he’d say. “Where is the woolly mammoth? Where is the Northwest Passage, the ten Lost Tribes?”
Tom had called him the fittest person. But not ’til that moment did he comprehend what he’d been fittest for. Meanwhile, from her screaming nightmare, Janey had waken’d gasping, crying over her children, who fled a world desp’rate to kill them. Like her, they’d be abducted over and over, held captive and raped, and raped again, over and over.
The dark was heavy as iron on leaves and branches. And through the crushing weight, the night stars began to press. Venus was out, naturally. He had but a moment left. And yet that lady did not leave, for summat was very wrong with her guest. But she was not afraid. A natural thing was happening, like a birth. She was a great lady on a par with his mother, or Janey, or F., or Theo, or L. B., or the madwoman who’d scarified herself in a horrible manner.
Twice had he tried for that embrace, the dousing of the fire that burned in his ev’ry nerve. In constant tremor, with flashes of wildfire, he suddenly heard the growl of his familiar.
The new world was coming on behind him. Light broke the clouds open and spread all around. Pernier was silent and forbore it all, foresaw every moment.
Falling to his knees by a beautiful arbor, the o’erreaching branches stretch’d tendriled fingers, and dead milkweed pods and vines clung fast to a limestone wall. A part of him he’d got cut off from felt such joy. How he should love to feel it! Perhaps it was not too late to feel! But a nameless, bottomless thing said there was nothing. An explosion threw up colours to the west, and the sun fell in the sea, making clouds from the steam. Slowly, two worlds ground their way into each other, like lovers, and eras’d his time. The road came loose and the columns toppled. He could not stir from there unless that lady came forward to release him. Everywhere about Heaven, Sergeant Floyd was asking and looking for him, in increasing alarm.
Now, streaks of light broke into shrill rockets and screamed in ev’ry direction. Each note flow’d and spark’d, did tricks in the air, like countless swallows of gold whiskey, red wine, green absinthe. The earth was shaking, and the universe vibrat’d and flick’red at such velocity as to appear solid. New sensations arrived nowhere and meant nothing. He’d come so far, but could not stir the final step. To stink in the body and bowel, to not be able to flee the stench of fear. Meanwhile, his enemies smiled, trading satisfied looks.
Probably, he’d ended that day on the beach, where Janey scorned him. He had never returned after all.
The evening lasted, and that place grew in space, pushing out to form the sides of his universe. This widening in a lost track dead-ended here. It seemed he’d always seen it, in his mind’s eye. And that lady was awaiting his crossing. Through it all, a whistling of wind acrost a hollow-mouth’d bottle. Something hurtled toward him. That bullet which missed him on the Maria’s! On a flick’ring plain, in his squirming mind’s eyes, he embrac’d Janey, dirty skin and animal musk. Stinking, with ripp’d nails, scarred knuckles, rough hands and chapped rasping lips, teeth yellow at the root, he nursed at those small brown dugs, worked a rough nipple into his mouth which let go a flow of thick yellow cream. And as he clambered up, his spunk came.
Wishing not to ever forget the distant bright world, sobbing after it already with longing, he went in the cabin, loaded the pistol and shot himself in the skull. Then, lying on the floor, he shrieked forth, “O, Madam! Give me some water, for I am so strong and it is so hard to die! . . .”
3. “…why did I come down in the same place?…”
Bill Lewis was, that moment, saying something to someone, and looked up to find the dim, surprised faces of his class. He was at the chalk-board with the chalk in hand, the squealing tip having slid down in a crooked line, like its author was interrupted by a seizure. Richard, in the back row, had his hand up with a question. The room was full of maps. And globes. The silence, impatient, had undertones of anguish. The faces were those of lovely young women, interrupted here and there by the duller male. “Are you all right?” Joaney asked. She was quite plainly big, pregnant, hugely ready to give birth. Her hard, thrusting belly crowded the desk.
He stepped back and looked. It wasn’t his handwriting exactly, but he had clearly written it. His hands didn’t seem familiar.
“Mr. Lewis, you want me to get the nurse?” Joaney asked. “You’re sort of white.”
He felt a little sick, full in the bladder, trembly as if for want of food. It seemed this scene kept happening, or had happened before. The roll was open on the desk: Pete, Jeff, Chris, Bethany, Joaney, Rebekah, Natalie, Skyler, Tremaine, Richard, etc. It was all pretty American. Maps looked back at him from all sides. Maps accused him and confronted him. It was all his fault, but what was? One boy was black. One girl was Asian. Richard was still waiting and Lewis happened to glance at his last name, Mercutio. “Richard, your last name is really Mercutio?” he asked. Laughter pressed him and held him in one place. “Your question was?”
“Were they queers?” Richard asked.
“It’s like they loved each other,” Joaney said. “The way they sound in their letters.”
“It doesn’t mean they were queers,” Skyler, his one Asian girl, said.
“Oh yes it does,” Richard said.
Lewis felt himself starting a bad sweat, shirt soaked through to his jacket, cold rivulets running on his skin. “Finish reading the chapter,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Then down the hallway, long and empty and lined with steel lockers, and he turned in at the door marked boys with bumpy green glass in the door, a room lit by transom windows. Cool, tiled sanctuary with pissoirs on the wall, floor done in squares of yellow Italian marble. He turned his wedding band on his finger. To wash his hands, he twisted a handle, which produced water. Someone else came in, wearing a tag that said “Hildebrandt, Psychology,” a balding guy with glasses, whom Lewis seemed to recall liking. And not being liked in return. The guy urinated with a heavy long sound and Lewis bumped out of that dripping place with the writing crammed into the mortar lines between tiles.
Looking for a window, he went up a stairway and gazed out on a little village, a church steeple, some small houses and brick storefronts. And, moving briskly by, curious vehicles with no visible means of locomotion. His ring was burning, so he teased and moved it with his thumb. It could be anyplace, Virginia, St. Louis, Georgia, Washington. He tried to breeze back in casually, but his class wasn’t having it. “Well, did you make it?” Joaney asked.
“His pants are dry,” Skyler said. “Close call, though, definitely.”
Sometimes he wasn’t sure what to do for his kids. He learned their names and then simply stayed with them, stuck it out for as long as required. They had a restless wish to go, to be gone, to keep going. Joaney had a special power in the room, and was its queen. “Are we doing anything today?” she asked. The last thing he could remember . . . He gazed hastily at his arms. There’d been cuts, slashes. He touched his breast-bone and temple. He was thirty-five. No, he was forty-five. As a boy, he’d leapt into the air and landed, saying, “If the world turns, then why did I come down in the same place?” But no, wrong again. The explorer Lewis did that, not him. He felt a heartsickness, a homesickness, like during that terrible winter, when he was freezing and starving on a barbaric, desolate coast. Except he hadn’t. That was that other Lewis again. By the light in the windows, it was just now September. Hugely with child, Joaney blinked at him. “What was I saying?” he asked her.
“You were saying how Jefferson sent him because he couldn’t find anyone actually qualified who’d be stupid enough to go,” she said.
“Jefferson had half-white bastards all over the place,” Richard said.
“Tom’s wife had died. It totally crushed him,” Lewis said. “I’m not sure we can understand it now. Your heart was a crypt by the time you were thirty-five, already full up with dead parents and spouses and children and siblings.” Only Joaney and T, for Tremaine, nodded their heads. Lewis saw that he’d