude to a cruel, indifferent God, planted in every latent victim of Catholic school, had been ticking away in me unnoticed. For two long years it smoldered, until the circumstances were right for the inevitable explosion. Those circumstances do not matter, and the only virtue I can find in that time is that it killed in me forever the pale and heartless spectre of altruism—that singular ideal, so wholly opposed to every law of man and nature, which we cling to the more desperately because of it, thinking that by doing so we can block out illness, death, and all the other hardships inherent and unavoidable in life.

But I had not yet learned this when I met Ron. I knew only that here was a chance to practice the well-intentioned drivel I preached, and extend the hand of charity to my fellow man. Ron accepted it gladly. He was used to it, and he lived on it. We became friends, after a fashion, and often went out together on weekends.

The connection, odd and alarming as it is to look back on, was this. Ron had a crush on Patty, and I do not use that word lightly. She would talk to him; she was kind to him; and she was beautiful. He began to pine over her, to follow after her. And I, lost in my harlequin’s role, did nothing to discourage him. Knowing something of her past and of her sorrow, I clearly saw the pain it cost her. I think by then the old wound had reopened, or perhaps new injuries had piled themselves upon her. I had not spoken to her at length for many months, and told myself I did not see. But I knew what I knew.

I think Patty must have known it, too, had some premonition of a dark and tragic end. Or else the sinister undercurrents which we strive so hard to disbelieve. . . exist after all. Obscure and meaningless as life can be, we are given on the rarest occasions a glimpse into its powerful, tempestuous heart—a sudden stark insight, a moment of unbelievable poignancy. But often what we see is too intense, and we tell ourselves that no such vision has been granted us. It is this same protective incredulity which keeps us from believing too deeply in the nightmare narratives of dark fiction, even when they are based on personal experience—nay, even when they are purest fact itself. But when it occurs in your own life, when it has stood right there in front of you, raw and menacing, it is impossible to shake from your thoughts, its message forever branded on your heart. I am not lying to you, or stretching the truth one iota. I wish I was.

Patty worked as a waitress at the Coco’s on Route 1, and a more drab and commonplace setting is difficult to imagine. Yet it was here that the apparition appeared to me. I used to take Ron to see her of a Friday night, adding my own, born-again stupidity to the burdens she already carried. Nowhere was the struggle to put on a brave and cheerful face more taxing for her, or more obvious. It was as if the twisted shadow that followed her, here trapped her in a last, desperate corner. And I was the vehicle to bring that shadow to her.

But the apparition. It was Halloween, that chill October night when we make a sport of our bloodiest, ancestral fears. All the waitresses in that bastion of mediocrity were dressed in lame costume of one kind or another, mildly embarrassed, or absurdly pleased with what they had created. But not Patty. Her natural intensity, or something else, would allow no such shallow display. I don’t know what possessed her to choose the image she did, but when she first approached the table I looked up. . .and for the space of several seconds I groped about in total darkness, trying to find my way back to the world of light and security. Of course my face remained immobile, and I was soon able to discipline my reaction. My mind accepted her guise, even shrugged if off as some bizarre funk on the part of the creator. But on a deeper, primal level I was horrified, and the dull shock of it has never left me.

She was a corpse. Her face, already thin, and by that time worn as well, had been painted a pale and ghostly white, with dark and sunken circles about the hopeless, dying eyes. She was terrible to behold, a waking nightmare relived in brutal dream. Her lips, dear God, were blue. And not long after, she was dead.

I was not there to see her murdered, but I see it all too clearly in my mind, knowing the place as well as my backyard, and so easily able to imagine the sudden terror of her face at the moment of supreme undoing.

It happened in the parking lot of the Oxford Valley Mall. The perimeters were edged in wilderness, and poorly lit. I can see her now walking toward her car, weary, head down, suspecting nothing of the assassin in the night. He came up behind her, wielding a long knife, and took hold of her throat. Reaching across her shoulder, he stabbed her breasts again and again. She fell to the asphalt bleeding, her fear, confusion and hope, draining with her life.

The madman drove away. A brutal and senseless killing, taking forever the soul of one with much goodness in her, and pain that deserved a better answer.

I learned the details of it in the high school hallway, told to me by a beautiful, idiot girl who seemed to find special fascination in the ‘sexual nature’ of the attack. The morning announcement confirmed that she was dead, and asked for a moment of silence. As if to add insult to tragedy, no mention was made of the black, male student who had also perished that weekend, victim of a car crash. I was left with the taste of wasted death in my mouth, and wholly unable to grieve. For the sudden pain of grief must come as something of a shock, and I felt nothing of the sort. I experienced only a heightening of the emptiness around me, and a sick crawling in the pit of my stomach.

The next day I took Ron to the wake, and any sense of unadmitted resentment toward him vanished. For he, at least, could grieve. He was crushed. We took our turn in the line facing the open coffin, and his presence added a kind of dark dignity to the hall, a testament to her kindness. I had befriended Ron because of his handicap, thinking I was a good boy to do so. She was kind to him, because she felt his pain.

When my turn came to stand before the body, my only thought was one of disbelief. I did not know who or what was the thing before me; but surely it was not Patty. Too clearly did I see her striding loose and happy down the halls of Charles Boehm, too clearly felt my own, slow-awakened desire for her, which I seemed to admit to myself only then, for the first and final time. I remembered the death mask, but more vividly imagined the gashes in her breasts..... The face was far too still to suggest either sorrow, or peace, or profound repose. It was only dead, and dead means gone forever. This reclining, waxen figure was not Patty. I turned and walked out slowly, turning hateful eyes on Claudia, my own hopelessly lost and bewildered Madonna, who sat blankly in the final row. Her friend and fellow waitress, somehow I blamed her, for something. Sweet Claudia, forgive me. My heart was broken yet I could not weep. You were alive, and she was dead.

The funeral was worse. For now my incredulity was gone, yet her death remained. The church, with few exceptions, was filled with those as young and forlorn as myself, pretty girls clutching to their boyfriends, unable to comprehend; young men looking strained and awkward; and Ron with his head bowed over the pew, as if in final defeat. I had never, before or since, felt my heart so crushed, or my soul in such unrelenting agony. Only the faceless woman sitting at the organ as we waited for the service to begin, kept me from irrevocable despair. Perhaps she had done this many times before, and knew the universal sorrow of death. Or perhaps even she was moved, and played with a gentle and sympathetic feeling unique to that hour. I do not know, and I do not care. She may have saved my life, and I thank her for it.

Once the service began the bludgeoning pain was brushed at least partly aside by the inanity of all things human. A minister who knew nothing of her, less than nothing, mumbled a few words about her goodness, the loss we all felt, and God’s mysterious ways. If God had stood before me in that moment, telling me the reason, I would have cursed him and tried to kill him.

But that is pointless. The service ended. We drove in a long, slow file to the cemetery. They placed the coffin on the thick belts of cloth that would later lower it into the ground. An old man, presumably her grandfather, wept pathetically on the shoulder of a total stranger—because she was young, like Patty. That shoulder, too, heaved with inexpressible pain. I felt something die inside me. Yet I could no more weep than bring her back from the dead. We just drove away. She was gone.

One last scene remained to be played. On an evening shortly after, I was at the small apartment of Ron’s family, a lost, unexceptional group of the world’s faceless and forgotten. A knock came at the door. Mrs. X, very much surprised, admitted two detectives who asked to speak to Ron, a known acquaintance of the deceased. What twisted logic had brought them there I could not say, except perhaps an exasperation at the complete lack of motive and suspect that confronted them. The assassin had vanished back through the rift between the worlds, leaving not a trace.

The policeman asked a few questions while Ron sat in bewildered silence, nodded or shook his head. I don’t know what moved me to step in, except that I knew a good deal more of what they were asking than he did. He saw her through the eyes of infatuation. I knew her as a real and flawed human being.

Yes, I said, there were drugs in her past. Her boyfriend sold them. The sidekick opened his notepad at this, and they turned their attention to me. Did she have a drug dependency? Possibly. Did she have any enemies? Not a one that I could think of. Could the killing be some kind of retaliation against the boyfriend for drug deal gone sour? I doubted it; he was strictly small-time. How long had I known her, and what was my relationship to her? Three years, and none at all. They grasped for a while longer at the straws I had given them, then thanked us and left. What they could not admit, what none of us could admit, was the certainty that the crime would never be solved, because it was a thing wholly outside the sunlit world. How trace a phantom madman? How find a shadow in full Night?

And in fact no motive was ever found, no suspect brought in. The only clue, insignificant as it was, has galled me to this day. For the assailant (or perhaps an innocent, unrelated being) was seen driving away in a blue Volkswagen. I drove a blue Volkswagen: it was the vehicle which had carried Ron to the restaurant, to the wake, and to the grave. Ron owned a dilapidated, greenish Volkswagen without an engine. At least that explained the visit, and the later follow-up on me. But the detectives never seriously suspected either of us, never questioned us again. Half the goddamned township drove Volkswagens, and the murderer was gone.

But when they left a stunned silence ensued. Neither Ron nor his hovering, protective mother had had any idea of the things I told the police. It was a world unknown to them, as their world was to me. All was still for a time until Ron, to his everlasting credit and my everlasting surprise, symbolically shook his fist at the heavens, and made his pronouncement.

“There ain’t no God, or this never would have happened.” He said it flatly, and perhaps without the conviction for which I gave him credit. But he said it all the same, and it startled me. His mother replied with an insipid look of fear that such talk wasn’t safe. I believe, to my shame, that I mumbled something about ‘reasons we don’t understand’.

But Ron stood his ground. “I just don’t see no justice in it.” At that we were silent, because we knew that he was right.

Now I sit with decaying words at my fingers, left with feelings both of remorse, and cruel inadequacy. I search in vain for some moral, however dark, to leave you. But there is none. Perhaps she was one who could never have found peace or happiness, but I doubt it. Her innate strength was too obvious, whatever the demons she faced. I tell myself that if I had known the depths of her suffering, if anyone had, we might have done something to relieve it. But these are only words. The accomplished fact stands in its silent enormity, defying me. She is dead. I will never see her again, never speak to her or comfort her. I will never hold her in my arms, and tell her it’s all right.

In his simple misery, Ron saw it more clearly than any of us. There is nothing left but to echo his words, and acknowledge the truth of them. There is no God, or such things would never happen—once, let alone again and again. I just don’t see the justice in it.

I love you, Patty.

Turn out the light.

The Cove

It was rather too much of a contrast—the wealth and physical beauty of La Jolla, and the moronic squalor of downtown San Diego. He worked in the former and lived in the latter, commuting back and forth as if daily crossing the line between Disneyland and Gasoline Alley. The only constant was the gasoline. He worked at La Jolla Chevron, a beautifully designed and executed asphalt ornament, catering to the very rich. He lived in the Gordon Hotel, left over clap-trap from the fifties, hiding hole of the (relatively) poor.

Anyone who doesn’t believe in the existence of white trash or welfare vultures, has never lived in a poorer neighborhood downtown. Phrases like ‘helping the needy’ and ‘equal opportunity for all’ lose a good deal of their romance. What he had found, at least in the microcosm to which he was exposed, were people who lived poorly because they deserved (i.e., they had earned) nothing more. Healthy younger men who sat around Social Services grousing to their fat, unattractive wives, usually holding at least one child: “That’s why I can’t find a job, ‘cause I ain’t black. If I was a nigger…..” till you wanted to punch them in the teeth. (Physically) healthy young women, following after abusive men who drank, cursed them, and often brutalized both themselves and their children. Members of minorities who hadn’t learned the hard but unalterable lesson: that poverty is a closing circle of hyenas, and you must fight your way out. Downright bums, aggressively panhandling, cursing the hands that gave, and floating their brains out their ears on a river of cheap liquor. Come and live in the city, gentle liberals, then we’ll talk about your checkbook conscience and self-righteous philanthropy.

Anyone who doesn’t believe too much money is a disease, and that every other rich person should be stuffed into a trash compactor, has never worked among the social elite. Family groups with four Rolls Royces, all of whom rave vehemently that there should be no income or property tax, because they’ve “worked like Spartans” to get where they are (which usually bears about as much truth as the bums who tell you their brains were scrambled in Vietnam), and therefor deserve even more than what they already have. Seventy-five year old men who haven’t yet figured out they’ll be dead soon, and their money and ‘breeding’ won’t mean a thing. Young goddesses who sell their bodies and their souls to marry cold-handed and cold-hearted momma’s-boys who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives..... But they have MONEY!!! You begin to get the picture. Drop dead, heartless conservatives.

La Jolla, California is set along one of the most magnificent stretches of coastline in the United States, if not the world. Shallow cliffs opening on cradled stretches of sand, offshore islets where seals recline unafraid, tidal pools in which the magic of the sea can be studied in miniature, migrating whales and feeding dolphins, all in crystalline waters alive and aching with color. A gentle cove from which to scuba-dive, a beautifully landscaped and richly flowered township. Heaven on earth, except for the grotesque lizards which inhabit it, sipping their drinks at the country club, buying Ferraris as a second car and (if they have any feeling at all) living in terror of the inevitable stroke or heart-attack.

The living areas of downtown San Diego are something between a tight urban neighborhood and a slum, with elements of both. Go four blocks in any direction from the skyscraping banks and fashionable shopping districts, and you have leftover Los Angeles filth, varying in degradation and intensity according to neighborhood. Seventh Avenue north of Broadway, on which tilts the Gordon Hotel (literally, as the road climbs sharply past it), is relatively safe from the junkies and winos, if only because of its elevation above the city sink-hole. That human refuse has descended liquidly into the low-lying center, and to escape requires a mental energy most in it no longer possess, if they ever did. The east side of Seventh is mostly occupied by Chicanos and blacks, generally preferable, as they at least have some reason to be here: it is their home, their community. Our main character’s side of the street, unfortunately, is made up largely of the afore-mentioned trash: shabby apartments, dirty, roach-filled hotels, though he has seen (and lived in) much worse.

Driving to work in the early afternoon is like being let out of prison. Driving back at night is realizing you have not yet escaped the urban jungle. And jungle it truly is, if paling in comparison to a Harlem, Watts or Detroit—hell on earth. But purgatory is bad enough. He carries a double-edged throwing-knife at his hip, speaks to no one, walks quickly and alertly from his car (which must be parked three blocks away) to the dingy, non-descript hotel. Saturday night is downright dangerous—Chicano dances at the El Cortez convention center. He must stay in the shadows, avoiding the pools of bottle-throwing youths outside, not necessarily out for blood, but you never know.

Not exactly a tale of two cities, but day to day life for the struggling is rarely as glamorous or dramatic as fiction paints it. More often it is simply hard labor, hard surroundings, and the endless frustration of trying to keep alive one’s hopes in the midst of a world which, if it cares at all, despises you for trying. Dreams have their place, but don’t last long when constantly being hit in the head by hard reality.

He works in a rectangular metal cashier’s booth, with bullet-proof glass and twelve-gauge steel walls. On any given evening, he is probably the safest person in La Jolla. But the walls of this fortress cannot protect him against the mental abuse so inherent in menial labor. Ignorant people are always dumping their frustrations on those not allowed to fight back—waitresses, working people, the police—but are particularly ugly to those who tend their insatiable metal horses, eating money the way the organic beast devours fodder. It is a bizarre and depressing phenomenon for those caught on the wrong side, but one which cannot be denied. Perhaps it is because these largely innocent gas-jockeys see them in moments of weakness, addicted to the poison juice for which the oil companies extort their huge profits. Perhaps it is because they understand something of the mechanical workings of the world, which the elite do not. Or perhaps people are just fucking idiots, always and everywhere looking to ‘get even’ for the essential things missing from their lives, which they will never find. In truth they haven’t a clue what to look for, and deceived, run instead the mad race to accumulate material objects, at the expense of any who stand in their way. Not to belabor the point, but people in southern California are, on the whole, more aggressive and less understanding than elsewhere. And of course the extremely rich are the worst of all, considering themselves the crème de la crème (crap of the crap?), far superior to anyone, let alone gas station scum, who don’t deserve this golden opportunity to kiss their royal ass.

So. It is a Sunday, in summer, in sunny southern California, which to the gas station employee translates into eight thousand tourists angrily trying to pump their gas at once, asking directions, demanding that someone work on their neglected, finally despairing vehicles, trying to park on the lot and walk to the beach, being aggressive toward each other and especially to the hired help, for having only two hands, one mind, and the other seven-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine people to deal with. Our nameless, faceless main character is about to go insane, working rapidly and accurately the keys of the computerized cash machine while being called slow, stupid and an asshole by every tenth moron with his wallet up his butt, and just generally wanting to explode.

Yet if life were nothing but drudgery and empty, fruitless struggle, those who saw it clearly (and possessed the courage of their convictions) would merely blow their brains out and have done. But it is not. There are the hidden fires that burn within, helping us to rise above, the sudden, searing moments of insight, and the dreams that refuse to die. And there are also the kindred spirits, far fewer in number but the more beautiful because of it, who are not mindless, aggressive jerks, wasting their grave-bound days on a wet dream of money and power and sex. And it is often in the midst of the darkest storm, the driest desert, that these blessed creatures, human beings who still have a soul, feel compassion and dare to try, appear to the lonely and broken-hearted.

So quietly that she is like the very eye of the maelstrom, a young, demure Oriental woman waits her turn to pay. And when she stands before him on the other side of the impenetrable glass, though he hardly has time to notice, her humility and gentle patience touch him. And the soft, sweet sadness of a woman who still feels—in the midst of a world of poverty, sickness, violence and greed—plants a seed of understanding and appreciation in his mind. And then she’s gone. Later he will dwell on it, and without words he will realize, here is a woman that a man could love.

The mad day ends, as all days must, and he returns in worn survival to the deserted, heartless streets of the city, cruising stealthily like some nocturnal beast, in his battered but dependable Ford. There is a sadness in the air as he parks it beneath the solitary, flowering tree and steps out, a sadness of ships passing in the night, and of beautiful souls that will not be seen again. She is gone, and he will never have the chance to tell her….. She is gone. Though not a believer, in his way as he lies in the hard and lonely bed, he prays that she will return, and that when she does, he will find the words.

Perhaps ten days have passed, and he has surrendered all hope of it. The endless pain of living is drowned in the ease of a long, warm sunlit evening. The lot is empty and wide, and there is time to breathe the rich air blowing in off the live Pacific. Blocking open the door of the booth, he stands outside it talking with Mike, a handsome and stout-hearted young man, something of an athlete, working his way through college. Mike is all right. They bullshit about women, sports, and between the lines, things that really matter. They pitch quarters, and make a small wager on whether the cashier can stick his knife in the post from fifteen feet. It is a good Texas Wildcat, deadly really, and he does. Still the sun hovers, and a smallish blue Mazda pulls up to the self-service island. A young Oriental woman steps out. . .and his heart is in his throat.

He had not remembered that she was so beautiful. It contradicts all his California experience: a shimmering, silken woman, beautiful on the inside as well. As she quietly and gracefully goes about her business, he subdues the tension of the moment in the only way he can. Turning to Mike: “My kingdom for a line that’ll work.”

“Is that her?” He nods. “I’ll be back.”

Nothing more need be said. There is that unspoken communication that is so special between men not afraid of feeling. You understand him and he understands you. He turns and walks toward the mechanics’ bays, giving you your chance.

Heart pounding thunder, he walks as calmly as he can up to the car, and with a courage born of long loneliness, just says it.

“Have you ever done any posing for an artist?” She studies him, shakes her head, the beautiful dark hair rustling slightly in its half-curls. Her eyes, at this distance, are stunning, sharp corners edging orbs so deep and still….. “Would you like to some time? Don’t take this the wrong way, but your features are perfect.” He is not lying.

A moment of silence, thick with expectation and despair.

“All right. How can I get in touch with you?” He pulls a Chevron business card from his wallet, writes the number of his hotel room next to that of the station. She looks at it calmly. “What’s your name?” He shakes his head imperceptibly. He has forgotten to write it.

He tells her. “What’s yours?”

“Doris.” He repeats it silently, taking her in like a clear spring in the heart of the desert.

He stamps her credit card, noting the last name, thanks her. She says she will call in the coming week, adding, “I don’t have to pose in the nude?”

“No. No.” He is embarrassed by the intensity with which he has said it. To cover: “Can I ask what your ancestry is?”

“I’m Chinese.” She turns to get back into the car, and he just can’t believe how sleek and desirable her legs are in their nylons, beneath the flowered cotton dress. She drives away, smiling strangely as he raises his hand goodbye….. So many levels at once.

Mike returns at a normal pace, carrying cans of oil to restock the bins. “How’d it go?”

“So good I’m afraid to talk about it.”

“Gotcha.” He goes on about his duties, performing each one with dignity, and the dexterity that comes from experience. He has worked here since he was sixteen, steadily and patiently making his way in the world. Mike is really all right.

Three days later the would-be artist is beginning to have his doubts. She has not called, but it is more than just that. The smile as she drove away. . .and the face. Is it the same girl? Doris is quiet and graceful, and unbelievably beautiful. But the feel of her; is it the same? The inevitable conflicts of body and spirit, angel and steppenwolf are set in motion. He buys new charcoals, arranges his paintings about the hotel room, paces and ponders and does not sleep at night. He tries to paint another subject, from a photograph he knows to be real. But always her lithe form dissuades him: always in the empty bed he feels his hand slide across her shoulder, the soft skin of his forearm stroking her bare breast. The hand touches again at the back of her calf, moving slowly and longingly upward. He strokes the inside of her thighs, teeth riding at her neck. And then his hand is on her abdomen, sliding downward. His fingers are met by soft down atop a firm and gentle mound. The hand grows hungry, demanding, finger piercing to a rising wetness as a groan escapes her. He draws her legs apart, and enters….. Doris!

It is morning, nine o’clock. He dials the number the operator has given him, wanting like a starving man just to hear the sound of her voice, to know that it is sweet, her heart gentle. Dear God it must be. The phone rings only twice.

“Hello.” A man’s voice.

“Is Doris there?”

“Yeah. Just a minute.” A man’s voice, at nine o’clock in the morning. No early risers, these southern California hedonists. He must have spent the night.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Doris. It’s the artist.” Despair. “Listen, if you don’t want to do this— ”

But her voice is reassuring, almost insistent. There is something else in it, but what that something is….. “No—thanks for calling. Why don’t we make an appointment? Give me a call again Thursday, same time, we’ll set it up for the afternoon.” Dear God. “Just a minute,” she says. In the background he hears the man’s voice, speaking with easy familiarity. Then her own at a distance, saying in a tone of puffed-up cheerfulness, “Goodbye, Brad.” A door is shut, and again she picks up the receiver.

“Doris….. If you’re married or something— ”

“Oh, no. Of course not.” Again there is the mystery of her voice: he remembers the smile. Is it coldness born of desperation, or desperation born of coldness? But he is gone. “Thursday morning you’ll call, and give me directions to your place?”

“Yes….. Yes.”

“Until then.”

“Good-bye, Doris.”

“Goodbye.”

He sets down the receiver, as love and longing overwhelm caution and doubt. He is confused, but there is no denying her effect on him. It is as if she had literally massaged his heart back to beating: touching him. Touching him. He leaves the ashen phone-cell, returns to his room. He does not see the dingy hallway, the peeling paint, or the endless dead-end of the city. He is in his room, in the island of his mind. He sits down at a small table, and the words flow onto waiting paper almost effortlessly. The first poem he has written in a month.

Doris

The first time I saw you

you were sad

But you moved with such quiet humility

That through the crush of angry motion

You stood out,

like a shelter from the storm

And I prayed to God

that I would see you again.

The second time I saw you

I was glad

And I knew that through the maze of my futility

I must set my quaking ship upon your ocean

While thoughts of gentle beauty,

kept me warm

And I thanked God

that I would see you again.

And when we spoke today by phone

My world didn’t seem so alone

And though through bitter night I hadn’t slept

If I’d been free, I would surely have wept—

To hear you answer my confusion with kindness

As Jesus touched the sores of sullen blindness

And the poor man saw

And felt his heart break

at the aching beauty

of the Sky.

No sense of duty

makes me write this.

You have touched me, and moved me

In the heart of the Night.

And I know I’ll be all right

Until I see you again.

Two largely uneventful days followed. Uneventful, that is, if the artist could have turned off his mind. But he could not. There were too many questions, and his need was too great. And always beneath the mundane surface of life, there is emotion.

He turned it all over in his mind a thousand times, trying to read the mystery. Was the man in the room a lover, a cruel husband, or merely the friend she said he was? On one occasion he tries to call, wondering if her words were not unduly affected by his presence. One way or the other. He reaches an answering machine on which her soft and businesslike voice says simply:

“This is Doris. If you are a man, between the ages of twenty-four and forty, and have called about the roommate situation…..” Roommate? Yet another bizarre clue, as he lightly sets down the receiver.

It is all rather unsettling, and the internal battles rage. An answer comes to him, so simple and appalling….. But a young man overwhelmed by what he believes to be love, heeds no other voice.

There is little sleep at night, and little peace by day. His intensity is not entirely a result of his feelings for the girl—the most important work of his life is nearly finished, and a possible contract awaits—but it inevitably wraps itself around her, the one-time quiet in the storm, who has metamorphosed beyond all hope into the sleek and sensual goddess. The sirens’ call is sweet, so sweet. He should have listened to Ulysses, and to Araby. But there are too many questions, and his need is too great.

It is Thursday morning, and he has nothing left either to win or lose, though somehow hope survives. Again the answering machine, this time saying, “I’m not here right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll be more than happy to return your call.” Why is her voice so deliberately sultry and alluring? He leaves his name and number, asking her to call around one o’clock.

She calls at one-thirty. The hotel manager buzzes his room, a loud, obnoxious noise like an electric chair for giants. He steps out into the hallway as calmly as he can, and picks up the phone.

“Hello, Doris?”

“Hi.” There is open sarcasm in her voice. “So how did you think we were going to do this?”

His instincts tell him to hang up right now, to run from this cruel abomination. But he cannot. “As you said: I give you directions, and— ”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Well I can’t give you money, if that’s what you mean. I thought maybe the portrait itself…..” You can all but see the sneer.

“I didn’t think you could afford to pay. You seem like a nice guy, but I’ve never heard of you. If I’m going to have a portrait done— ”

“Why did you say yes in the first place?”

“That’s really none of your business.” Her tone is scolding, imperious. It’s not enough that she is hurting him, she must make him see that it is his own fault: execute the dissident, then send a bill to his parents for the bullet. “I’m sorry, but my time is very precious and— ” He hangs up.

He sat down on the torn, moldy couch beside the phone outlet, his insides vivisected, bile in his throat. The peeling paint jeers at him, and the stench of cigarette-butts in the plastic, ash-filled urn makes him want to vomit. It hurts too much, too much to keep inside. If he doesn’t find some outlet he will die. The same small table, the same ruled paper. But now the hand that grips the pen is taut, like ship’s rigging in a gale, the words like corpses dragged from a smoking ruin.

Doris Too

I asked her to pose for me, a beautiful Chinese

It was the poor boy’s line—an artist

And she said yes.

I spoke to her by phone and said,

“If it’s a hassle…..”

Because I couldn’t understand why a guy had answered first.

She assured me it was not

She said to call her Thursday

and silly me, dying of thirst

I said yes.

So I called her today

Know what she said?

I’ll give you a clue

I wish I was dead:

“What’s in it for me?

‘I’ve never heard of you’

‘if I’m going to have a portrait done’

Well I’m sorry, but my time is very precious and—”

At least I had the dignity to hang up.

Because what she was telling me, between the lines

Was that I had no business thinking of her between the sheets

Wasn’t good enough to be in the same room with her

And that she’d only used me,

for some ugly and inscrutable purpose.

“The kind of man the world proposes to love,

but in truth despises.”

That’s how Robert Bolt put it, in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago:

The artist, the dreamer, the malcontent

Always chiding us that there’s more to life than money

and sex and sex and sex.

Dear Doris,

You and your clitoris,

can both go straight to hell.

Ain’t life swell?

But the pain remained.

Because the answer to the mystery was, in fact, the simple and appalling apparition from which he had fled. No one wants to believe the worst about their fellow man (or woman), no matter how clearly the evidence condemns them. Until he is left no alternative. For this reason, no doubt, the tyrants of this world, both great and small, are turned free like rabid dogs among the sheep, and no action is taken to stop them…..

Doris was a prostitute, this realization confirmed by a later meeting with someone who knew her well. She never stood on a street corner, and her clients—the rich and spineless momma’s boys mentioned earlier—believed she truly cared for them. But the end result was the same: expensive gifts or outright payment. A professional fantasy, among the opulent decay of the western world.

Perhaps in a moment of weakness, or genuine humanity, she had felt for the naïve artist something akin to honest emotion. But if so the feeling did not last, and the backlash of conditioning was the more vicious because of it. Doris was a whore, and like all whores, male or female, actual or metaphorical, viewed honest endeavor with the utmost contempt.

A week later, more or less a Sunday, a young Oriental woman approaches the cashier’s booth to pay. She is so humble and demure, almost apologetic….. And in a swift moment of recognition, the whole of the joke is revealed to him. For if there is a benevolent undercurrent in life, rising form the heart of Nature and rewarding honesty and perseverance, then there is also a malevolent, at least as strong, the creation of man’s ignorance. Blindly he had stepped into it’s waters, and blindly been borne over the falls.

He had mistaken a whore for an angel.

A simple Vietnamese girl with a narrow, care-worn face stands before him, the true goddess, the real shelter from the storm. She is not pretty, but clearly she is beautiful. He looks full into her questioning eyes, and says with all his heart,

“Thank you.”

Ruth

I had often watched her from a distance, intrigued (and I must confess, mystified) by the unvanquished power of her eyes. She was an older black woman, living in the same low-rent apartment complex as myself. Some injury or illness had hobbled her—she walked slowly and stiffly, with a cane, and her left arm was paralyzed—but had not daunted her fiery heart. This you saw clearly in the painful determination of her face. And if you looked at her she looked right back, neither angry nor insecure. That looked seemed to say louder than any words (as her survival stood before you, an indisputable fact):

“Yes, life is hard. No, I’m not afraid.”

I had at the time a small cassette recorder, a self-contained dictation machine which I used to record moments of insight, or thoughts which somehow seemed meaningful, later to be written down and translated into prose. It never did amount to much in this regard, but on that singular afternoon in March, 1984, I was glad indeed to have it.

She was sitting at an iron table in the small, palm-lined courtyard between the buildings, talking idly with a younger, unexceptional friend. Neither seemed engrossed in what was said, with long pauses in between. And feeling myself the need for some deeper communion I approached her, machine in hand. I introduced myself as a writer (a reasonable excuse), and asked her if she would mind a brief interview, for the sake of literary understanding. I believe her first reaction was, Why me? But I persisted, telling her as best I could that I had watched her, and believed she had a tale to tell.

Nor was I wrong. Here then, word for word, are segments of that unique conversation. Sacramento.

“Where were you born?”

“Pennsylvania.” Her voice is strong, but at the same time easy, with the lingering southern drawl of many inner-city blacks. “McKeesrocks, Pennsylvania.”

“What kind of different jobs have you had?”

“I only had one all my life; I was a registered nurse. For about thirty-five years. I had one break in service, when I had a stroke. Then I went back. Worked eight years after I had the stroke, finally gave it up.”

“Was it hard leaving?”

“Hm?”

“Was it hard leaving behind?”

“Oh yeah….. I supervised the emergency rooms in Michigan and in California.”

“Was it hard for you, working in an emergency room— ”

“It wasn’t for me, I loved it.”

“You never had any problems? too many people coming in— ”

“Oh, definitely, all the time.”

“Was there any particular patient, or experience at the hospital that stands out— ”

“Oh, my lord. There were so many I don’t know which one to start with. Because in Michigan it’s just like Vietnam on weekends. It’s cutting and shooting every weekend. Stabbing.”

“Is this. . .Detroit area?”

“Right downtown Detroit, Detroit Receiving. It’s Detroit General now; they changed the name. We got all the accidents, and everything that happened in the city of Detroit, we got it. We even had a police ward.”

“Is it hard for you. . .somebody comes in, you know they’re probably not going to make it….. What effect did that have on you?”

“A lot of times that happened. We, you know, you treat them just like they’re one of your family. So you naturally, feel the effects of it. But after you see so many you learn to deal with it.”

“Did it make you angry?”

“The drunks did, yeah. I never got along with the drunks too well.”

“Is it because you felt like, they just didn’t care—they weren’t taking care of themselves?”

“No, I just felt like, whatever problem they had they caused that on their own, where these other people coming in, it really wasn’t their fault most of the time. And they were so obnoxious, you know?” A jet passes low overhead, from one of Sacramento’s two Air Force bases. She asks simply, “Is that a fighter plane?”

“Sure looks like one….. Living in Sacramento, the jets coming in low, rattling the windows. . .do you ever feel like you’re watching—”

“Sometimes I feel like they’re coming right in my house. My son came to visit me and that was the funniest thing. He was laying on the couch, and the plane came by so loud and he said, “Oh Momma, my goodness, is it coming in here?” She laughs quietly to herself.

“I get scared,” I said honestly. “I’m more afraid of a nuclear war…..” A man in overalls, and carrying a tool box begins to walk by.

“Are you the plumber?” she asks, turning abruptly. “I wish you’d do something about my sink. It runs continuously—keeps me awake at night. And the shower.”

“They never did get mine right,” I interject.

“Me neither,” puts in Melissa, the younger (white) friend. “An’ I been here three years.”

“You sit in the living room,” Ruth affirms, “and you hear the water dripping in the sink; you go to bed you hear it dripping in the bathroom. There’s no peace in there, you know?”

At this point the conversation becomes somewhat jumbled as Don, another resident, approaches and begins to ask me about my plans. I tell him I am heading back to Colorado, and at this point Ruth breaks in.

“What part of Colorado?”

“Denver area.”

“I was in Denver. My first marriage was in Denver. Fitzsimmons General Hospital, you know where that is—Army?”

“Yeah. What year was that?”

“Oh, I don’t know….. About ‘46.”

… “How many children did you have?”

“One. One boy.”

“What was childbirth like for you, was that a hard experience?”

“I don’t know, because they put me to sleep. I was too bossy, they said.” Laughter. Her humor comes out of nowhere, and like her other traits, has the irresistible force of reality. “So when I woke up he was about five hours old. They knocked me out. So don’t ask me, I don’t know anything about it.”

When I could I asked, “What was your first reaction when you saw the baby?”

“I took his clothes off and checked him out, make sure he had all his parts. Then I thumped him on the bottom of his feet, made him cry, so I could see if his lungs was okay.”

… “Did you have help in raising him?”

For the first time there is sadness in her voice, though it doesn’t last long.

“My mother helped me….. I put my husband out when he was eight months old….. I put him out; he was no good.”

“Was it hard getting by?”

“No.” Her tone is almost defiant, though this too is quickly mastered. “I had a pretty good job. Like I said, I was a registered nurse. Had a job, I didn’t have to look for a job. I always was lucky to have a job as long as I wanted it. I didn’t have to retire when I did; I just got tired of driving with one hand, you know. People drive so crazy down there in southern California, on those freeways. And then my son was fussing, ‘Momma, what are you working like that for, you don’t have any small children now.’ So he kept after me and it kept me worried, that I might have an accident, ‘cause he was prophesizing it, you know? So I quit.” It took no great insight to see how hard this had been for her—that she had never quit at anything.

“Are you religious at all?”

“To a certain extent, yes.”

“I can never make up my mind myself.”

“Well you better make it up before you die.”

“Yeah. It’s been a little easier for me to believe in something since I came out here, just because it’s been harder…..”

“You have to believe in something—something better than what you’re experiencing now. ‘Cause I really believe we’re already living in Hell. Can’t be no worse I don’t think.” Silence.

“Your son come to see you a lot?”

“I was down there on Thanksgiving day.”

“Has he got a family?”

“No. He’s getting ready to get married the second time.”

“Do you have any advice for him?”

“No. I let him do his own choosing, and do his own living. That’s his life. I can’t run his life; I did my best. Brought him up and educated him, now that’s his problem…..”

“Do you ever miss the company of children?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can take ‘em or leave ‘em, you know. He’s over six feet tall now, so he’s not a baby anymore. I guess whenever he marries this girl he’s going with now maybe they’ll have a family. At least he says he’s going to have one before I die. So I can see ‘em, you know.” Inexplicably, the forgotten Melissa laughs, and Ruth smiles in accompaniment. She is talking about death, her own—not something distant, seeming far off and unreal, but near and ever-present. And yet she finds the courage to smile. How? It makes me think of the quote by Leonard Bernstein, as he tries to explain the magical quality of jazz: “never completely happy or sad.” But it’s more than that. This grizzled veteran of hospitals, poor neighborhoods and loneliness. . .is simply not afraid of death. I rail at my own cowardice, until her voice once again brings me back. I believe I must have mumbled something about, “don’t know if I could bring a baby into this world.”

“Well they’re anxious to get married so they can have a family. And I’ll be glad when they do, ‘cause I want to see what it looks like.” Again Melissa laughs, this time joined heartily by Ruth. After a time we returned to the subject of the hospital.

“Well like I said there’s so many things that I saw there in Detroit. I really learned everything I knew about emergencies there. Because if it did happen. . .if it happened, it happened there; if it didn’t happen then it has never happened. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah….. Was there any specific, patient coming in, or— ”

“That’s what I’m saying, there’s so many different ones I could talk about. Some weird ones, some common ones. I don’t know which one I would take first, over another you know because they’re all….. For instance the one where this man came in with a machete clear through him. You know what a machete is? It went in front and you could see, part sticking out of his back. He didn’t die. We didn’t lose very many patients. We had some good surgeons.”

“How’d you get the machete out?”

“They took him to surgery and took it out.” Another fighter swoops low overhead. “I remember one joke I’d like to tell. ‘Cause this is the truth. This woman had brought her child in, and it had, uh, German measles. The doctor told her he had, the child had German measles, wasn’t anything to worry about. I was comin’ in the room with a basin. And you know what she said, Melissa? ‘How’d he get that, we live in a ‘talian neighborhood.’” Wild, unrestrained laughter all around. Perhaps it is the counterpoint between comedy and tragedy that gives her words such power. “I dumped the water and everything, right down on the floor, start out laughing. I got out of there in a hurry, ‘cause I was so tickled….. How’d he get that, I live in a ‘talian neighborhood.”

… “Do you remember, any specific patient that died?”

(Sadly) “Yeah, I can remember one guy that was shot up in a dope raid. And he was dying and he wanted to give me his mother’s number, and address, so I could contact her. That was about the saddest thing I remember. Other than this little baby was burned like a little pig. And when you go to lift it and put it in the shroud, the meat just fell right off its little bones. I mean that little baby was charred; now that was very sad.”

“Was it a tenement fire?”

“Hm?”

“Was it a tenement fire?”

“I suppose, I don’t know.”

“Is there a lot of….. I know there’s a lot of arson in New York; is there a lot of that in Detroit too?”

“Not as much as it is fightin’ and killing.”

“What do you think it is about Detroit that makes it as violent as it is?”

“It’s just a mixture of people, you know. And then. . .I don’t know. Now don’t start me lyin’ ‘cause I don’t know.”

“Okay.” A long pause, in which I thought I had stepped too far, and the interview was ended. But as always, Ruth rallied, and began again of her own accord.

“You know they had two riots there, you remember? I missed ‘em both. I moved there right after a riot, and left there just before they had another one. I was lucky to miss ‘em both.”

“Would it be dangerous, to be in your own place during a riot?”

“I don’t know, ‘cause like I say, we moved there right after a riot….. But I had a girl-friend who had two or three. . .you call ‘em duplexes here, but they called ‘em flats back there—two-family flats. They burned, two of her flats down. It just looked terrible up those streets where they did burn. They went up in a Jewish neighborhood and just, tore up that place up there. It looked like a ghost town…..”

There is more, both gay and sad, exultant and heart-breaking. But the essence, the innate strength of the woman has by now been felt, or it never will be. Ruth Henderson has either come alive for you, lending courage and wisdom, or she has not. In her own words, “I let him do his own choosing, and do his own living. I can’t run his life; I did my best.”

In setting down this briefest chapter in the long and often obscure epic of quiet heroism, I have not tried to organize or edit what was said. It must follow its own course, and like so much that happens in our lives, come to an end too soon, before we have been able to take it all in, or find in its fleeting impressions the moral significance of an isolated human encounter.

But these pages, at least, may hold up to the ravages of time. It seems our struggles, hers and mine, have bought us this much. And she will always live, proud and strong, in my memory.

Until I myself am a memory. And life goes on.

Frozen in the Deeps of Time

The man, now thirty, felt moved to speak of it to his friend. Or perhaps this distant figure, sympathetic because of shared sufferings, was only a vehicle through which to re-examine that period of his life. For it had been a time so condensed, so pure, as to stand in flat contradiction to the seemingly uneventful years which had piled themselves on his recent consciousness, until now their dull desert, the endless trying and coming to naught, seemed the only possible reality. He wasn’t sure. He only knew there were the beginnings of a written page in the machine before him, and that strong, eager phrases leapt into his mind, demanding the free air of expression. Or something.

Dear John:

Eighteen is a very dangerous age. You’ve lived long enough to feel you know and understand the very roots of Life, but not long enough to know there is no such understanding, unless it be sheer survival, and the desperate attempt to keep alive one’s aspirations, if not his dreams, these having faded to incredulity like so many lost fair tales. At eighteen the illusions remain strong, not dulled by the inevitable catastrophes of youth, but on the contrary, burning the brighter for them, like coals stoked by the wind, and seeming the very core of existence. To let go of these, it seems, is to let go of Life itself. So we cling to the Quixotic dream, the holy Quest, and suffer all the consequences bravely. But that very courage seems to enrage the darkness, and to summon from its depths a redoubled fury at the very pretense of belief. The dreamer is cast into Hell, and forgotten. If he should survive it, learning its hard lessons of what life is, and is not, perhaps the sun will once more shine on him, and reality (and all that harsh word implies) think of him in terms less vile. I don’t know. But first, unquestionably, he must survive it.

He paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts, continued.

I suppose every young artist is a masterpiece of pretension, but when I look back on the dreamer that I was, the only emotion I find myself capable of is wonder. I wanted in my naïve and (not to wholly discount the sincere intentions with which we embark) beautiful way, to glimpse the truths of existence which the human spirit has hungered for since the first dim, questioning consciousness rose in our most primitive ancestors. I felt capable, and indeed called upon, to look unflinching into the eyes of God, as a madman might stare at the sun, and know, beyond all doubt, what lay at the heart of Creation, and on the other side of the impenetrable curtain of the grave.

I used to walk the quiet suburban streets of Pennsylvania with my dog—the small, amazingly loyal and big-hearted mongrel that was soon after killed by a car—looking up at the stars and feeling the whole Universe laid out before me. I would like on my back in the tall grass next to an abandoned stone house, gazing at the limitless heavens, and imagine the Earth losing its grip on me, as I fell upward into its unfathomable mystery. That mystery, as I lay there, seemed infinitely more real than the sphere of earthy matter at my back. For I had managed, somehow, to keep hold of the fact that this planet was but an island adrift in the hugeness of Space—that it circled the sun, and not the other way around. And in the same way I moved through the world of men, not touching anyone, any thing, as if my place were elsewhere, among the prophets of old, and the spirits of the sky.

Only the night walks seemed real, like something from a legend of Saint Christopher. Lifting my head to the stars I would say to my God, as if he were a palpable being, at that moment fully and exclusively aware of my presence—my heart, my soul, and all my yearning:

“If there is some task that you would have me do, I am here, and I will do it.”

And I was equally convinced, so deeply that through all the loss and disillusion of the intervening years I cannot swear it wasn’t so. . .I was absolutely certain that such a task awaited. My Quest, chosen for me and no other, as necessary and profound as any ever undertaken by mortal man. And I barely added the ‘mortal’.

Dear God, do the droll priests and nuns have any idea the effect their angelic teachings have on the young and vulnerable, whose innocence and imagination lead them already to pursue shimmering castles in the sky? C.S. Lewis be damned! You don’t give children dynamite, then encourage them to play with fire.

But back to my delusion. “In Search of the Evermore” would be the written account of my journey, and I would live to the heights and depths ever perfect and undeniable word of it. The Truth! And the astounding thing is, I still plan to write it, if no longer in the same way. It rests quietly at the bottom of the battered suitcase which holds the only tangible result of my subsequent years of struggle—the novels, short stories and poems. It waits patiently, as if for all else to pass, and the only thing beneath it is an oil painting, on paper, of a man standing on the back squares of a massive, sunken chessboard. From the edges high walls rise, an inescapable prison, sealing him beneath the level of a vast, windswept desert. From this grim arena he contemplates the sun, unreachable, red and glowering in the distance. This impromptu portrait was given to me by a quiet, intense young acquaintance I met at the very heart of the maelstrom.

But I see, as in every attempt to look back on this time, that the best I can hope for is to enlarge and expand upon small fragments, indeed, the merest corner of such fragments, and in this way try to shed the faintest light upon the relentless intensity of those days. It seems I must try, having coaxed myself this far.

You know that after surviving high school (and I do not use that word lightly) I had no intention of having my brain raped further by college, or of plugging myself in to what I perceived as the unconscionable meat-grinder of the working world. Moreover, I felt ready to take up the Quest, the chance denied me earlier by necessary adherence to convention—school, friends and family—the sheltered and smothering home environment. Further, I felt myself experienced enough in the artful use of words to perfectly capture and record my adventures, a brilliant jewel for all the world to see. This alone will show you how consummately unprepared I was. Still, I suppose there is something to be said for starting young: I had many years to recover from the harrows that awaited.

But here, I’m wandering. Of course I was wandering then, too, in the deepest sense, alone and without a guide. But at that age everything seems to hold a double purpose, some hidden meaning that if we can only unravel, will reveal the entire secret of the pages we pass through.

High school was at an end, and the summer of living out of a backpack with my second dog—the beautiful, female shepherd that Mark had brought me—had ended in disaster. All the poetry I sent out, sure that it would be immediately published and recognized, securing my financial as well as artistic future, had come back to me largely (if not wholly) unread. And the friends I imposed myself on when food ran low and the tent became unlivable, were beginning to lose patience with lofty ideals which translated into my sleeping on their floor. I was flat broke, and emotionally, if not physically exhausted. I swallowed my pride, called my older brother, and asked him to take me home.

But home was gone forever. Never again would I rest safely among the deep and wooded suburbs of Pennsylvania. My father had been reassigned to Washington, D.C., and rented a tight condominium in the outwardly shining, but internally polluted and corrupt borough of McLean, Virginia. I had lived there for four years as a boy, but now found the place changed beyond all recognition. For it too had been deep and soft and green, but now had fallen victim to its own beauty and vulnerability: money, access, developers. I won’t go into details, as they have been spoken of elsewhere, and do not form the segment I wish here to examine. Enough to know that it was to me an ugly, oppressive place, and one in which I knew not a soul but my own.

In such an environment there seemed little enough to inspire art, or support the illusion of adventure. But where there is a will, there is often considerable danger. I launched into the epic novel, lived out my fantasy quest, and somehow managed to secure the LSD which I felt revealed to me the hidden truths, denied all others.

But in the process I detached myself farther and farther from any day-to-day human contact, or moderating influence of perspective. I tell you now, I was so deeply plunged into the realm of my thoughts that it became, literally, a separate reality: a physically separate world in which I was the center, and dark wonders revolved around me, strange and poignant.

But even the most brilliant tragedy must be aided a little by background. I found I could not bear that smug, crowded and aggressive hole one day longer. So I sequestered my father, and launched into the most amazing discourse about his unfair treatment of me—that while my brother lived a life of social wealth at college, I was forced to pursue my own, loftier goals in squalor and obscurity. My plan (and where it came from I haven’t the faintest notion) was to go and live with him at Penn State, and with a similar financial backing. I believe I quite bowled him over. At any rate he consented, venturing to suggest that maybe when I saw what college life was like, I would drop my pretensions and attend.

Fate did not stand in the way of self-destruction. One of my brother’s three roommates had moved out of their apartment without notice, leaving those who remained in the lurch. My body (and accompanying rent money) were welcomed with open, long-distance arms. I made my meager preparations, and set out once more on the road to Destiny.

Mid morning still and calm. In a wounded vehicle that would soon be mine I made the passage, through western Maryland into the open country, small towns, and rising hills of central Pennsylvania. The day was neither warm nor cold, as I recall, sometime in late November. I felt incongruously free and unconcerned, like a Mozart concerto, the dark episodes of so recent a past seeming to fall away behind (in the manner of simple hobbits like myself), expecting at any moment a swift return to the softer and more pleasant realities of a deep and protected childhood.

The aging Impala, whose wounds were hidden and not yet fatal, made its way smoothly and without complaint up and down the long flowing curves and straight lines, while mixed forest, or wide cultivated field, or steel-bridged streams and near wilderness ran away to right and left. Most of the leaves were gone, and the intermittent towns small and lonely like a trap. But perception forms at least half of the world a man passes through, vying always with physical reality (which must inevitably triumph). And my perceptions told me I was going somewhere. Where and why don’t seem to matter as much when you’re young, feeling life opened like a book before you. And the books you read at that age, at least the ones you take to heart, always have a happy ending.

I stopped about noon, not so very far into the Pennsylvania heartland, at a spot which seemed suited to my purpose. I was alone in a hilly, roadside wilderness which protective amnesia—along with much else that occurred in the months to follow—has made vague and unclear in my mind. A stream flowed nearby I think, swift and cold, to an end altogether beyond my imaginings. From a foil pouch kept cool and well-hidden, I took out one of the four tiny tablets within: purple microdot. Not the purest and most potent form of acid, outshined perhaps by LSD-25 and orange sunshine, but in those days quite potent enough: to enlighten, and to kill. I put it on the tip of my tongue, like the God-given scrolls of Jeremiah, and let it dissolve there. Then washed it down with clear, cold water….. I remember the anticipation and mild anxiety that always preceded an LSD experience, but also a blind, stupid trust that all would be well, along with a feeling of spiritual communion inspired by Eastern philosophy, and too many Hermann Hesse novels. Then back behind the wheel.

Acid takes effect slowly, and by then we were old companions: there would be no wild hallucinations, no sounds that weren’t there. But for some reason I kept thinking of a small illustration from the King Crimson record, Lizard. A golden-haired medieval prince in shimmering mail and white coverlet, sits his beautiful roan through a strange and bleak countryside, with cracked mountains and a pale, crescent moon in the background. Beside him rides another, a skeletal wraith wrapped entirely in black. Only the skull mask and bone fingers—the one raised, illuminating some wicked point in its litany of temptation—protrude. But the most striking aspect is the horse on which Death’s messenger rides. Pale as snow it moves mechanically, frigidly, with red eyes staring straight ahead in terror, or malice, or both. The vainglorious Crusading prince views his dark counselor unafraid, his own horse stepping lightly in self-satisfied bliss.

Stopping again perhaps an hour later, the air is noticeably colder. The altitude and latitude have both risen with the road, but it feels nonetheless an unnatural change. It is as if in the space of a three-hour drive I had left the shelter of an ambiguous fall, for the first sinister touch of desolate Winter. The heater in the car would not work, and this seemed somehow ominous. Back on the road, and weary of inadequate music, I drove in silence the remaining distance, passing a large dead deer, and for the next ten miles agonizing over whether I should go back and see if anything could be done for it. It all began to feel very bleak, despite my natural (and wholly unfounded) optimism.

But I had taken the drug to see a sign, to read the underlying currents. And the deeper world which most never see, or flee from when they do, did not withhold it from me.

But it was not a sign that any living man would seek. Again my memory is imperfect—odd, as from earliest childhood I recall most incidents with extraordinary clarity….. But I seem to remember that upon my right, rose a hill of pines singularly sharp and symmetrical, casting in deep shadow the narrow vale through which I passed. It became suddenly colder, as if this were a place banished from sunlight, or even the memory of warmth. And from the greyness of my stupor a historical marker appeared suddenly by the side of the road, beneath the cold and desolate hill. It read simply, “The Shadow of Death.”

Fear and curiosity at once surged inside me. The truly disquieting thing, because it ran counter to all my foolishly brave inclinations, was that fear proved the stronger voice, and I did not stop to read it.

This journey, as I have intimated, is extraordinarily difficult to set down on paper. The sequence of events becomes clouded, the imagery vague, and the thought uneasy. This is more than a little disconcerting to one for whom words have become a well-worn tool, and who has tried to place such emphasis on exactitude and truth. But try as I might I can’t make the image in the mirror resolve, or find the right path, the right metaphor. Because LSD (to say nothing of life) is not ‘like’ anything, and its deepest impressions remain incommunicable.

“Between the event and the telling, the thought and the word, between the intention and the act, the means and the end, falls the heart of darkness.” Thus quoth a British professor of mine years later, in his discourse on that incomparable work. I believe the Joseph Conrad title, and the four words on the heartless roadsign, to be absolutely interchangeable. Heart of Darkness, the Shadow of Death. Like Conrad, I too could not write or speak of it till ten years after the fact. I, too, feel the intolerable futility of the task. But I must try nonetheless, as every man must try to understand and come to grips with the tragedies placed before him: the failing powers of both body and mind, and the spectre, now near, now farther off, of inevitable death. But death, at least, I do not fear. How much worse the life without hope.

The arrival at State College, surrounded on all sides by pine mountains and vast emptiness, is of little importance. Only one other image will come to me, and whether it occurred on the same day, or during another LSD aside, I cannot truthfully say. It all runs together in my mind, and it is all one.

I was returning to my brother’s apartment after a walk with my dog—loyal, beautiful companion through joy and pain, young life and hell alike. . .now gone. An old woman was making her way to her car.

Now the fears of the elderly are seldom rational, and I don’t know whether the sight of the unleashed dog, or of myself (not altogether tame and respectable in Army jacket, dilapidated boots and long hair flowing) which put her in such a state of anxiety. Perhaps it was merely the closeness she felt to death, which manifested itself in all manner of dark and imaginary dangers.

She fumbled about with a ring of keys, which made the thinnest and most peculiar metallic sound, as of tiny silver bells leading through the halls of damnation. The acid surged, and it seemed to me there was nothing in all of Space but that withered and terrified hand, fearfully pushing at a cold, unyielding lock. Yet again, words fail me.

Winter closed around me with sullen swiftness. I don’t think I had been there a week when the first snows came. And when they came, they stayed. Unlike the Colorado winters I had known as a child, where the white-world attacked in waves of powder, intense but short-lived, here it stayed on the ground without melting till another layer, and yet another, piled itself on top. Less spectacular but more numbing: at one point the temperature didn’t rise above ten degrees (Fahrenheit) for three weeks, and more often it was well below zero.

Of course I hadn’t come prepared. I was like a French soldier under Napoleon, or a young German of the Third Reich, invading the Russian frontier wholly without understanding of what awaited. A year later, sitting in the white piano room of a neighbor’s townhouse as a snow-laden wind howled outside, I had the most intense sensation. You know I don’t believe in reincarnation, or any other such soul-soothing rot. But this was uncanny. I was sitting in a kind of rib-backed bench against the wall beside a white shrouded window. Involuntarily I shivered, and closing my eyes, felt myself hunched down among the low, ruined walls of what had once been a stone house, the ceiling, and all but the low parapet of stone, ripped away by war and cannonade. Hunched in a corner against a raging wind, clutching tightly about my body a long and tattered blue uniform. Before me burned a ravaged fire that gave no warmth, and I knew I would die of it. Exposure. Coming back to myself, I felt a deep and ancient chill in the very marrow of my bones, a creeping death that could never be warmed or driven out.

But this was a year later, and by comparison, subdued. That winter at Penn State, by all reports the coldest in a decade, I was not looking back on a bitter foe, but facing it every day. And I had not the wisdom, the raw experience, to perceive it as such. For at the time I was possessed not only of spiritual naiveté, but by a matching illusion of robust health. Allergic anxiety/fatigue had been trying to kill me for two years, but this had largely vanished with the onset of winter, and was not at all the same thing. Resilience! In all my years in Colorado I could not remember a single cold of notable duration, and I had practically lived in snow.

So with nothing to protect me but the thin Army jacket (with the name ‘Godin’ stitched above the breast pocket), the dilapidated work-boots and no warm underclothing, I went out again and again into the merciless night. The dog must be walked, and my mind spared from the dullard’s hell of writing while standing (my back had gone out and I could not sit) and staring at the walls. I don’t say night literally, yet somehow the word seems to hold more truth than day. It was nearly always overcast, and cold with the indifference of a stark and star-filled solstice. I remember standing atop a rise in the small park behind the apartments, looking out at the distant hills of snow and pine, and thinking I had never seen anything so desolate. You could almost hear the hard-edged boulders crack with cold, and the frozen hearts of the pines feeling nothing at all.

My living situation, never stable, deteriorated rapidly. My father had promised me an allowance of fifty dollars a month—of course I was wrong!—but when the first month expired he seemed to remember the arrangement differently. The long and short of it is, spending that niggardly sum on nothing but food, there was still not enough. My brother was supposed to help feed the dog, but he bought her such noxious, low-grade stuff….. After a time she would just lie on the kitchen floor with her muzzle on her paws, begging. I took to gambling at backgammon with one of the roommates—trying to win more money for food—and almost invariably lost.

But the way becomes unclear, and memory reluctant. Somewhere between the raping cold, the poor food (I even ate dog food, though I cursed myself for it), the highway that ran before the apartment denying all sleep, and the gnawing of Lysergic acid under conditions wholly hostile and malignant, I gradually wore out the last of my resistance, both physical and mental. I would add emotional, except that I took it all in with a sense of disbelief. It couldn’t possibly stay this cold. My back wasn’t seriously injured. My father and brother hadn’t forsaken me. I myself was not naïve.

That my dog had taken to perusing dumpsters, that I had taken to stealing food, that the elements seemed to make a special point of annihilating me, and the surrounding mountains to howl their silence of cold and sinister vastness….. My dreams became troubled, my walks (again, I could not bear to remain caged in the apartment, watching my dog watching me) like an endless journey back to a place which no longer existed.

Where do I find the words? If you were to take a man and set him naked on the North Pole, without gear, food, or direction home, he could hardly have been in a more dire predicament, the more so because, as these images will show, my mind was overthrown. And there are worse things than death or madness: to finally see the horror without the shelter of delusion. And death at least is a clean amputation— sudden, swift, final. While having the heart cut out of you, and be left to go on living…..

Like a reeling boxer before a skilled and savage opponent, I was set up for the knockout blow. And when it came, I nearly had that amputation. Somehow I eluded it, but was (physically) crippled for the rest of my life.

One evening my brother wanted to walk to the campus, some two miles away, for a reason which remains unclear. And driven by some motive equally obscure, I went along. He walked briskly, and, apparently angry with me, refused to slow down though I lagged far behind. My boots, both heel and sole cruelly worn by time, simply would not grip the snow and icy walks. I slipped and cursed like a man in a dream—I couldn’t possibly keep up—while he just kept moving farther and farther ahead.

Finally something snapped inside me. Understand, this was the same brother, the same flesh, that had shared my room since infancy, the one who had always looked out for me, the living essence of family. But intent on some mission of his own, and having become cold and cruel in its pursuit, he was abandoning me. We had cursed each other and come to blows in the past, as all brothers do. But in that moment I truly hated him. I shouted, “Stop!” at the top of my lungs, raging at my helplessness, and his indifference. He did, and when I caught up we exchanged bitter words. I should have known then and there the trap was sealed. I should have known a lot of things. But I didn’t.

When we reached the campus—was it evening or late afternoon? I swear I don’t know—we bumped into a girl who had shared my homeroom throughout high school. Bitter, unforgivable irony. I had watched her gentle melancholy in the tenth grade, wanting to be loved so desperately, and believed her a special, a superior being. One who had known loneliness like that could never be cold, would never forget the lessons of compassion and shared humanity it taught. But I was wrong. In the eleventh grade her fortunes changed. Her looks had improved (mostly her body), and a big handsome athlete claimed her as his own, raising her social status….. It hardly matters. She had metamorphosized in reverse, from a beautiful and sad, deep violent butterfly, into an ugly, destructive, crawling thing. The common word for it is cunt. And that is exactly what my brother was looking for.

We went back to her dormitory, where for some reason she found it necessary to take a shower down the hall. She returned in a loose, terry-cloth robe. We sat and talked about nothing in particular, while at intervals she shifted positions, each one more suggestive than the last, gauging our responses. My own reaction was something between bewildered amusement and disgust: she had a boyfriend, and any fool could see it was just a tease. But my brother, who at the time placed a good deal of emphasis on lust and very little on scruples, was clearly aroused. So when she suggested we all go to that night’s hockey game (yet again for reasons which remain inscrutable), naturally he said yes. I believe at the time I was just so numbed by everything, and in truth not immune myself to the sirens’ call—I kept hoping that somewhere, deep down, she was still an angel—I stumbled along after them like the shadow of a dream.

By this time the temperature outside was far below freezing. And yet when we came to the arena, a great, ribbed, empty place like the inside of a whale, some maniac had turned on the overhead coolers full force. It was like a nightmare: the huge refrigeration units were meant to insure good ice in warm weather. But it couldn’t have been five degrees outside! On the inside it must have been ten below, with the endless cold draft of the fans, and the resonating heart of the ice itself. You know the line about ‘colder than a witch’s tit?’ Well this was her insides—a hell of ice instead of fire. There might have been twenty people in the stands, but you did not feel them. There were only the three of us, and the oblivious gladiators on the ice. Yet roused by their swift, aggressive motion, our escort…..

But these are only words, seeming to describe a place firmly anchored in reality. For me it was not so. There is no metaphor, but I tell you with all my soul it was not a place of the waking earth. Something underhanded and malicious ruled that hollow, blocked by impenetrable shadows from all that is living, warm and vital. It was Death. It was Death.

Our escort led us to the press area, a small, concrete floor level with the ice. There, numb, oppressed and disbelieving, I watched the living crash each other into the boards in front of me, curse, slash, and abuse each other fiercely. I was appalled. My brother watched only the effects of such violence on the bitch he hoped would be in heat. And she loved it.

I think I told you once before that a starving polar bear would not have stayed in that frozen crypt for ten minutes. I stayed for nearly an hour. Understand, the killing cold that crept under my sleeves and down my neck, that wrapped chains of ice about my feet and crawled slowly upward, indeed, the whole of the trap itself, was to me in that moment the symbol, the physical manifestation of the sinister force that sought to snuff out my life forever. And bravely, stupidly, I refused to yield, or even to believe in it. Standing there in the leering maw of destruction, I made my stubborn and blind-innocent profession of Faith: there could be no such enemy, no such malignant evil loose upon the earth. Fear was the only darkness, and I would look it square in the eye, denying to the last its impotent wrath. I was an innocent sparrow, hypnotized by the cobra of death.

But after a time I trembled bitterly, and my hopeless resolve was buried beneath a landslide of hard reality. For strange and otherworldly as the setting might have been, so far as its bludgeoning effect on my body, nothing could have been more real. I began to cough, and felt myself burning and freezing at once—like the French soldiers in Russia who fell asleep too close to the fire, and died frozen on one side and cooked on the other. I no longer cared about my fallen angel, or prodigal brother. The voice of my body, of sheer survival, finally cut through the angelic absurdity of ‘faith’. I said simply, “I’m leaving.”

The girl, untrue to the end, tried to change my mind with a tilt of the head and a coquettish smile. My brother was only too happy to see me go. I walked away from them as a man walks away from a battlefield on which all those he loved, along with all he believed to be lasting and true, have been crushed utterly. Nothing but corpses remained for me there, though in reality I was the corpse, leaving behind the hardy and unfeeling. My physical vitality was gone forever, and through the undercurrent of real horror, I knew it. At nineteen my youth, and what I had once called my dreams, were ended.

By then it was completely dark. The wind had rallied, and it was snowing. Trudging back through a frozen, airless field suspended in the depths of Space, I tried to bring the slightest measure of warmth back to my body by walking faster. I slipped at nearly every step, falling often, but could not shake the ice that had formed in my veins, closing on my heart. As the stars watched, cold, sterile, and dead.

But there was more bad news to come. I returned to the apartment, trembling and in torment, to find one of the roommates (the one to whom I’d always lost in games of chance) flat on his back for the first time in memory, overpowered by a vicious, intestinal flu. And his was not the illusion of vigor; his health was a rock, undeniable. If the virus had done this to him, well-fed and hardy….. I knelt down before the couch on which my dog lay dejectedly, and giving myself up to despair, wept against her. As I did I felt the invisible touch of a phantom, as it came up behind and placed the shroud over us both.

But of course there wasn’t really a phantom. And surprisingly, the next day I felt all right. Perhaps the virus had missed me, after all. Except that. . .a part of the ache in my limbs, was a feeling….. I was stricken with an almost physical panic—unable to remain in the apartment. Scientifically I suppose you could say it was the acid still flowing through my veins (small traces can remain in your system for years, and to this day if I hold my eyes open without blinking I see colors and textures, ‘trails’ that aren’t there). And of course the scare I had received in the arena. But it was more than even that. A cold, unreasoning fear of the shroud, a feeling of being smothered as the weary diggers pushed the dirt back into my grave….. I only knew, despite the danger, that I must get out.

But to truly get out—out of State College—I had no idea how. I told myself I would take a short walk and think it through. It had warmed considerably overnight, and the temperature hovered just above freezing. But if it had been fifty below and I knew I would die of it, I could not have stopped myself. Fear drove me, the fear of the young, who have for the first time sensed the presence of death.

What was about to happen I have spoken of before, yet it remains the most singularly terrifying experience of my life. Nowhere else is the protective amnesia wrapped so thick as about that lonely afternoon, lost at the ends of the earth. Not that I have wanted to remember. . .until now. But looking back hard, I see it only in glimpses which refuse to linger, to resolve and make themselves clear. It is as if in speaking of it, and trying to write about it, however abstractly, I have slowly replaced the actual event with the words I used to describe it. No doubt this is but another way the mind has of protecting itself—replacing an horrid memory with one slightly less real, more tangible but less intense. Yet I feel that to overcome the fear of that time I must look it square in the eye, if only from the distance of eleven years time, and the knowledge that it will never, never happen again. My holocaust. I must try, though the way is dark and filled with vapors, as the apparition itself.

I started out, as I said, to try to escape the fear of the shroud. This sent me walking briskly (I don’t know why this time I didn’t slip) in a direction away from the campus, toward the eastern and outermost suburbs. I can’t say why I chose this direction, except perhaps that it took me away from the arena, the apartment, and all that I perceived as unnatural. Evil.

But if I sought comfort from Nature, I was in for a rude awakening. As the houses began to thin, and the fields of scattered tree and boulder to open toward the encircling mountains, the acid surged inside me, or my soul at last began to falter beneath the barrage….. No words exist for it. I merely felt myself at the literal ends of the earth. A chain of thoughts developed in both my conscious and subconscious—at that moment there was no barrier between them—along with a series of desolate images. The cold, unfeeling hills became for me a precipice, a sheer fall into the silent, screaming void. What lay at the edge of the created Universe? Did it stop, or just keep going? Infinity! Was it possible? And myself but the tiniest speck, unimportant, lost and mortally wounded….. The world was flat, after all, and I had come to its margins. I have killed myself! I have looked too long at the sun, flown too high. Why is the sun so cold and white? Because it cannot care. It is dead. Not dead, as those who say God is dead, but never living. It has never been more than a mindless furnace….. Never. The black hole opens wide. No way back!

A mist began to rise about me—had it been there all along? A cold white fog rose between the shell of my body and the suburbs, the world of life and order, leaving me trapped against the brink, looking down into the formless swirl of unmaking. And between myself and the living world there appeared a dark clot of shadow: the blackness of the Demon, the shadow of Death. My heart would not beat. My blood literally froze. I died.

…..

Slowly the shadow passed, and more slowly still, the fog began to lift. But the demon was not gone. The apparition had only been the physical glimpse of it as it entered the remnants of my soul. It was there inside me: undeniable, invincible. It stood between me and all that had once been mine: life, love, the earth that I had shunned. I had gone too far. Too far! I would never overcome the monstrous thing that now possessed me, never return to the land of the living. Already I walked in Death’s Kingdom. That the husk of a body remained, to wander wraith-like….. No words exist. My lower jaw trembled. I needed to scream, but was mute with raw animal shock and fear. I needed to weep, but my eyes were turned to stone.

I had but two choices: tell myself it had not happened, or lose all grip on life. Despite everything I had seen, felt, and been torn apart by, the tiniest shred of courage, of real hope still lived in me, unreachable, and indestructible. Such is the strength, and the curse, of human endurance. I denied the Horror, in the name of life. I closed my mind, and called my only friend to me.

My one true friend. Somehow she was still there with me. She lived, saw my pain, and came to me with the only gift that could sustain me—the comforting touch of a loyal ally. I dropped down on one knee, utterly lost and bewildered, and stroked her soft fur until a single tear ran lonely down my face.

But when I rose again the distance still remained. The demon was inside me, and there was no way back. But I had chosen. I refused to think or feel anything, but only walked—back to the place that was no longer there. Reaching the apartment at last, I resolved then and there to leave that trap, that horror. Where I went, and what I would do, I had not the faintest notion. But the cold blade of winter’s Night had raped me for the last time. Or so I told myself.

No words exist.

III

The day after the fear of it remained. But I was determined. Putting all my belongings into the same backpack with which I had set out on the dreamer’s road—it seemed incongruous, that it could still exist in the world that had been razed—I called my dog to me, and walked out of the door. My brother was by then an afterthought, and I have no idea how, or on what terms we parted. Because he was still of the living world; he could no longer see me but for the shadow, thin and wavering, I cast on the ground behind me.

I walked, as ever, toward the east. In that direction lay the only road open to me: toward the battle of unmaking, to Mordor, through death. Of course I felt the fear as I passed by the shadow of the Shadow. But I was determined.

Only I couldn’t make the word mean anything, and the acid in my veins, now literal, refused to calm. I walked, aware of the growing ache of my limbs, and an icy numbness of the heart. But fear we can never shake: it remains through all, until the day we are no more.

The end, the Void, was everywhere. I had gone too far! No longer a rush of liquid fear, it was instead a cold realization, a brutal statement of fact. My sun had fallen from the sky. The trees that had sheltered me were dead, and all I had believed in. . .destroyed. And I, I myself had been the instrument. I had flown too high. I had killed myself. But I kept walking, with life on one side—my animal friend—and death on the other, in the form of Prince Rupert’s unnatural companion. But no, the wraith was inside me. I was the wraith. Too far! A surge of rage silenced my fear, but was futile. No such emotion could deny the executioner’s blade, which hovered over my every movement. I walked.

At an undetermined spot I stopped, turned, and stuck out my thumb. My ship was wrecked, my cargo of good intentions obliterated. Without hope, without destination, I begged a ride from the winds of chance.

At length a car pulled over, and I got it. It must have, because somehow I was brought to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And then somehow I was walking again, being warned of arrest, back to an entrance ramp, there to try my luck again. Again the cold length of waiting, and then a car. This ship and two-man crew I remember—pirates. My hair was long, like theirs, and my dog and my knife seemed to speak of a similar, savage past. I was safe from them, among them: without reserve they offered this small help. I climbed into the back of a far older, more battered Impala. They drank beer, cursed each other good naturedly, and drove with alarming speed and want of care.

I was safe, and in my mind I knew it; but my body would not be stilled. It ached, and urged relentlessly to get out, to escape. It was not a fear of the pirates, whose rough hearts I understood, but of the thing inside me, which I could only doubt at greater and greater intervals. It was an agony that is difficult to convey—I simply could not sit still. And yet I must. I knew by then where I was trying to go: the lost home, Lothlorien, its golden leaves withered and fallen. Bucks County. With what wild and unfounded hope I clung to it. I had no plan, except that it had once given me shelter, and perhaps was not yet lost to me. You can never go home, was a sentiment I railed against with all my broken strength. But I tried. I give myself that much. I tried.

But trying, like dying, isn’t easy. Bouncing painfully over that concrete sham of a highway, we came at length to two sharks feeding on a kill—state troopers, writing up some old hippie in a Volkswagen van. Expired, out of state plates. Looking back as we passed, I saw them beginning to search and seize. The pirates, whose bleared eyes had caught sight of danger just in time and slowed to a less incautious speed, now laughed, and the driver once more buried his foot to the floor. “The way I figure,” he said, unafraid, “they’re stopped and they gotta start again. They prolly won’t do ninety, and I will.” He nudged his friend, who punched him in the arm, and gave him another beer.

I began to fear, as at last we neared my exit, that these two outlaws might be dangerous, after all. But they were all right. They let me off at the Levittown overpass, even went so far as to shake my hand and wish me luck. “Sure you won’t have a beer…..” But already they were fading, a last glimpse of the rough-edged survivors of a murderous world. Again I walked, down the curving ram to a place familiar, but never before seen with these eyes. Levittown is no garden spot, as you know, but I had always before forgiven its abuses, as the good-hearted and less fortunate neighbor of my beloved Yardley. The oppressive steel mill, the reeking chemical plant—these were not the fault of the people. But here I was much too close, too vulnerable to ‘soothe beneath the artist’s loving hand’. I was scared, and exhausted, and at the last overpowered by it all. Beside the pressed-upon remnants of Route 13—drab shopping slabs, cheap motels, gas stations—I found a lamenting patch of weedy grass, bordered by the ramp, that sank away from the dirty, rubber-scarred pavements, and there sat upon a broken rock, as the sounds of traffic shook me. It was here, utterly helpless, that I saw the witch.

My dog began to bark, and I knew her well enough (better than any, better even than myself) to know from the sound that she was frightened. Young, fearless and a dauntless fighter, she was afraid….. The stick figure of a woman approached, was passing close, along the pummeled gravel margin of the roadway. I looked up, and could not believe my eyes. At once I saw what my dog had sensed: a tortured body and bitter, deranged mind. From the grim, early pages of Macbeth, from its festering sores, a witch had risen, or escaped, to walk the same dying chapter as myself. I knew that for me the world had crumbled, yet somehow fancied myself alone in this smoking ruin, this shadowland, this Hell. But it was not so. As if frozen forever I see her, long shag of wild, reddish hair; thin, gnarled body of a hale but hateful old womanhood; sharp nose; bitter eyes, unwell. Pauper’s clothes, sunken cheeks, a brisk but unnatural gait. And the snarl of contempt she gave us both as she passed by, grotesque, larger than life, with that one guttural sound cursing all the world….. But she need not have wasted her hatred on me; I was already cursed. Seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Why else had I been brought to this place at the precise moment and, seeking escaped, been shown instead this undead vision of spiritual rape and murder? For through my fear—frozen, rooted and riveted with horror—enough of a conscience still lived in me, to pity her. She was quite obviously unwell in her mind, and utterly alone in the world. Perhaps she had literally escaped, from a place of inhuman imprisonment—cruel injections, straight-jackets, shock treatments. But more likely she was mere human refuse, a refugee, like myself, from the Flood. I could not hate her, though her visage rattled my bones like a wind-chime in the desert of death. How could I hate her? I understood her, all too well.

Again the way becomes unclear, though from this time forward my memory grows more intact. It is not that I can’t remember, only that I don’t know what to tell. It seems so utterly pointless. Even you, will all you know of me, must begin to doubt. It is impossible not to. I doubt myself. And yet it happened, all of it, every damnable, lamentable moment. There is darkness. There is evil. Perhaps that evil is not Demonic or supernatural. It doesn’t have to be. By elevating ourselves above Nature, we have created an alternative Order—a parallel world, but without matching restraints. In Nature there is pain, and fear, and death. But they are not lasting, and all returns, progresses for the greater good. There are scorpions, sharks and hyenas; but the wise avoid them, and those who cannot, die quickly. In the world of men there are no such limits. Death is prolonged, endless. We are too strong for the natural order: we overpower it, and reek destruction blindly. In time we kill, but first we torture: Auschwitz, the Inquisition, animal experiment laboratories. The Horror, the unspeakable horror of what we can be, finds us out in our small and futile worlds. It shatters the heart, destroys our will to continue. And yet those with a conscience must continue, must try, because there is no one to stop us but ourselves. Neither God, nor the poetic justice of dreams brought down the Third Reich. Men with weapons who had been pushed too far—fire with fire—put an end it its reign of terror. Jesus must have been incredibly naïve…..

I found my way to Mike’s farm, or what we then called Mike’s farm. It was the place I had sought, and the haven I hoped would sustain me, if only for a few days. But it never belonged to Mike, or to any of us, really. His father held the deed, and because of his goodness we prospered there, along with nature—living, dreaming, and making music out of doors. But the goodness of Mr. Osborn had been slowly leached away by his second wife—the stepmother, Randy. She was a bitter, vindictive woman, and it is so easy to imagine her poisonous, seductive whisperings. Soon the farm would be sold, traded for a droll townhouse, and small dance studio in Newtown. This accomplished, the widow spider would then discard the empty body of the man. Divorce. She left him dry, and my one hope is that she is now dead.

But at that time the farm was still there, and somehow I made my way to it. Now I remember. I called Gerard from a phone booth on Route 13, still shaken by the witch, practically begging a ride out of there. It seems I had a great deal of trouble in getting through to him, or when I did, in making him understand my urgency. Perhaps both. But it was getting on for evening, and the temperature was dropping rapidly. It was still February, and I was beginning to think I had not eluded the virus after all. My body ached and my mind was reeling—no food. He at last came to get me and, still not understanding the gravity of the situation, suggested we go to a party at a mutual friend’s house. The only reason I agreed was that Gerard clearly had no conception of what I was going through, and perhaps someone would be there who could take me the rest of the way to Mike’s.

When we arrived at the party I confessed to its host, whose parents were out of town, that I had not eaten all day, or well for many days before that. Larry was a pretty good guy whom I’d known throughout high school, and said to help myself to anything in the house. It was here that I first realized (continued to realize?) how out of control my situation had become. My body was a wreck, I knew, and the acid that had eaten my mind….. But my conscious will—this, at least, I thought was still my own. But when I went to the refrigerator and opened it, I was like a crazed cannibal. I began to eat everything in sight, without discretion or restraint. I tried to stop myself, or at least slow down, but something other than my conscious mind had taken over. Cold spaghetti, warm beer, it didn’t matter. I couldn’t believe how much I ate—until my stomach was ready to burst—and still I did not stop. I knew then, really knew, that in the name of the Quest I had pushed myself beyond the bounds that nature would allow. Once and for all my Quixotic, ‘angelic’ self had lost control. My body’s crew had at last mutinied—strange, rough men who had had enough of serving a blind destiny, and trying to save the world. But what was their intention? Had they a plan that was any more realistic? Clearly not. What I needed was the captain of the mind: firm, objective, able to make the hard decisions. But he lay sick and helpless in his cabin, writhing with fever.

But when at last the mutinous crew had gorged itself, appeasing fear with liquor, I went below and roused my ailing captain. I had no choice. The ship was battered, and the storm still raged. Was my mind beginning to split—body vs. spirit, logic vs. emotion, life vs. death? Am I talking like a lunatic? Of course. But under the unbelievable pressures of the storm, and the harrows still to come, I had little choice. And bizarre as it may sound, my irrational outlook—seeing things in terms of metaphors (derived largely from books I had read, along with my own)—was often the only thing that saved me. I said earlier that in slowly detaching myself from any conventional reality, I had created a physically separate world. Well I had, or something had. Psychotherapy, ‘realism’, the advice of others, none of these could save me now. I had thrown myself clear of the known universe, of all they knew and understood. I was in a Hell of my own creation, and only I could find my way out. Dante was not speaking metaphorically when he wrote Inferno. He, like myself, was only trying to escape from the nightmare, the highly personalized subterranean fire.

Later that night Fred and Bob appeared (the musical brothers), and I had found my ride to Mike’s. After I called ahead they dropped me off, and we had a small reunion. My dog at once renewed her acquaintance with the three that lived at the farm. Mike and I talked for a while, then he let me go to bed. I slept for ten hours straight, maybe twelve, and in the morning felt a lot better. Once again it seemed I might be okay.

The sun shone brightly and the day was warm, deceptively so, and made me forget for a time my newly (and finally) learned sense of caution. After all, I had made it to my favorite place in the world, fair Rivendell—the deepest of the deep, the haven of my youth. Mr. Osborn, despite objections from Randy, had agreed to let me stay for a few days, until I was well enough to form a new plan. But all of this presumed that the damage done to me at Penn State (whether self-inflicted or otherwise) was not permanent. It was.

After a big country breakfast in the cheery, old-fashioned kitchen (I always think of that place as the essence of morning), Mike and I went somewhere in his car. Wherever it was, and whoever we went to see, we ended up getting stoned with them. Mike had pretty much given up smoking pot by then, as I undoubtedly should have. But I found myself clinging to the notion that marijuana had some healing properties that might help me to fight, or at least understand, what was happening inside my body. We got stoned, and the only effect it had on me was to make me disbelieve almost all of what had happened in that long, brutal winter. Surely there was no sinister force, trying to annihilate me. No! I was still young, and strong, and with the approach of Spring would be able to fight off all my ailments. When we got back to the farm I played Mike’s drums (though at the end of the solo I trembled slightly and struggled for breath); we took the dogs for a long walk across the open countryside (despite the gathering clouds and falling temperature); and ended with a mock martial-arts duel (in which I felt called upon to shed my shoes, exposing my weary feet to the cold ground, and eventually slipping down on one knee in a puddle that felt like the arctic seas). For though we were at a lower, more temperate altitude, winter had been here as well, and showed every sign of returning.

So at last, weary of strenuous activity, we went inside to dry off and warm up. The only trouble was, for all its other virtues, the old farmhouse was not well heated. I sat, wrapped in a blanket on the couch in Mike’s room, shivering now in earnest. He turned on the portable TV, and we began to watch the Winter Olympics, from whatever site they were held that year. The mild, disbelieving euphoria of the pot was now a thing of the past, and the ache in my limbs returned, worse than ever.

But this was not what disturbed me. Sitting in the half-light glow of the television, I was shown yet again how battered my emotions had become. Watching those graceful and heroic athletes, skating or skiing their hearts out….. I don’t know how to describe it. Maybe it was because their Herculean efforts were being recognized and rewarded while my own, utterly futile, were played out in shadows no one saw. Maybe because my own body, once fairly athletic, was now in such a ruinous state. I don’t know. But every time an event was ended and the winner stood upon the elevated platform, listening with a bursting heart to his or her national anthem, something wrenched mercilessly at my soul. Tears of shame and sorrow and loss and disappointment, streamed down my face, uncontrollable. I wrapped the blanket higher about my face, to try and hide it, or just to hide. But Mike knew me too well. He sensed that something was really wrong, and asked if there was anything he could do.

But he had done for me all that he could. The house was simply too cold, and by now it was apparent that the flu, so feared, was claiming me at the last. I called my Uncle Ed in Ewing Township, across the river, and asked if I could spend the night at his house. He came to get me, and when he saw how genuinely ill I had become, phoned my father at once. My father got in his car (it was by then Friday night), and began the three hour drive up.

There’s a country song that goes, “It’s a short walk from heaven, to Hell.” In this case it was a short drive. Three hours! From Mike’s farm, the bastion of my youth, to the bottomless hole of McLean, Virginia. Going in was so easy, like sliding down a greased rope. But getting out. . .it was like trying to climb back up the same, damnable cord. For four years I would struggle in vain, unable to escape. Several times I though I was almost out, only to come to the same impassible length, and after cursing, praying, hoping, despairing, trying and trying and trying, would slide down helplessly once more, to the last small knot at the end, there to clutch like a madman, hovering in often unspeakable fear above the Void, the Hole, the bottomless pit. For four impossible years.

“The demoni lived far underground, in the dark tunnels and luminous caverns of a long-dead volcano. Their lives were wretched and cruel, and many died of hunger and cold. Many others took their own lives out of hopelessness and despair. The only escape from their underground prison lay in the long and treacherous journey…..”

But that is another story. For at this point, though I could write about such piteous creatures, I did not yet count myself among them. Not yet.

Wave after wave of numbing, dizzying pain broke over me, through me, pinning me relentlessly to the unyielding bed. A high fever chilled me through the thick layer of blankets. I ate nothing, lived on water and air, for three days, writhing beneath the onslaught of the virus, my defenses weakened, obliterated, by harsh exposure and childish neglect.

But strange to say, in a way I almost welcomed the pain, the long helplessness. I felt it would cleanse me in some way and, when all was over, I would be myself again, the traumas of the past months left behind. Also, it called to mind my childhood: times I had been ill, sometimes seriously, but always surrounded by such care and concern, always recovering fully, walking away from the malady as if waking from a bad and bitter dream. The good doctors, who knew everything, and the family that would always be there…..

But this illness was different, the prelude, in fact, to a lifelong affliction—Crohn’s disease. That this would not be diagnosed until ten years later is a testament, in small part, to the relative rarity of the disease, but in larger part to the indifference and ineptitude of those same doctors in whom I placed such trust. That I inflicted it upon myself through bad food, exposure, and inadequate respect for the killer virus, is a further testament to just how badly you can injure yourself through simple naïveté—not realizing the fragility of life, not believing in the forces, natural and otherwise, that would snuff out your gentle flame forever.

But here, I’m ahead of myself. All I knew then, as on the fourth day I got up from the bed and tried to function as before, was that something was very, very wrong. Though the heat in the townhouse was constant and evenly distributed, I was haunted by endless chills. No matter what I ate, my intestines would not tolerate it. Nor was Crohn’s the only problem; far from it. My back, which before had only prevented me from typing without pain, had surrendered in that pathetic scoop of a bed the last remnants of its strength. Now I could not sit at all: when I tried it felt like someone had buried an axe between my shoulder blades, or (more appropriately) that I had fallen from some steep rockface onto an equally jagged and merciless ledge. And when I tried to lie down, especially if the cushion beneath my head was inadequate, the dizziness and debilitation would return, and the blood vessels around my eyes and forehead would begin to spasm and seize, little tremors that jerked at my eyelids, knotting my brow fiercely, and denying all rest.

So. I could not sit or lie down without pain and discomfort, could not leave the house at all (it was still late winter, even in northern Virginia), and walked my weary circles warmly dressed, cold nonetheless and sometimes trembling, no matter what I did. Though never heavy, I must have dropped close to twenty pounds, and with dark circles beneath my sunken eyes, looked every bit the concentration camp prisoner I was.

But if I had been plagued only by physical difficulties, and knew that in time they would lessen (I did not), it might not have been so horrible. Unfortunately, the LSD was not through with me, and with the coming of Spring, so eagerly awaited as a cure for my winter maladies, would mesh perfectly with yet another enemy, at least the equal of any I had yet faced.

All through my junior and senior years of high school I had felt a creeping and unshakable weariness, both of body and of mind. At the time I had attributed it to simple fatigue—you never get enough sleep in high school, and the constant mental drain of classes and homework when every part of body and soul longed to be elsewhere….. But it wasn’t that at all. My allergies, always strong (I would say severe, except that they had always before been treated, and treatable) had begun to manifest themselves in an entirely new way. This physical condition as well—the Allergic Anxiety/Fatigue—is somewhat rare, at least to the degree that it affected me. But to a trained physician up to date on recent findings and able to see past narrow, personal prejudices, it should not have been impossible to decipher. Yet here, too, the doctors I went to see about it claimed they could find no cause for the symptoms I described—sinusitis, constant fatigue, sensitivity to heat and sudden sounds—and suggested it was all in my head. One idiot even put me on tranquilizers, a hell of a thing to do to a floundering high school kid dragged down by endless weariness—leave him with a bottle of downers, and a sure and easy way to end his life. But hey, it got me out of his office.

Again I run ahead, and back, seemingly without purpose. I don’t mean to, and I’m sure it’s no great thrill to read about my personal travails, and tragedies. Everyone, at one time or another, is forced to grapple with such demons. It’s just that my demons came at me one after the other, for four years, relentless. And yet somehow they could not utterly destroy…..

I don’t know how to tell you this, or even what it is I’m after. And though I would never try to speak for them, I’m sure the survivors of the Holocaust must feel much the same. How describe Hell to another, and what is gained if you do? Because no one, despite the overwhelming physical evidence, can truly know what it was like for them—the screaming, inhuman Horror—and many outsiders simply will not allow themselves to believe in its intensity. They cannot (or will not) accept that human beings could undergo such torture and survive: that a world in which the worst of us is supposed to have a conscience, and in which a benevolent God is supposed to reign supreme, could ever allow such atrocities. Well, gentle Christians, you can just take that little protective plate away from your heart, and feel the true coldness and brutality of the world of men. It is that horrible, and when ignorance and human cruelty are given unlimited rein (No one to stop him, indeed!), the worst that you can imagine does not equal the truth. I’m not asking anyone to live in terror, or surrender all hope. But you have to know that evil does exist, and that Nature holds absolutely no mercy (nor should it) for those who refuse to see life as it is. And no one, no one, is safe from the grim razor of truth. The one defense is not to fight it, to see things as they are, neither better nor worse. Only then is life meaningful, or even possible.

Time passed slowly, and with the approach and early stages of Spring, some of the wounds of attack and exposure made as if to heal. Hope springs eternal, even when it is vastly premature. Some time around April, I suppose, I was again able to go out at times, though the walks through that crowded, viciously territorial suburb were but a grotesque parody of those through deep and gentle Yardley. Every few houses someone would threaten to call the police if I didn’t, “Put that dog on a leash.” The sight of that tiniest freedom—an animal uncaged and unchained—was more than their miserable minds would allow.

And neither one of us were free, happy, or even young, in the way that seemed to enrage them. Forget that my own health was non-existent; my once beautiful and perfect companion had developed similar afflictions from a similar cause—her own innocence, and the indifferent cruelty of those who should have loved her better. She ate grass to make herself vomit, trying to eject the foul things that had rooted in her stomach from eating garbage at Penn State. Of course I had tried to stop her from rummaging the dumpsters, but how do you tell the most basic drive of all, simple hunger, to be silent? I could not feed her adequately, and so she must feed herself. After a time she also developed sores on her lower legs, and allergic reaction (like father…..) to the high grasses we wandered through, and not helped at all by the polluted creeks she waded in. Again, she was used to the clean water of Pennsylvania, and how could I deny her this simple release from the heat and oppressive surroundings?

How can I describe the thinly wooded undergrounds we were forced to frequent? Creek-sides littered with trash; sewer-like underpasses where gas station refuse turned the waters oily with scum; woods I had played in as a child now hemmed in on every side by roads and dwellings. Such is the modern reality. Stray but a short distant from any tight, over-developed suburb, and you find a grim wasteland of choked waterways and dying nature.

I had to clean and my dog’s sores twice a day, which was painful for us both. For her it was both the physical anguish—the rash was red, and tender to the touch—and the bewilderment of a loving master hurting her. For me it was the mental anguish of having to cause in her such pain. The vet gave me some pills for her (she had trouble breathing at times, as I did from asthma), but these in time caused blood in her urine, and had to be discontinued.

What you have to understand, what no one seemed to understand, then or now, is that I loved her. She was my closest, my only friend. My family had had her spayed (without my knowledge or consent) when she was still a pup: I was the only mate that she would ever have. She had been there when my world came apart. She was with me now. And I couldn’t take care of her! I couldn’t protect her.

But this is pointless. Bitter, frightened people will always despise and try to snuff out those who love, will always ridicule one’s most sacred feelings. To hell with them. They are beneath contempt.

But I do not write this for them. Such people do not read, unless they have to, despising literature (and all art) because it makes them think and feel. I write it for you, because you still have a conscience, a heart, and a reason to live. Be at peace; there is only one more thing that I must show you.

I think it was June. Nothing had changed except the temperature outside, and the increased vivisection of my allergies. But there was a girl across the way, a beautiful, innocent young girl, a friend of my sister’s. She had long, brown-blondish hair, large, sensitive eyes, and was just at the age where the woman begins to bloom, but the child has not yet died. She was shy and exuberant at once, and so alive it was almost scary. Her name was Sarah, and I still think of her wistfully, looking up at me with a flushing face as I walk by. For you see, she had something of a crush on me, and to feel love in any form, after so much hatred, was like water to a dying man. She was still far too young to encourage. I had no thoughts of touching her. Yet platonic affection too can be very sweet. I cared for her like a brother, in my way protecting her innocence, praying it would last. Of course it did not, and in another year she would be lost to me forever. But that is beside the point. At the time she was still achingly alive, vulnerable, and I loved her. I love her still.

One fine morning she knocked on the door, entered the townhome (at all other times a prison), and suggested that the three of us go to see a movie playing close by. It was all the rage and my sister, too, was eager to attend. The theatre was within walking distance, and Sarah was so insistent….. I could not have said no if she asked me to cut off my arm.

So together we walked down the long, paved incline, skirted, then crossed the busy roadway, into the parking lot of the shopping center beyond. For some reason I thought of another parking lot, another center, but couldn’t make the connection. When I saw the words on the marquis I almost stopped. Perhaps I did stop. But she took me by the arm, whether literally or figuratively, and said, “Come on, it’ll be fun.” The movie was “Jaws,” and may God curse all who gave it life. We went inside.

She and my sister sat in the front row, though some innate sense of caution made me remain near the back, despite all protests. “Okay,” said my angel lightly, seeming a little hurt, but altogether able to go on without me. It sounds like such a small thing, but I felt I had in some way betrayed her, and by the simple act of protecting myself….. It all grows gray, and above all, hopeless. Somewhere in the heart of it lies a truth, some dark meaning—there was hidden meaning to all those days, however grim, and aimed at my destruction—but I will never find it. When one is surrounded by dark forces, when life is happening, it is impossible to find the words, the symbol, the reality. To a chosen few is given the gift to look back and understand. But if that gift is mine, it could not help me then. No amount of wisdom or understanding could, only yielding to the force of the typhoon, and calling upon the stubborn core which Nature ingrains in us all: the will to survive. Though that same, answering force is so often and deeply corrupted, leading us to commit our most heinous, our most unforgivable acts. What a strange, accursed race we are, in whom that which is most holy may become the source of unspeakable evil. And those same men who begin by appealing to our most lofty sentiments, so often lead us to destroy our fellow man, and to shatter the common bond we all share: a flawed, and often desperate humanity. We are alone, and no one to govern our fate but ourselves. I will say it one last time. Kill, do not forgive, the Adolf Hitlers of this world.

Bland, disarming music played, as I looked about the theatre. The silent screen forward, as well as the high walls to right and left, were hung with great curtains as if, the moment the lights were dimmed, and the music stopped, they would be flung open like the doors of a cage, releasing strange terrors, ravenous beasts to feed on the innocents lured into the trap. Oh, I knew it was a trap. I had seen enough of them; there was no question in my mind. But something, through the ever-present fear of that time, something akin to anger and defiance rose up in me. I told myself it was to protect the girl…..

All at once I understand, or think I do, the emotions that played at the young girl’s heart. I remember something my first serious girl-friend told me in the ninth grade, when I was fourteen. She, too, had wanted me to attend a horror movie with her, but I declined. She went anyway, and told me afterward that through all the scenes of bloody debauch, her one desire was to turn to me for shelter, for protection from the dark unknown….. Again, how odd: by what twisted and roundabout ways are we forced to seek outlet for the primal emotions. To be protected from the fierce, predatorily enemies of a prehistoric world….. Sarah had cast me in that role, needing, as her instinctive self continued to unfold, to feel secure and protected by a man. And I had denied her. Thus her pain, which was not lasting, and mine, which will never leave me. I’m sorry my poor, fallen nymph. I’d walk through fire for you, but not at the cost of our souls. Perhaps if things had been different. But they weren’t, and never are. I watched her from my immeasurable distance, fairly squirming with anticipation in the front row and I knew, deep down, she was not mine to win or lose. Though the knowledge could not, cannot, lessen the pain.

At last the presaging music ended. The lights dimmed, went out. And though this had in every way been anticipated, still, when the moment arrived, a creeping dread came over me. The place was dark, and empty, and I was alone. Sweet Sarah had been the bait, but with the coming of that phantom night she vanished utterly. Nothing existed in all the world but that yawning cavern, the slow opening of the curtains, and the stark razor of Eternity.

I have no recollection at all of the movie’s introduction— how they ran the credits, the list of co-conspirators. I remember only that I became aware of my particular demon once more beside, no, inside me. I was having another flashback—I’d had one perhaps a week before in which I walked through dead forests, literally unable to feel my body—though I tried to shake it off. The figures on the screen were larger than life, or I was smaller. I could not leave.

A beautiful, carefree and innocent girl stripped off her clothes in the half-light of evening, and lept into the gently lapping waves of the Atlantic, leaving her drunken companion on the shore. She laughed as she swam, playfully beckoning him to follow. He could not, and she laughed again. Double basses played an ominous rhythm—doom-doom, doom-doom, doom-doom—beginning faintly, like the subconscious perception of an unseen predator. Ever louder, and more insistent. The darkness deepened. My horror congealed. The beasts were set free from their cages. LSD. LSD. LSD.

The girl gave a dull gasp of pain; her face was pulled just below the water. She resurfaced quickly, arms turning her in quick, frightened circles, trying to understand. Again the unseen shark struck home. She screamed, cried out, “Please, God help me!” But of course there is no God. The monstrous razors closed on her again, and this time she made no sound. The subterranean killer dragged her beneath the water….. Though torn to ribbons I could not leave, for the girl’s sake. Perhaps she still lived.

But the next scene played in daylight, bright and painful to the eye. The sun glinted on the sea like a shining path. Something had washed up on shore….. The remains of the girl, with an army of small crabs devouring the last, long shreds of human flesh. Aahh! Then a loyal and trusting dog, fetching a stick thrown into the waves by its master, disappears. Then a boy, a child, is killed. I no longer care to be the virgin’s knight, protecting her from the dragon of her own creation. I rose, trembling, and walked out.

The sun shone bright and hard on the sidewalk: I was once again at the foot of the asphalt track, leading to the prison-fortress. But at the time I could find no such creative metaphor. At the time I could not find anything—did not know my name, where I was, or how I had gotten there. I had no sensation in my body, except perhaps for a vague feeling that I was leaving it. I had no time for fear. If someone or some thing had approached me in that moment and told me I had died and gone to another world, it would not have surprised me in the least.

But something was wrong. Something was wrong. I looked back across the roadway. A metallic shape roared by. The Nazgul screamed, shaking me to the marrow. I fell to my knees beside the way. . .and almost smiled. But it was the smile that forms on the face of the guillotined head, as it sees the basket rising.

How can I tell you? I cannot tell myself. I only knew that some last desperate instinct told me to reach out. I touched brick, a wall. I rubbed the side of my hand against it, trying to regain some sensation. . .trying to remind myself of something. Something.

I still wanted to live.

The Wolf

The winter had been unusually harsh, even by the relentless standards of the Northwest Territory. The young timberwolf staggered against the weight of the oncoming wind, lashing him with its burden of sharp, drifting snow. It was a dangerous chance he took, crossing the bare valley of a frozen lake at the height of the landlocked gale. Lost among the blinding whiteness, struggling for footholds again the ice below, the drifts reached at times to his shoulders, as if trying to bury him alive. But he had no choice. The thin stretch of pine forest at the base of the huge rise was barren of game, not a squirrel, not a rabbit, not a mouse to be had. He had wandered for many days. He was on the brink of starvation.

It was his first winter alone, a trial, a ritual as old as the mountains which loomed, gigantic, solemn, and indifferent around him. Each autumn for ten thousand generations the wolf packs had broken up, all but the mated pairs, and the young, who until then had been sheltered and fed, were turned loose to face the cold desolation of the North which was their only domain, theirs because they had been hard, and clever, and stubborn enough to endure it. Those who survived the unerring ritual would re-form in the Spring, and establish rank with the group. Then the strongest and wisest alone, the leaders, would be allowed to mate. Like every other male, this half realized desire, to take a mate and sire offspring of his own, was strong in the young timberwolf, even now. It drove him onward, against the wind that strove to force the breath back down his throat, suffocating him. His eyes narrowed and blinked against the stinging snow, and his legs felt as if they would collapse beneath him, leaving him to die. But he continued.

At long, weary length the battle of the lake was behind him, and he climbed stubbornly up the opposing bank, through the patch of clearing beyond, and at last to the edge of yet another lonely stretch of pines. Empty and inhospitable it looked, the branches waving fiercely in the howling storm, those that could shaking off their chains of snow and ice, those that could not, cracking with a dry, hollow sound that was their final undoing. Whole trees, split nearly to the base, crossed the ground at leering angles, some partly propped against large stones, or other trees both living and dead. The wolf had no other hope than to dig a nest of snow just within its boundaries, there to sleep, and wait for some strength to return to him. His muscles trembled with fatigue, and he felt hot and dizzy from the incessant pounding of the cold, made palpable by its burden of white. He staggered toward the shelter of the lessening wind, and began to paw feebly at the loose snow before an uprooted trunk.

But in the midst of his labors he stopped, and began to turn his head eagerly from side to side. The scent of meat, not game, had come to him. He knew the difference, and set out at once in the direction his dilating nostrils pointed him. The wind twisting through the trees sought to confuse the scent, at times carrying it away, but in vain. Too keen and precise was this, the most developed of his senses. Now the smell of it was near, and his eyes made out something dark against the snow ahead, a small mound of fur protruding from the lacing blanket of white: a young caribou, unable to survive the long migration, or perhaps lost along the way.

Without haste, and with all the caution of one ill-prepared for a fight, the yearling approached. Standing with one paw atop the frozen carcass he raised his head high, again tasting the air, this time for bears, or other wolves. There would be no communal feeding now. If another wolf, even one of his siblings, were to come upon him it would certainly come to a fight—to the death, or until one retreated. This was no game. As fiercely determined as he was to keep his prize, still, he tasted the air.

He was alone, but not so alone as he had been but a few moments before. Now the caribou was with him, almost a friend, and its flesh would sustain him. He licked at the carcass lovingly, but was disturbed by its cold immobility. Tearing at the fur with his strong jaws and neck, he succeeded only in opening a narrow vertical slit, perhaps three inches long. Trying to break free a small strand of the meat inside, he was met by an obstacle beyond his experience, which seemed to utterly deny all sustenance. The carcass, three days old, was frozen solid.

Something desperate and uncontrollable rose up in him. He ripped and tore at the spot with all the fury of imminent starvation. His jaws ached and his muscles knotted with the strain, but still the icy flesh defied him. Stepping back weakly, he lay down beside the stiff unmoving form, licking plaintively at the opening, now a little wider. But even here he received a shock. His tongue stuck to the meat as to ice, and when he pulled it back in consternation, a small patch of skin remained behind. He gave an involuntary whimper of pain, and tasted for the first time his own blood in his mouth.

Gently, instinctively he ate a bit of snow, then for some reason not altogether clear to him, began to dig a nest directly beside the young caribou. Leaning full against it, he released a deep breath akin to a sigh, and surrendered to death-like sleep. The wind gradually lessened as night drew on, its howling torrents slowly replaced by the gentle fall of white and delicate flakes. The wolf and caribou slept, as the snow slowly covered them both.

The yearling woke several hours before dawn, feeling weak, but aware of some change which made him stagger to his feet at once. The smell of the carcass, barely detectable before, was now strong and distinct. Quickly clearing away the snow, he examined its hind leg, on which he had forlornly lain, perhaps in simple yearning for the comforting contact of fur-covered flesh. The smell was strongest here, and the meat….. The nest of snow had protected them both from the bitter cold, and his own failing body heat had thawed a place, just large enough. Without stopping to wonder he tore into softened flesh, greedily devouring perhaps a pound of meat before being halted again by the unyielding ice. But he had taken nourishment, and now he knew the trick. Once more he lay upon the leg, licked a bit of snow for moisture and, nestling in the soft powder, went to sleep. He slept far into the morning, and when he awoke, he was stronger.

Again the scent of meat was strong, and again he ate rapidly. Though the cruel edge of starvation had gone from his hunger, he was keenly aware that in the still air, by comparison warm, the smell of blood and flesh was sure to carry. This lesson he had learned the hard way. He expected danger, and indeed, it was not long in coming. Almost the instant the thawed portion of meat had expired, he heard a twig crack at the edge of the forest, to his left. His head jerked upward and turned to face the sound.

A second wolf had appeared. Sizing him up, it began to advance slowly, head down, hackles raised over haunching shoulders, lip curled in a threatening snarl. At a distance of twenty feet it stopped, and for a moment the two studied one another point blank.

They were both large, nearly three feet at the shoulder. But the intruder was heavier: stronger, older. Both had coats of silver-gray shot through with tawn, highlighted with black about the face and shoulders. The yearling’s eyes were bright, attentive and unsure. The eyes of the challenger were hard and set, ready to kill or be killed. The younger wolf sensed this, sensed also its superior strength. For this was a gray wolf, not as fast but much more powerful. And while it galled him to give up his prize without a fight, his own hunger had been slaked, and he possessed the intelligence to know there was nothing to be gained by a confrontation now. Without snarling in return, he moved off. The other took possession of the carcass, and did not pursue him.

For if there is one pervading truth of wolf behavior, it is that even in life and death, there is honor.

The Spring thaw came, slow but inexorable. First to break through the choking layer of ice were the small, swift-flowing streams. More slowly, the snow began to thin and patch, leaving moist, fertile ground dark with nutrients, springing forth new blades of grass, saplings, and sudden swaths of brightly colored wildflowers. The sky was a deep northern blue, with high fleece clouds moving slowly across the still and profound vault of heaven, home of sun and moon alike. Soon the undulating V’s of returning geese appeared with their tumult of voices, bound for the great, open water of the placid lakes beyond. Smaller birds returned as well, and those who had stayed, nestled deep in the hollows of trees, rebuilt their nests and prepared for the arrival of new life. Rabbits appeared in greater numbers, sharing the ground with foraging chipmunks and flying squirrels. Woodpeckers drummed the trees for insects, and foxes prowled both field and forest alike, ever alert for the small, unwary animals which sustained them and fed their young.

The young timberwolf, alive as he had not been for many months, moved easily through the shade of pines and soft sunlight of the clearings, returning slowly toward the stone den which was the winter home of the pack’s dominant pair. There, when all had gathered, social status would once more be established, and bonds renewed. The pack would then move as a body to intercept the northern migrations of the caribou, in the broad valleys that were like streams of living fur and flesh. Outnumbered hundreds to one, joined loosely perhaps by other packs and solitary hunters, they would start the great animals to flight, single out the weak and disabled, and make their kill. In this way, far from diminishing the herds, in fact they made them stronger, taking no more than they needed, assuring the vigor of future generations.

Loping easily, no more than two days journey from the meeting place, the wolf stopped suddenly, turning his head from side to side. Once more the pungent smell of meat had come to him, alluring and full of promise. And while his hunger was not acute, after the privations of winter all nourishment was welcomed, and needed to husband strength. The scent was unfamiliar but strong, and he had no trouble locating its source: over a short rise and down into a kind of dell, little more than a downward fold between opposing hills. Here the pines yielded to bracken, stone, and a few rugged, deciduous trees.

But as he drew nearer something made him pause, then advance much more slowly, full of caution. There was another scent here as well, a little to the left, ahead of him, all around, an elusive wisp of fragrance edged in instinctive fear. Ears erect and straining in a wide sweep, nostrils raised and quivering, he sought out the source. In vain. The creature was gone, and now he could see the meat.

Dangling from the low branch of a gnarled oak, it was completely bare, without fur, not a carcass or a kill, but something stripped from one. The yearling could not make out the strand from which it hung, or understand what creature had brought it here or why. Beneath it the ground had been disturbed, with dead leaves and other natural debris making a small, flattened mound. He stood perfectly still, trying to understand.

All was still; he knew that he was the only large predator in the vale. The meat just hung there, waiting….. So carefully, one stealthy footfall at a time, he moved forward. Stopping again nearly below the desired object, he took one more thorough sweep with his senses. Nothing. He raised up a little, sniffed at the meat, and came down again.

All at once the leaves beneath him were sent flying, and a sharp pain erupted in his lower foreleg. He jerked back wildly but something held him, gripping his leg like the jaws of a monster. A flow of thick blood swelled slowly around the wound, and the crushed tendon throbbed with a pain such as he had never known. Straining frantically, he backed in a small, unyielding semi-circle, the only movement that the trap permitted him. Its iron jaws were linked after a short length of chain to a spike driven deep into the ground.

Though filled with a wild, uncomprehending fear, at length the animal relented, as the pain and blood of his wound were only made worse for the struggle. He lay down on his hindquarters, and gingerly licked at the distended paw, attempting as he did so to bite away the metal teeth. In vain. He rose again, raging at the thing, but soon sank back into the same pensive lie. His fear and fury expended without result, a wordless voice inside called him first to yield, then to try to think it through. He remained immobile, panting with exertion and pain, stifled a bitter urge to howl out in bewildered despair. He was alone, he was trapped, and in the midst of unspeakable dangers.

Such is the effect of man on the animal brothers he has spurned.

Night drew on, and soon the hollow became a pool of darkening shades: the tree loomed large and menacing. The wolf could no longer contain his anguish. Sitting up he raised his head skyward and sent a long, passionate wail into the night. Again. Again he pulled against the chain, but this time feebly. The pain that had fallen to a dull, relentless throbbing grew sharp, and he released the weight of his body against it. Then hobbling closer in the last dim light of day, he examined the butt of the spike.

It occurred to him slowly to dig at the thing, as he would at a rabbit’s den. But he could not put any weight on the wounded leg, and without it the best he could manage was a few hopping scrapes, which barely cleared away the leaves and twigs to one side of it. Desperately he struggled, until giving too earnest a scrape he lost his footing and fell, both on the forepaw held in the trap, and on the spike itself. It jarred at his throat, and the pain from the paw bent beneath him was indescribable. He struggled to raise himself, whimpering, then lay down again slowly. With the fall of full Night the dull horror of his predicament closed in on him, drowning all other sensations. He licked again at the wound, lay his weary and aching head upon the ground, and slept.

His dreams were troubled, filled with images of bears and wolverines, and with the strange smell of the creature who had laid the trap. For a moment he almost seemed to picture it, as the racial memory of a hundred thousand years conjured the great and terrible being in his mind: tall, erect, carrying fire and possessing strange powers. He woke bitter and confused, for the last image had not been of man as an enemy, but as an ally, walking side by side with his earliest fathers, spear in hand.

But something had changed between man and wolf. And the fear of what man had become, fed by the memories of more recent generations, brought home with ever greater intensity the fullness of the danger. Again he struggled against the trap, the resulting pain goading him almost to madness. A large seam opened in the underside of the shattered joint, and the blood flowed heavily once more.

At last he relented, unwilling to injure himself further. At least not yet. An idea had come to him in his fury and despair, but it was so brutal, so savage….. He lay down, closer to the spike, and tried to stop the bleeding with his tongue. His own blood in his mouth, and the trap….. Weak, frightened and unsure, he slept, as the bastard pain pervaded all.

When morning came he woke with a burning dryness in his throat, an increased throbbing of the wound, and a feeling of disaster which he could not allay. He sat up and sniffed the air instinctively. The wind was from the west, slight and fitful, and in a thin wisp, as if carried from far away….. There it was, the thing he feared above all others. Not a wolverine, not a bear. He smelled man, the same man whose ruthless iron jaws held him fast. The scent was fleeting at first, but as he continued to taste the air, grew stronger and nearer. While such a word could hold no meaning for him, in his way he knew the creature was little more than a mile off.

A kind of helpless panic grew in him, the last remnants of desperate youth. He hobbled through the small semi-circle allowed him, almost whimpering. But a sudden sound split the air, cleaving forever his innocence. Coming upon another of his traps and finding in it a small fox, the man had aimed his rifle and shot, trying to graze the skull so as not to damage the pelt. His first shot missed as the animal squirmed, so he took aim and fired again.

At the second report the wolf was filled with a savage fury. It was a fury born half of fear and half of courage, half from love of life, and half from hatred of the thing that sought to steal that life away from him. Abandoning all but his passion to be free, he bit again at the trap, then at the wounded limb itself. The limb itself. The pain of it drove him to madness, but he knew he could not stop. He bit and tore at the shattered joint between the paw and foreleg, snarling with razor-edged anguish and rage. The pain became unbearable, and the raw animal shock of it made him stagger in near unconsciousness. He fell forward, bleeding and in torment. But the paw was severed, and he was free.

He lay motionless for a time, his body trembling both from the physical agony, and from the horror of the act forced upon him. The blood flowed thick and dark upon the earth, the amputated foot half buried in the soil. After a time he rose, weak and swooning, and hobbled off.

The trapper carefully skinned the fox, leaving behind its ravaged carcass. The rough man rose, and headed for the next trap in the line. Here he hoped to find larger game, perhaps even a grizzly. The trap that had caught the wolf, nearly performing the amputation of itself, had been a bear-trap.

But he was disappointed. Entering the dell, he saw clearly that the trap had been sprung: fresh blood and scattered debris. But on examining the iron jaws themselves, all he found was the severed paw of a wolf. This troubled his conscience briefly—the thought of an animal maimed for life by his greed. But this small stab of remorse was not lasting. He comforted himself with the knowledge that a predator in the wild could not long survive such a wound. If it did not bleed to death, it would, at the least, be unable to hunt, and quickly starve. He threw the ruined limb aside, dug up the stake and continued on his way.

But he was wrong about the wolf. Though it did nearly bleed to death, though it did almost starve, its will, and therefor its life, remained undaunted.

Captain’s Log

Only now, during a relative calm, am I given time to look back upon our voyage. I will not try to divide the battle into days, for the attempt would be futile. Storms and high seas off the Horn cannot be measured in terms of days, or even weeks. For months at a time they rage, one into the next, day and night blurring together into the endless struggle to survive, and forge a passage. Further, my mind is tired, and it will be many months before I can look back calmly to order events, and try to find the significance of each. What I have to offer are only generalities. Specifics would be of no use. Other ships to follow will by met by other trials, if the same unyielding danger, and there is no substitute for having looked the Devil in the eye.

For this journey does not stand alone, but is the culmination of the attempts which came before it, along with all my years at Sea. Without those earlier failures, and the hard lessons they taught, I would not be sitting at a weathered desk writing this, but sleeping with Davey Jones at the bottom of the sea.

Experience in this consummating enterprise has been both a blessing and a curse. For while I had some idea what to expect, the memory of past failures haunted me with an almost malignant intelligence, as old fears rose one by one to confront me, like the phantom images of drowned sailors. Having seen and heard a mainsail tear away in time of greatest need, having watched masts crack and crash down upon the decks, having been bested by sinister waves, felt a ship knocked on her beam-ends and left floundering, been swept over the side by a wall of irresistible water, it was all too easy for me to imagine the myriad ways by which my final hope might be undone. How truly did Captain Marlow speak, when he called imagination the enemy of man. Though I dared not show the trepidation I felt, for fear of unsettling the hands, I will confess there were times when my spirit quailed at the desperation of the undertaking, and the hugeness of the enemies I faced. One by one they would come upon me, and no way to beat them but to simply outlast them.

But in the actual fury of storm and wave I can make no fair complaint. Of all the voyages that came before, this last was met with the fairest weather. In this I must warn the innocent that fair weather off the Horn—except for those lucky few who strike the one week in a hundred when the tumult of sea and sky seem to forget themselves in slumber—is weather which no man of the Sea will face unless dire need compels him. Yet still I must say it. This time the storms were merely vicious, seldom crossing the line into outright evil.

This is not to say that the passage was made much easier for it. All the predictable obstacles were met with experience and determination, and I am not ashamed to say it. Yet the Sea is nothing if not unpredictable, and the ships men sail upon it will never be impervious. For what is a ship but the body, the protective shell of the spirit contained within? None of our bodies will last, and as for the spirit, well, the question of afterlife is one best left to philosophers. A captain knows nothing of the ends of a voyage, only of the voyage itself, and it is with this alone that he must concern himself. It is my own suspicion that this life be finite, and my prejudice that we must live it, in any event, as if it were the only that we would ever know. How else can a man know the joys and sorrows, how else measure his own light against the darkness? Odd that these thoughts should come to me now, that have not come for many months. Best left to those safely ashore, I’ll warrant. For now I have a ship to sail, and a cargo to protect.

It is too early to say that I have beaten the Horn, though it may be hoped that the worst now lies behind us. We are past the point of the blade, and in this sense at least, have accomplished the greater part of the feat.

But now my mind grows weary, and my hand unsure. I must rest them both, for we have still a considerable journey ahead of us. Know only that for now I am not beaten. And if I seem reluctant to gloat over an expected victory, or even to dwell on it, be assured that this too is a kind of wisdom. It is always when we let down our guard, when we call the battle won, that the hammer-stroke falls. There is much water still to cross, and much to accomplish on the other side of it.

But this much, at least, I can give you before I take my leave. For all the pain and despair, it is my experience that the darkness can sometimes be beaten, and a meaningful life delivered from the ashes.

So be of good hope, my brothers, with prow set high against the waves, and sails flung wide upon the blue vault of heaven.

End

Aragorn Books