Copyright 2005, all rights reserved.

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.

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 woul