Hazards of Time Travel

HIKER STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, WAINSCOTIA ARBORETUM

18-YEAR-OLD WAINSCOTIA STUDENT HOSPITALIZED

Found Unconscious on Trail by Hiker, Dog

Wainscotia Falls Journal-American, May 20, 1960

Saved

A warm soft muzzle against my face that had gone stiff with cold.

For in shock the blood had drained from my brain.

My breathing had ceased. Like a living creature that has been pinched cruelly in two, and its life snuffed out.

Where I’d fallen heavily on the trail. Outcropping of shale sharp against my stunned face which bled from abrasions I could not see and could scarcely feel.

Could not move not even to cast my eyes into the place where Wolfman had died.

What had been Wolfman, destroyed.

Shock like icy water into which I’d been flung. The shock of an arrested heartbeat. Eyes blinded by light.

Then came a sudden warmth against my face. The panting-hot breath, a dog’s quick damp astonishingly soft tongue.

There came a cry—Rufus! Where are you?

A hiker on the trail. Running up behind us where we’d fallen.

Then—Hello? Are you hurt? What has happened . . .

Through the haze riddled with pain came a dog to lick my face to revive me. Eagerly, anxiously. Emitting sharp-distressed cries so close to human, I wept to hear and to know that I had been saved.

The Miracle

For a long time then I was sick.

It might have been weeks. Months.

For there were intervals of “wakefulness”—followed by periods of “forgetfulness.”

For there was not what could be called a steady recovery. There was not a steady progress.

More like switchbacks on a trail. With painful slowness you make your way forward—only to find yourself switched-back, facing the direction you’d come from.

In such a way time turns back upon itself. You believe that you are making progress, but it is an illusion.

Yet, this is progress of a kind.

At first I wasn’t sure where I was. These (austere, white-walled) rooms to which I was taken (gurney, wheelchair) were different places serving different functions, purposes. Different medical workers, in different uniforms. Often I would open my eyes—(my aching eyes with their blurred vision)—to find myself in a place that was new to me.

Possibly, this was a hospital. Or a rehabilitation clinic.

Some place in which there are degrees of “hospitalization” relating to degrees of physical injury, psychological deficit.

Do you know your name?

Do you know where you are?

Do you know the date?

Do you know who is president of the United States?

Like a small child who is eager to talk but doesn’t yet have the power of speech I was eager to give the correct answers to these questions but I did not feel confident that I knew the correct answers. I understood that it was wiser to give no answer than to give an incorrect answer, that might be held against me.

For I was remembering an elaborate examination I’d once taken—when I’d been a student—(I think this was recent, since I’ve been told that I am a student at the present time, at Wainscotia State University in Wainscotia Falls, Wisconsin)—in which it hadn’t been enough to know the correct answers to questions, you had to know which “correct” answer was the “most correct” choice of multiple choices.

Your name is “Mary Ellen Enright”—do you remember your name?

And do you know where you are, Mary Ellen?

Do you know why?

SOMETIMES I WOKE, and the voice(s) continued.

As if there’d been no interruption, the voice(s) continued.

Do you know what happened to you, Mary Ellen?

The doctors believe you were STRUCK BY LIGHTNING.

And, you survived!

It’s very amazing, Mary Ellen! It’s considered a “miracle.”

Your picture has been in the newspapers, Mary Ellen! At least, in Wisconsin papers and on local, Wisconsin TV.

You will be a sophomore at Wainscotia State in the fall. Do you remember your freshman year?

Do you remember—you are an honor student? You are the recipient of a University Scholarship?

You are recovering, Mary Ellen. Dr. Fenner—your neurologist—says the prognosis is GOOD.

All of your doctors say the prognosis is GOOD.

You were found on a trail in the arboretum—a hiker found you—in fact his dog found you.

You were unconscious. You did not seem to have a pulse nor did you appear to be breathing.

The hiker’s dog led him to you. By his quick actions he saved your life.

Mary Ellen, you are a very lucky young woman.

You were in an acute state of shock but—you are recovering.

Your blood pressure had plummeted. Your left eardrum was perforated.

You are recovering steadily—you are ALIVE!

A MIRACLE—people have said.

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING in the arboretum where you might not have been found for hours and already it was believed to be approximately ninety minutes you’d been unconscious, before you were found.

Hiking alone in the arboretum. In the more distant parts of the arboretum, it can be dangerous.

It is always recommended that no one hike alone. Even an experienced hiker should not hike alone.

Fortunately, you were discovered. In time.

Your lips were blue. You appeared to have ceased breathing. You appeared to have no pulse.

Fortunately, the hiker knew CPR.

Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He’d been trained in first aid as a Boy Scout.

STRUCK BY LIGHTNING and survived—that’s very rare.

That’s a “first” for Wainscotia Falls!—we are proud of you.

If you had family, Mary Ellen—they would be so very grateful that you are ALIVE.

MARY ELLEN—why are you crying?

Are you in pain, Mary Ellen? Where is the pain?

You can point, Mary Ellen, if that’s easier.

Your heart? Your heart hurts?

Or do you mean—your heart is broken?

Grief

Can you explain but I could not.

Why you are crying as if your heart has been broken.

SO MUCH TO BE grateful for! I knew.

For slowly I was regaining the use of my legs. And the coordination of muscles that in normal people is taken for granted.

If for instance you decide to stand, your legs will not meekly buckle and cast you to the ground.

If you decide to lift a glass in your hand, your fingers will not release the glass to fall clattering onto the floor.

If you open your mouth to speak, you will not begin shivering, shuddering, weeping inconsolably instead.

Weeping as if I’d lost something—or someone—and could not remember what, or who.

Nor could I remember who the person had been—Mary Ellen Enright—(the name on the hospital bracelet on my left wrist)—though I stared into a mirror at the unfamiliar face, shaping the unfamiliar name with numbed lips.

Mary Ellen Enright. A riddle that, no matter how long I puzzled over it, I could not solve.

For I knew—(but how could I know?)—that it was a false name.

As I knew—(but how could I know?)—that I had not been alone on the trail when the lightning struck.

As if I’d been flung down from a great height onto the needle-strewn trail. And the breath had been knocked from me. And when I shut my eyes there came rushing at me a mysterious object the size of a bat—in panic I ducked, cried out in terror, covered my head with my arms, tried to scream but could not.

No no no no no.

THEY BELIEVED: the patient was reliving the lightning-strike. The powerful charge of electricity that threw her to the ground, and the deafening thunder that followed, that perforated her eardrum.

They believed: the patient was an orphan, had been an orphan since early childhood, and had lost her adoptive parents as well, in an automobile accident. These traumatic losses the patient was mourning in her weakened and semi-delirious state.

OFTEN I WAS very happy! With each improvement in my “condition”—I tried to rejoice that I was very lucky.

Yet in the midst of, for instance, physical therapy—(which included swimming)—the terrible tears came, and would not soon cease.

Like a convulsion of the body, such grief.

Like a great snake rippling inside me, that cannot be contained or controlled and whose outlet is tears.

Why did I cry so helplessly, and bitterly—I did not know.

(It was not pain. Or it was not solely pain. The many pains in my legs, my backbone and my neck, my head, my eyes—these I could bear without crying, for they were only physical symptoms.)

Slowly my ability to think was returning. My ability to concentrate, and to remember.

The neurologist explained to me that my “short-term” memory had been affected by the trauma of the lightning strike. There had been, he believed, some (temporary) brain damage, judging by my symptoms.

Memories stored (temporarily) in the hippocampus before being stored (permanently) in the cerebral cortex had been lost, and could not be retrieved.

It was a normal reaction to a traumatic brain injury, Dr. Fenner said. I had not lost my grasp of language—how to speak, read and write—and certain skills—like walking, climbing stairs, swimming—but it was evident that I’d forgotten much in my recent life.

As if someone with a giant sponge had vigorously washed, scrubbed, wiped a part of my brain clean.

I asked Dr. Fenner if there had been a CAT scan of my brain? Or—what was the term—“MRI”?

Dr. Fenner smiled quizzically, cupping his hand to his ear.

“What was that, dear? Something about a—cat?”

“A CAT scan. Or an MRI.”

“But—what are you saying, dear? ‘MIA’?”

Dr. Fenner was an older gentleman, kind and solicitous to his patients but with a very limited patience for foolish questions; I had noticed that the nurses were careful in his presence, behaving more like servants than trained staff workers. He wore a stiff-starched white shirt and a necktie beneath his physician’s white coat, that bulged over his small high belly. Involuntarily I’d shrunk from his touch, as from the nurses’ touches, which were with bare hands, where I would have expected thin rubber gloves, when I’d first become conscious of my surroundings; but by this time, after several weeks in the hospital, and now in a rehabilitation wing adjacent to the hospital, I’d become accustomed to the hospital staff working with bare hands. I told myself—But they are probably washing their hands all the time. When they leave a patient’s room.

Dr. Fenner’s necktie fascinated me also. For it was just perceptibly mottled with stains—(food stains?)—and when Dr. Fenner bent over me, it swung at my face.

“‘MIA’—‘Missing in Action,’ I think?—why are you asking about that, Mary Ellen?”—Dr. Fenner was utterly bewildered.

Rapidly I tried to think. But my thoughts came slow and halting, like my walking—sometimes with a spurt of strength, sometimes a flurry of weakness.

“I—I don’t know. I guess I don’t know what I mean, Dr. Fenner.”

It was so: I had no idea what I’d meant. The terms CAT scan, MRI were bewildering to me too, like the arcane Latin terms I’d typed in the dim-lit university building whose name I couldn’t quite recall—a museum of natural history with which I had an association both vague and exhilarating, like a tumultuous dream that has faded except for its emotional residue.

“Well! You’ve had a brain trauma, my dear. But you’ll recover—I’ve seen miraculous recoveries in the past.”

So often the word miracle was voiced in my presence, I was beginning to believe—miracle!

(Yet I wondered what percent of the neurologist’s patients recovered. And what percent of the neurologist’s patients were untreatable.)

Again, when Dr. Fenner left, I burst into tears.

Out of nowhere a terrible sadness swept over me, and I began to cry helplessly, like an abandoned infant.

One of the nurses asked what on earth was wrong?—Dr. Fenner had been so positive.

Visitors

Few visitors came to see me. And each was a surprise to me, as if stepping out of a pitch-black part of my brain.

The first identified herself as Ardis Steadman, who’d been the resident adviser of Acrady Cottage, my freshman residence.

Did I remember Miss Steadman? Did I remember my roommates? Did I remember Acrady Cottage—“Such a spirited group of freshman girls this year! And you, Mary Ellen, pulled our grade-point average ‘way up.’ We were all very grateful for you.”

I told Miss Steadman that yes, I did remember her—of course.

We’d gone to a music recital together, I thought. Or—we’d watched TV together in the sitting room of the residence.

As Miss Steadman spoke, reminiscing of events I could not recall, and had no interest in recalling, I began to feel the sensation of terrible loss wash over me, and began to cry.

“Oh, Mary Ellen! What’s wrong? Have I said something—?”

I tried to think why.

“It’s like—I’ve lost something. But I don’t know what it is.”

“But when did you lose it, Mary Ellen?”

“I—I don’t know . . . Maybe in the arboretum.”

“From what I’ve read and heard, there was nothing on the trail that you’d left behind, evidently. You were hiking alone, and you were wearing a backpack—that was all.”

“I remember the arboretum—from before. I’d gone there before. But the last time—” Quick sharp pains struck my eyes, from inside. My vision, that had been improving, became misty now, so that I could barely see Miss Steadman’s concerned face. “—the last time, I don’t remember.”

Miss Steadman clasped my hand. “That may be a blessing, dear. No one would want to remember being struck by lightning!”

And there came, with some embarrassment, Miss Hurly—she’d been astonished to read about me in the papers, and to hear about me on the radio, and to realize that the girl-struck-by-lightning was Mary Ellen Enright.

“Such a shock! Dr. Harrick sends his regards and very best wishes for your recovery. He said—when I’d told him about you, and showed him the news stories—that he had once come close to being struck by lightning himself, boating on Lake Michigan as a teenager—when a sudden storm came up. It was quite a suspenseful tale Dr. Harrick told, really quite emotional—how terribly close Dr. Harrick had come to being killed, at such a young age; and only think, all the great work he has done in science would have been lost . . . He did remember you, Mary Ellen, though at first he’d mixed you up with our other girl Lorraine who’d been working on Mondays and Wednesdays.”

And there came a woman whom I didn’t know, whom I had never seen before, who introduced herself as Cornelia Graeber—“Please excuse me, Miss Enright, but I saw your picture in the newspaper, and I—I felt that I knew you, somehow—and I wonder if you know me? In some way? I’m sometimes called ‘Nelia.’” This individual was edgy, nervous; as she spoke to me, she picked at her fingernails, and tugged at her hair; she seemed quite anxious in my presence, as well as bewildered—she had no idea why she’d been drawn to see me, but the idea had obsessed her, and at last she’d come. She was about thirty years old. She reminded me of myself—somehow. Her eyes were disconcertingly intense, fixed upon me in a way that suggested that yes, she knew me; but she wasn’t sure why. She explained that she was a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, working with A. J. Axel. She’d looked up my course work, out of curiosity, and discovered that I’d taken Axel’s popular lecture course Psychology 101 the previous fall, and that I’d had an instructor named Ira Wolfman as my quiz section instructor—“Do you remember him? ‘Ira Wolfman’? He left Wainscotia abruptly, at the end of the term. He didn’t say good-bye to any of us. Not even A. J. Axel. It was very—upsetting. Of course, Ira may have had reasons—professional reasons. But to leave without saying good-bye to any of his friends and colleagues—that wasn’t like him . . .”

The sharp shooting pains behind my eyes were making me blink rapidly. Tears flooded my eyes. I could not hear the woman’s words clearly for a roaring in my ears like a freight train. Badly I wanted to tell the woman to go away—I didn’t know her, I didn’t know what she was talking about, the names of most of my professors had vanished from my memory, and could be retrieved only with great difficulty. And it wasn’t clear why this stranger was addressing me.

Drawn by the sound of my sobbing, one of the nurses intervened. Quickly the woman apologized, and departed.

The fit of convulsive sobbing was so extreme, I could not catch my breath and began to hyperventilate. I had to be rushed to the ER and given oxygen and an IV medication to bring down my suddenly accelerated heartbeat, that was racing at 260 beats a minute.

THEN, THERE CAME Jamie Stiles to see me.

“Hello? Mary Ellen—”

At first, I didn’t remember him. In ungainly stained bib-overalls and no shirt beneath, with bristling dark whiskers, and sandals on his large gnarly feet, he was a startling and intimidating sight.

Telling me, with awkward humor, that “Rufus” wanted to see me also but hadn’t been allowed inside the hospital—his leash was tied to a bicycle rack outside.

For it had been Jamie Stiles’s dog Rufus that had discovered me fallen on the trail, and rushed barking to me.

It had been Jamie Stiles who’d been hiking on the trail—(not the trail that I’d been on but one close by)—and who’d applied mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to make me breathe again.

Jamie Stiles, who’d been one of the SANE protesters. Who taught sculpting part-time in the fine arts department at Wainscotia State.

Jamie had remembered me, he said. Seeing my picture in the newspaper he’d remembered me from the SANE march.

By this time he’d stepped inside the room. For a big man he was shy. Nurses were glancing at him curiously as they passed by in the hall. A flush rose in his face. I saw now that in his right hand he clutched a bouquet of flowers which looked as if they’d been picked in haste in a field.

There was some fuss about getting a vase for the flowers. When I lifted the flowers to smell them, the scent that lifted from their petals was very faint, yet sweet. Confusedly I thought—Is this a long time ago, or now? Or has it not happened yet?

In fear of shutting my eyes. For there was the possibility that, if I did, something small and dark would rush at me and cause me to scream and when I dared to open my eyes again, I would be alone; or worse yet, one of the nurses would be bending over my body.

As Jamie Stiles spoke haltingly to me I thought that yes, I would have remembered this man—I wanted to remember him. For his face was familiar, in a way that a face is familiar which you have been seeing all your life.

Jamie Stiles was deep-chested, with a thick neck, muscular arms and shoulders, jaws covered in bristling dark whiskers that looked as if they would be wiry to the touch; yet his eyes were kindly and concerned, and puzzled. For he’d seemed to know me, he said. When he’d seen me on campus at the time of the protest he’d felt this strongly—“No reason, I guess. The phenomenon is called déjà vu.”

(Déjà vu. The term was familiar to me. Though in the psychology textbook in which I’d encountered it the phenomenon was discounted as usually mistaken, delusional.)

Jamie Stiles was soft-spoken at my hospital bedside but I recalled from his behavior at the protest march that he was a man of strong feelings, impulsive, courageous.

He’d spoken scornfully to me, I recalled. Oh but why?

But then, he’d spoken tenderly to me. He’d forgiven me for my ignorance.

Despite the size of his hands, and his stubby clay-stained fingers, there was gentleness in Jamie’s handclasp. In his voice, sympathy and hope.

I felt tears threaten me. Though I tried very hard to keep them back tears spilled onto my face like acid and I began to cry as Jamie looked on in distress.

Unlike the hospital staff Jamie Stiles did not ask why I was crying. He did not remark that I was very lucky to be alive.

He said very little on this or subsequent visits. For Jamie Stiles is not a verbal person.

He did not say What have you lost, why are you grieving. Why, when you should be grateful to be alive!

He did not say In another story, you were electrified to a crisp. A smear and a smudge and a smelly hole in the snow, that’s all of you.

So that I knew, and there was great comfort in the knowing—He will be the one.

“Uncle”

His name was Cosgrove, David R. He introduced himself to me as an old-fashioned family doctor.

He didn’t know Dr. Fenner, or any of the physicians at the hospital. His practice wasn’t in Wainscotia Falls but twenty miles away in St. Cloud. He’d been “intrigued” by my picture in the newspaper. He’d come to visit me just to say hello and to ask a question or two.

“Like Benjamin Franklin, I have an abiding interest in electricity. It’s a hobby. The history of ‘reanimation’—for instance.”

Reanimation? I tried to think what this might mean.

Dr. Cosgrove was a lean wiry man of some mysterious age—fifties?—sixties? Slightly ill at ease, though boyish, and very friendly; thistle-colored hair had nearly vanished from his head, and his eyes were couched in shadowy puckered skin. He had a long thin nose with a tiny bump in the bone and he was smiling hard at me as if to impart some secondary meaning to his words, totally lost on me. In his left cheek was a tic or a twitch, which was distracting. He was carrying a brown leather bag much creased from years of wear.

“Unless you’d rather not talk about it? The ‘lightning strike’?”

Vaguely I shook my head, no. Meaning—yes.

Meaning—yes, I could talk about it. Though I didn’t remember anything helpful at all.

Dr. Cosgrove continued to smile at me in that curious way. A strange sensation came over me—I know this man! I have seen this man before.

Dr. Cosgrove chattered about lightning, electric current, those instances of individuals who’d been “struck” and yet lived, until one of the nurses who’d been in the room left; then, he ceased speaking abruptly.

He went to the door, and shut it carefully.

Doors to hospital rooms are rarely shut, still more rarely are they shut so carefully, so that the lock clicks.

“Very good to see you, ‘Mary Ellen,’ dear! I’ve been told that you will be discharged in a few days, you’ve made a miraculous convalescence.”

Dr. Cosgrove continued to smile, even as he removed an object from the brown bag. It looked like a wand, or a small phone—a small, flat phone?—a shape that was familiar to me, that fit in the palm of the man’s hand, but which I could not have identified.

Ah, a cell phone! I had not seen a cell phone in—how many months? Years?

But no, the object was not a cell phone after all.

Dr. Cosgrove was frowning, turning a dial between his thumb and forefinger, that caused the small flat object to stir, to emit a low buzzing sound like a hive of wasps.

Seeing the perplexity in my face he said quickly, “Just a little ‘baffle’—of my invention.”

“‘Baffle’?”

“A kind of ‘white noise,’ in case anyone is listening to us. Advertently, or in—”

Dr. Cosgrove adjusted the buzzing-level of the object in his hand. Now it sounded like honeybees at a little distance, a friendly sound. But all this was utterly mysterious to me.

I wondered—why would anyone be interested in our conversation? I could not imagine who these people could possibly be—no one on the hospital staff, certainly.

Satisfied that the small flat object was operating as he wished Dr. Cosgrove pulled a chair close beside my chair—(for I’d been sitting up and reading beside my bed; I’d become very tired of lying flat and helpless in bed)—and smiled at me with an air of complicity.

An eccentric individual, I thought—but a gentleman.

Dr. Cosgrove asked if indeed I did remember anything about being struck by lightning; and when I shook my head no he said, frowning, “But think again, ‘Mary Ellen.’ Try to remember.”

I had tried, many times. This request had been put to me frequently. Most recently by a Wainscotia Falls Journal-American reporter who’d been assigned a feature article with the sensational title THE GIRL WHO CAME BACK FROM THE BEYOND. The disappointed reporter had had to interview several doctors, nurses, and a professor of physics from the university, since I hadn’t been able to supply him with much information.

“Did it feel as if you’d been ‘transported’ from—somewhere? I mean, when you woke up.”

“I—I don’t know. What do you mean ‘transported’?”

“Or, a more accurate term might be ‘teletransported.’”

Teletransported. What did this mean!

(I wished that my new friend Jamie Stiles were here. It had become a habit to tell Jamie most of what happened during my days in rehab, as Jamie told me what happened during his days, when he came to visit me in the evening; but this exchange with Dr. Cosgrove was so peculiar, like something in a dream, I despaired that I would be able to convey it successfully.)

In a yet more cautious voice Dr. Cosgrove asked if the name “Eric Strohl” meant anything to me

Eric Strohl. I wasn’t sure.

“‘Eric Strohl.’ ‘Madeleine Strohl.’” The doctor spoke slowly, and quietly, just loud enough for me to hear him over the buzzing sound of the flat little object in his hand, even as he held his hand over his mouth as if to shield his lips.

Eric Strohl. Madeleine Strohl. I began to tremble. I had no idea why.

“Does the name ‘Adriane Strohl’ mean anything to you?”

My heart was beating rapidly. I was frightened that I would begin to hyperventilate again. The pain in my eyes throbbed.

Dr. Cosgrove reached out to take hold of my wrist. Gently, he pressed his forefinger against my pulse.

“Calm, now! Remain calm.”

“I—I don’t—”

“Calm, my dear! Just breathe normally. You may want to count your breaths.”

I counted my breaths, to ten. By ten, I was not so agitated. Dr. Cosgrove released my wrist.

“‘Adriane Strohl.’ I’m just curious—if you have ever heard this name before.”

“I—I think—” I was straining, trying to remember. I felt as if I were about to stumble over a curb, as in a dream. “I don’t know. What is it again—‘Adrian’—”

“‘Adriane.’”

Very deliberately Dr. Cosgrove pronounced this name. It did not mean anything to me—did it?

Dr. Cosgrove and I stared at each other as if across an abyss. Not a wide abyss, but very deep. I felt that familiar weakness in me, as if my bones were turning to water.

From some long-ago time I remembered being told, unless I’d read these words—The striking thing about self-knowledge is that it may be lacking.

When I’d awakened from my comatose state in the Wainscotia hospital I’d felt this weakness through my entire body—no way to describe it except as terrifying, appalling.

That sense that the body is a precarious entity comprised of numberless atoms, that might disintegrate at any moment.

And beyond the body, the world itself—the very Universe—poised at the brink of detonation.

Leaning close to murmur in my ear Dr. Cosgrove said, “It may be, dear, that I used to know—your parents . . . In fact, I have reason to believe that I am related to your father. And so, to you.”

This was astonishing! For a long moment I stared at the bald-headed doctor with the earnest eyes, and had no idea how to reply. “I don’t mean to surprise or shock you, dear. I realize—you’ve been told that you were ‘adopted.’”

“I—I don’t really remember my parents, I’m afraid. The parents who adopted me, and the parents who . . .”

Dr. Cosgrove regarded me thoughtfully. He reached out to take my hand in his, my hand in both his hands. I thought—He knows me. The absurd thought came to me—Maybe he was the doctor who delivered me.

“Your father Eric was—is—my older brother. I have reason to believe. For you look very like him—unmistakably. I saw the resemblance in the newspaper photograph—I was sure.” He paused, wiping at his eyes. “But we’ve been separated, your father and me. We have not seen each other in nearly twenty years.”

Have not? This man was speaking as if my father were alive at this time.

I was very confused. Pulses pounded in my head, exacerbated by the drugs that coursed through my veins, seeping into my blood.

“You’re my uncle? But—where did you—where did my parents—live? How is this possible?”

It did seem to me now that Dr. Cosgrove looked familiar. The uncanny dark glisten of his eyes, the tiny bump on his nose . . .

“I think that it is possible, ‘Adriane.’ You won’t remember—probably—because you were very young when I’d last seen you. About two years old, I believe.”

“Oh—where was this?”

“In another part of the country.”

“But—which state?”

“In New Jersey, I believe.”

But I have never lived in New Jersey—have I?

“Have you ever heard of Pennsboro? New Jersey?”

“N-No . . . I don’t think so.” I could not think at all.

“Maybe—y-yes . . .”

I was shivering badly. Wiping tears from my eyes. Dr. Cosgrove apologized for upsetting me.

He held my chilly hand in his and stroked it, for some time.

“Adults have not treated you well, my dear girl. I would not exacerbate your confusion and grief. But let me ask—do you know the name ‘Tobias’?—‘Toby’?—‘Uncle Toby’?”

I did not know how to reply. If this man was my uncle, I wanted to say yes.

“I—I’m not sure. ‘Uncle Toby.’”

“That was my name once—‘Tobias.’ Before I was sent to Wisconsin to complete my medical degree at U Wisconsin–Madison; then I settled north of Wainscotia Falls, and haven’t left St. Cloud since. I’m married—have been married for a long time. I married a dear, kind, beautiful girl from here—Zone Nine. I have children—that is, you have cousins . . . But we may not see each other again, I think. It’s too risky for us both.” Dr. Cosgrove blinked tears from his eyes, though he was smiling. “I’ve been concerned about coming to see you—I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. But of course, I wanted to see you—my dear niece Adriane. I wanted to ask about your father—your family. How they are, how things are in that other—dimension. But you can’t answer me, I think. You can’t ‘remember.’”

“I—I can almost—remember something . . .”

When Dr. Cosgrove gazed at me with his dark-brown glistening eyes, and as he smiled at me in so kindly a way, almost I did remember—something. But at once it evaporated like a dream in bright daylight.

“You seem to be doing well, ‘Adriane’—that is, ‘Mary Ellen.’ At least physically, now that you’re recovering. Young people are so much more resilient than older people—you’re still young, though you’ve traversed decades.”

“But—how old are you? When were you my uncle?”

“Ah, dear—it hasn’t happened yet! And when it happens, when I am a young man, in my twenties, and you are newly born, some years from now—we won’t remember a thing. Amnesia is all that saves us from the abyss.”

Seeing that I was looking confused Dr. Cosgrove said quickly, “All we can do is persevere in our own time. No one has to deal with more than one day at a time. That’s the blessing of our temporal universe—time is spread out horizontally, you might say; it doesn’t all happen at once, as at the instant of the ‘big bang.’ Some of us are political beings, and some of us are not. But it can’t be the case that any of us—in 1960, in the United States—or elsewhere, at another time—can be wholly well.”

I didn’t understand this. I knew nothing about politics—(though I knew, now, who was president of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, an actual person, a former general, and not a genial smiling emoji). I knew that the United States had recently been “at war” with a faraway foreign country called Korea and I knew that World War II was a “fresh memory” to many.

“The new decade will bring us true ‘newness’—even revolution. But it will be revolution mixed with tragedy, and not a little farce. And beyond that—!” Dr. Cosgrove laughed, with a shudder. “But we must not look ahead, you know. That is the essential lesson we Exiles learn. We must look to save ourselves.”

I told Dr. Cosgrove that I wanted to know more about my parents—please! And how it was that—somehow—Dr. Cosgrove had known me, as a small child; and he’d had another name at the time: Uncle Toby . . .

A sensation almost of delirium overcame me. What would it mean to me, what happiness, to have an Uncle Toby in my life!

“No. We must live here, Adriane. I’ve learned that, after having made painful blunders. The ‘future’ exists only in the way that the other side of the earth exists, whether we can see it or not. Or,” Dr. Cosgrove said, indicating the sky outside the window of my third-floor room, “those clouds in the eastern sky that look so sculpted—they exist in our immediate future because they are being blown in this direction, from Lake Michigan. In some time—it might be an hour, or several hours—the clouds will be overhead, the sunshine will be obscured. But now, we can see the clouds approaching, we can see into the distance and so, in a sense, we can see into the future. Most things are too distant for us to see, however, and we have to surrender the effort. ‘One breath at a time’—your father used to say, wisely; though I was too young to listen to him at the time.”

With a snap Dr. Cosgrove turned off the small flat object that had been buzzing and slipped it into his breast pocket.

“Dear Adriane—good-bye! Maybe we will meet again, if you wish—you know my name, and you know that I live in St. Cloud, just over the mountain.”

Smiling Dr. Cosgrove squeezed my hand tenderly in parting. Badly I wanted to say Good-bye, Uncle Toby!—but the words could not come.

Heron Creek Farm

“Rufus! Time for our walk.”

Rufus is a six-year-old mixed-breed dog, part boxer, part retriever, part border collie. His fur is sand-colored and coarse. He weighs about thirty-five pounds—eager, clumsy, hot-panting. His ears are alert and his eyes are alive with happiness when his name is called. If he rushes at you, tail thumping, he’s heavy enough to cause you to stagger.

He swathes your face with his damp soft eager tongue.

You do not want to think what that tongue has touched. You do not want to think of a dog’s myriad loves of which you, as yearning as any dog, but determined to disguise that fact, are but one.

Rufus and I walk together in the fields behind the farmhouse. There is a bond between us, I want to think: this is the creature who saved my life.

An animal is a kind of machine, the behaviorists teach. Yet Rufus is hardly a machine. Rufus’s soul shines in his eyes, when he is in the presence of someone he loves.

Rufus’s great joy is fetching a stick. Especially from out of the pond in which Jamie stocked trout a few years ago, and where a colony of noisy frogs live.

When I hug Rufus, and when Rufus licks my face, I feel tears stinging my eyes for this reason—I am so happy.

SOMEDAY, I MAY HIKE over-the-mountain to seek out Dr. Cosgrove in the place with the beautiful name—St. Cloud. But I have not, yet—my new life is too demanding.

THERE WAS NO NEED for Jamie Stiles to ask me. Somehow it seemed to have been decided between us that when I was discharged from the rehabilitation clinic I would come to live with him in the farmhouse on Heron Creek Road.

You know—you have a home with me.

You know I love you.

The first sight I had of Jamie’s house I fell in love with it—a sprawling clapboard farmhouse someone had painted the startling hue of goldenrod, with dark blue shutters. Other farmhouses scattered along the rural Heron Creek Road were a uniform weatherworn white.

The farmhouse is set back from the road. The (dirt, rutted) lane must be a quarter of a mile long. In the front yard are a 1949 Ford pickup truck with a smashed windshield and no tires, the remains of an ancient International Harvester tractor, an eviscerated 1947 Buick convertible, a child’s sled with badly rusted runners: these are not remnants of discarded, formerly functional objects but an elaborately constructed scrap-metal sculpture titled, by Jamie Stiles, Hazards of Time Travel.

On the front porch, in addition to rattan sofa, chairs, and a Schwinn bicycle leaning against the wall, a display of—quilts? But these are not ordinary quilts for they have been fashioned of Plexiglas, heavy brocade, and aluminum, in stark metallic hues—Quilt Legend Diorama 1958.

Behind the house, a large hay barn that has been painted brick-red. On the peak of the roof is a weather vane bearing the heraldic figure of a stag. On the front of the barn is a large copper sunburst-face, like the face of a (benign) ancient deity. Beside the barn is a crumbling stone silo, and close by are several smaller outbuildings.

And behind these, the pond Jamie has stocked with trout.

In the red barn is Jamie Stiles’s sculpture studio. Several feature articles for Wisconsin newspapers have been published about the sculpture of Jamie Stiles, as well as interviews on TV arts programs, and these always include coverage of the studio which resembles, at first glance, something between a mortuary and a junkyard—the myriad, very physical materials of a sculptor’s trade. In the smaller outbuildings are studios used by artist-friends of Jamie’s, some of whom have had the rent-free studios for years while others are “just visiting.”

As he has inherited and accumulated people in his relatively young life—(Jamie Stiles is thirty-one)—so Jamie has inherited and accumulated farm animals. These include a chestnut-red mare named Hedy, retired from harness racing at the punishing track at Traverse City, Michigan; Leila and Lee, two goat-companions who graze with Hedy; a dozen dingy-coated sheep—(for sheep are nothing like storybook pictures of them, I’ve discovered: they are not naturally white); a half-dozen cats of various sizes, ages, and colors of whom some are affectionate house-cats and others, more feral, live in the barns; and Rufus our ever-vigilant guard dog. Also, a flock of chickens—white-feathered, Rhode Island reds, Plymouth Rock barred—to provide eggs for the large household. (Chicken-tending, egg-gathering, are tasks that quickly fell to me, with help from my young step-niece Chloe and step-nephew Tyler.) On the pond behind the barn, often squawking and contentious, are Canadian geese, domestic (white) geese, and a shifting company of wild ducks.

Sometimes, a pair of swans arrives at the pond from Heron Creek a short distance away. Vivid-white and usually silent amid the smaller waterfowl the swans are beautiful like figures in a dream, that seem to represent something for which there are no adequate words.

The oldest part of the farmhouse was built in 1881, by a long-ago relative of Jamie Stiles’s; it had come into Jamie’s grandparents’ possession, and they’d left it to him a dozen years ago, along with forty acres of mostly uncultivated land. Along a circuitous rural route the house is approximately five miles from the vast Wainscotia campus where Jamie Stiles teaches, or has taught, sculpture in the fine arts department for the past nine years, and I am a student enrolled in the liberal arts college—my twin majors are biology and art.

I am still a University Scholar. I don’t any longer work part-time on campus, since I am no longer living in a university residence.

A census taker would be frustrated seeking to determine exactly who lives in the goldenrod-colored farmhouse on Heron Creek Road, Wainscotia Township. For the place is always open to Jamie’s friends, acquaintances, fellow-artists and fellow pacifists/anti-nuclear protesters; frequently they are strangers passing through on their way elsewhere, who are known to Jamie, or recommended to him by mutual like-minded acquaintances. Also there are likely to be Stiles relatives on the premises, temporarily or permanently: a male cousin of Jamie’s who’d dropped out of the agriculture school at WSU years before; a morose older half-brother who works in a local stone quarry, and who weighs three hundred pounds; a ravaged hard-drinking stoic uncle who’d had a twenty-year career in the U.S. Marines and who’d been severely wounded in the closing week of World War II, in Germany.

And, to my surprise, two children aged five and eight, not Jamie’s children but the abandoned children of an older sister of Jamie’s who’d departed several years before, leaving nothing in her wake but the children and their clothes and toys—“They’re a little sad-hearted but very sweet kids, Mary Ellen. You’ll love them.”

It is true, I will love Chloe and Tyler—in time. I am sure of this.

The significant fact about the children, I guess you could say, is the color of their skin: a rich mocha-brown.

In all of (rural) Wainscotia Township there is probably no one else with mocha-brown skin like my little step-niece Chloe and my step-nephew Tyler.

Jamie and I will have our own children sometime soon. This is our hope.

Much of the farm property isn’t tillable soil but there are a number of acres that are fertile enough to be leased by neighboring farmers, which provides a much-needed source of income for the household, and there is a half-acre behind the house where we can plant a few things—tomatoes, green beans, sweet corn, carrots, cucumbers, melons . . .

In time the care of this ambitious vegetable garden will fall to me, I think. (As the care of Chloe and Tyler will fall to me.) By the time Jamie brought me to the farmhouse in late summer everything had been planted but there were weeds choking the smaller plants, and the corn and melons had been ravaged by deer and raccoons; what flourished most was a bed of basil, catnip, and mint, which grow like weeds, and a small jungle of hollyhocks and wild rose.

I was eager to clear away weeds and thistles. But Jamie laughed at me.

“Sometimes you come too late to a garden, the way you might come too late in another’s life. Best just to take things as they are. ‘One breath at a time.’”

Walking through the overgrown garden, with Rufus at my heels, sniffing and bounding into the dry-rustling corn, I am suffused with happiness. I think—All this was waiting for me. I didn’t know.

In my former life—(which I can remember only vaguely, like something glimpsed through frosted glass)—I don’t believe that I lived on a farm, worked with the soil, grew things. Yet, I have confidence that I can learn.

The smells of a garden, in late-afternoon sunshine, or after a quick flashing rain—so beautiful, they leave me feeling faint.

Jamie and his friends are continually repairing the house—shingled roof, shutters, rotting porch, steps. Jamie has a plumber friend, a friend with a backhoe, a friend who digs cisterns and wells. He has (commercial) painter friends as well as (artist) painter friends. His closest sculptor-friend is a welder. Jamie himself is very handy, and strong; he has to be prevented from lifting things that might throw out his back, or break it altogether. For a reticent person he seems to thrive in a whirl of communal activities. Meetings of the local branch of SANE are usually held at Heron Creek Farm. Though sometimes Jamie drives to Madison, or farther still to Chicago. (Chicago! How very far away that seems to me. Since being struck by lightning, I tell myself that my traveling days are over.) Jamie’s artist-colleagues work in their studios and eat with us, most nights. And their wives, girlfriends, children eat with us. Parents arrive, and stay for the night, or several nights. Elderly grandparents too are welcome. (But please don’t die on the premises! Jamie jokes about such things, which don’t seem funny to the rest of us.) Of course, there are poetry evenings—many (of us) are poets. (H. R. Brody is a friend of Jamie’s.) There are musical evenings—(Jamie plays drums). Even the young niece and nephew have school friends, who are invited to the house often, brought by their parents who stay for dinner as well. Because WSU has seemed to be exploiting some instructors and staff workers Jamie has been trying to organize a union without having realized how much time this would consume, and how quarrelsome people can be when you are trying to help them. One night at dinner, which had sprawled out of the house, onto the porch and onto the grass, I counted twenty-six adults and children before I gave up.

Thinking—There is no time here for sorrow. I am too busy!

Jamie identifies himself as a “multi-media” sculptor. His great model is Rodin. He has fashioned strange and striking works of art out of scrap metal, including wrecked cars and tractors; he utilizes iron (which he allows to rust, in a “natural progression”), stainless steel, aluminum, brass, wood, clay, fiberglass and other materials, even papier-mâché; yet he’s a traditional sculptor too, whose most successful commission has been a Korean War memorial for Wainscotia Township.

At the university Jamie Stiles is highly regarded as an original and important artist; at the same time, his political involvement with SANE, and his general pacifist/anti-war statements, have made it difficult for his departmental chairman to promote him, still less to give him a permanent appointment with tenure at WSU.

Jamie is kept on, however—“kept on.” Semester after semester, year after year.

“The department likes me well enough—I mean, most of the guys on the faculty are my friends. I’ve known them for years. I’ve helped them with their work. But the dean of the college, and the president—they’re afraid of my ‘notoriety.’ They’ve been hearing that there’s a ‘rabid Commie’ in the art department. One of the trustees thought that I’d been arrested in ‘some sort of protest riot.’ So part-time employment is the best I can hope for.”

Wistfully Jamie spoke, and yet boastfully. I had to rush to him then, to kiss him.

Soon after I was discharged from the rehabilitation clinic and had come to live at Heron Creek Farm, Jamie took me to see the Korean War memorial in front of the county courthouse in Wainscotia Falls. Though made of stainless steel the figures of the eleven soldiers, ground troops on parole, were unnervingly lifelike; you could almost imagine that they were breathing, and that their stony skin was actual skin. They loomed above the viewer slightly larger than life-size, at about seven feet in height. Their faces were both youthful and ageless. Their hands—their fingers—were particularly lifelike. Names of the Wainscotia Township dead had been carved in stone on a parapet surrounding the sculpture, and with this too Jamie had taken a good deal of care, rejecting several fonts before he chose the one he finally used.

There was a good deal of positive publicity in local newspapers regarding Ground Patrol: Korea 1950–1955. Relatives of soldiers who’d died in the war were deeply moved by Jamie Stiles’s memorial and wrote letters to him, each of which he answered. (Jamie had not yet become involved in anti-war protests, fortunately!) His model for the memorial hadn’t been Rodin but a revered midwestern sculptor of the early twentieth century named Harry Hansen, at one time promoted as the midwestern Rodin, who’d executed more than two hundred memorial sculptures during his fifty-year career. Jamie seemed embarrassed by the sculpture though I praised it as moving, tragic, beautiful; he said, humbly, “It wasn’t my idea to do a ‘realistic’ memorial, but that’s what they wanted. I tried to explain to the township board that what they wanted was an old-fashioned kind of sculpture that had been valued in the past, before photography; the rendering of human faces and figures so close to human that they appear human. Sculpture today is more likely to be abstract than realistic. I tried to explain, but . . .” In the end if he’d wanted to accept the commission he’d had to create the kind of memorial the citizens of Wainscotia Township wanted, which he did.

“But it’s very powerful, Jamie. It is.”

Seeing the figures of the eleven soldiers transformed by Death was deeply moving. I could not speak for some time as Jamie circled the memorial, staring at it. An artist is one who never believes what others say about his work—perhaps that was it. Jamie could not see what I saw and could not believe what I believed about his sculpture.

On the soldiers’ heads and shoulders were chalky-white bird droppings. This, we tried not to notice.

Though finally I wetted tissues in a nearby puddle and tried to wipe the droppings away, with limited success.

When we returned home Jamie showed me his framed award from the Wisconsin Council of the Arts for Sculpture, 1957. He seemed both embarrassed by the reward, and proud of it.

“Jamie! Congratulations.”

Only three years before but Jamie had looked younger then. He’d been thinner, his face leaner, and his jaws clean-shaven.

Jamie Stiles without a beard! The young man in this picture wouldn’t have approached me on the university campus, possibly.

Seeing his young face I felt tears gather in my eyes. For when this photograph had been taken I hadn’t known Jamie Stiles. He hadn’t known me. And it was quite likely that we would never meet.

Indeed, how was it possible that we’d ever met? Ever glimpsed each other? It was not possible. Yet it had happened.

Tears ran down my cheeks. I was overcome with joy indistinguishable from grief. At such times Jamie comes to me, and silently gathers me in his arms.

Jamie’s strong arms. Jamie’s heavy body like a fortress.

His comfort is immediate and unquestioning.

I have you, I will protect you. I love you.

IN JAMIE’S STUDIO, in the old red barn. We’ve fashioned a small studio for me in the hayloft, to which I climb by a ladder. It’s a private space that looks out over pastureland and down into Jamie Stiles’s workspace. I can watch him below but he isn’t likely to watch me.

My artwork, so-called, is of a much smaller scale than Jamie’s. I have no interest in heroic or monumental works. I’m content to wander outside sketching for hours with pencil, charcoal, pastel chalks, then return here and work on my sketches. I’ve experimented with portraits—my little step-niece and my little step-nephew, residents and visitors, Jamie’s ex-Marine uncle who calls himself, with some measure of irony I am not able to gauge, “Captain Shalom.”

In the loft I have a workbench of about six feet in length, that Jamie made for me. Jamie has stretched canvases for me and encouraged me to experiment with paints.

Often, I gaze over the edge of the loft floor, at Jamie Stiles below. He’s a restless figure, burly, muscular, yet like an athlete he is agile on his feet, alert and curious. The sliding barn door to his studio is usually kept open except on cold days. He works with fire, sometimes. He works with spray paint. He has fashioned sculptures out of old broken floor lamps, discarded baby carriages, bullet-ridden STOP signs; scrap metal, fiberglass, window glass, aluminum and brass rods. I think that his work is not only strangely beautiful in its own way but “profound”—“important.” I don’t think that it’s naïve of Jamie Stiles to be thinking in terms of Rodin, not Harry Hansen of Whitefish Bay.

Jamie has the ability to totally lose himself in his work. No matter how much he’s worried about, for instance, the financial upkeep of Heron Creek Farm, or the insanity of U.S. nuclear testing in the Southwest, or whether he will have an instructorship at WSU in the fall, his concentration on his work is complete as that of a lone child who has lost himself in play. He’s pitiless on himself when his work isn’t going well, which is fairly often; he’s stubborn, easily discouraged; it makes me sad that he sighs often, runs his fingers through his hair in a gesture of exasperation, or despondency; that he pulls at his beard, that seems to me a beautiful bristling beard, of the hue of mahogany, curlier than the hair on his head.

Yet, so much of James Stiles seems beautiful to me! I could stare and stare at the man, even in his soiled bib-overalls worn without a shirt beneath, and his weatherworn sandals.

When Jamie makes love to me he is awkward, tender, hesitant—he fears hurting me, or crushing me. And it is true that Jamie’s considerable weight takes the breath from me, and makes me worry that my ribs might crack. The fierce thrusts of his body cause me to shudder in pain, which Jamie interprets in another way. I never betray the slightest discomfort for I think only of Jamie. I think of my need to love, and to be loved.

Never in my life before this have I loved any man—(I am sure)—yet by instinct I’ve known that I must not hurt Jamie’s feelings. The slightest tone of reproach or criticism of his work—never. I would never undermine Jamie Stiles’s sense of himself as a man, an artist or a sexual being.

The truths I reveal to Jamie Stiles are those “truths” that will nurture Jamie’s love for me. For only Jamie Stiles’s love for me can validate the love I feel for him, so powerful it leaves me faint and breathless.

It must be—I came so close to dying. Now, nothing matters except this life.

SOME EVENINGS, we watch TV.

On a sofa we sit holding hands. We are open about our affection for each other—(this is Jamie’s way, in the expression of affection generally)—and not at all embarrassed about seeming sentimental, even when “Captain Shalom” grunts wryly in our direction, passing with heavy steps through the living room on the way to his quarters at the rear of the house.

We’re rarely alone watching TV. The prime hours are 8:00 P.M. and 9:00 P.M. Jamie laughs as loudly as the children laugh at the foolish pranks of Milton Berle, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz; Ozzie and Harriet are household favorites, as well as Arthur Godfrey, Lawrence Welk, and Phil Silvers. Jack Benny, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca require more thought, like Jack Paar, Truth or Consequences, and What’s My Line? Sometimes, Jamie falls asleep while watching TV, exhausted from a full day of work, and I don’t wake him, but continue to grip his hand tight. TV images wash over us. Our most torturous thoughts are obliterated in the bluish-flickering TV light.

In our lumpy brass bed in Jamie’s longtime bedroom on the second floor of the house we lie entwined in each other’s arms. Here we talk, and kiss; we kiss, and make love; sometimes a sensation comes over me, that I am in the arms of someone else and not Jamie Stiles—someone whose name I have forgotten. I shudder with dread, but don’t cry out, and manage not to weep.

For life is now. Life is not thinking, not reflective or backward-glancing; life is forward-plunging; life is the present moment as, on TV, it is always now.

And I think—I am in the right place, at the right time.

TO CELEBRATE OUR WEDDING in late October, Jamie’s poet-friend Hiram Brody gave a large, festive party for us in his Victorian house in the Faculty Hills neighborhood of Wainscotia Falls, and wrote a “sprung love sonnet” for the occasion. At the party, in addition to Jamie’s many friends, was a dazzling mix of writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, university professors, and their wives; here were such Wainscotia luminaries as Amos Stein, Myron Coughland, my former employer Morris Harrick, Carson Lockett III, and A. J. Axel—all of whom were friends of H. R. Brody’s and, I wanted to think, admirers of Jamie Stiles’s sculpture. (The most distinguished of these professors, judging by the deference paid to him, was Professor Axel of psychology, who made only a brief visit at the gathering, and left after the first champagne toast. Mr. Brody said proudly of his friend that A. J. Axel had just received the “largest federal government grant ever given to any research scientist in the State of Wisconsin” to help establish the Wainscotia Center for Social Engineering, of which Professor Axel is the founding director; the Center is to pioneer in the behavioral conditioning of anti-social, psychopathic, and subversive personalities.) To this gathering, white-haired Mr. Brody read his “sprung sonnet” in a richly dramatic voice; it was a poem containing an echo, he said, of a sonnet of Shakespeare’s—Let us not bar the twining of true love but celebrate Love’s fixed star . . . Everyone applauded loudly; Jamie wiped tears from his eyes. He didn’t understand most poetry, Jamie said, but he often cried just the same when he heard it.

I thought Mr. Brody’s poem was strange, and beautiful. I did not quite understand it, either, but it brought tears to my eyes.

Jamie and I had been married that morning by a justice of the peace at the Wainscotia Falls courthouse, with just a few witnesses from Heron Creek Farm. The fatherly justice had expressed surprise and a little concern that the bride seemed to have no family, or at any rate no family members who’d come to the wedding, but I smiled and assured him that Jamie Stiles was all the family I needed.

(One of many kindnesses Ardis Steadman had done for me, in addition to boxing those possessions of mine which I’d left behind in Acrady Cottage, was to provide me with a birth certificate out of my university file, which I needed in order to be married. This birth certificate, with an ornate gilt seal from the State of New Jersey, was not a document I could remember having seen before; it stated that Mary Ellen Enright had been born in Pennsboro General Hospital, Pennsboro, New Jersey, on September 11, 1942, and that her parents were Constance Ann Enright and Harvey Sterns Enright. Were these my birth-parents? Or were these simply fictitious names someone had provided, for a birth certificate? The names meant nothing to me—not a stir of emotion. But I remembered Dr. Cosgrove speaking of New Jersey.)

In black ink, with a fountain pen, H. R. Brody copied “Wisconsin Epithalamium” inscribed to Mary Ellen and Jamie, signed and dated in the poet’s flowing signature, on a stiff sheet of parchment paper, which Jamie has framed to hang in our bedroom. “It’s like having a handwritten poem by Robert Frost, or T. S. Eliot,” Jamie has said. He is deeply moved by the poem, as I am. Sometimes one of us reads it aloud to the other, as we prepare for bed.

I thought—I have always loved this person. I have always known this person. Before I was born, I loved him.

SHORTLY AFTER THIS, a strange and disturbing thing happens.

I am not sure how to speak of it. So much in my life has floated beyond language, like a high scudding cloud so distant it can’t be identified, I have lost confidence in my ability to comprehend many things, let alone explain them.

I have not tried to avoid “Captain Shalom” for I have not wanted to hurt the man’s feelings, nor do I want to hurt Jamie’s feelings; but there is something unnerving about Jamie’s ex-Marine uncle, that hasn’t only to do with the poor man’s ravaged face, his hairless battered head, and unblinking rheumy eyes; or his breath that smells of something metallic, like coins held hotly in the palm of a sweaty hand. In our household, in which there are so many individuals coming and going, in the kitchen, on the stairs, in the living room and hallways, not to mention in and out of bathrooms—(there are just two bathrooms for all of us, one on each floor; but there is an outhouse between the house and the hay barn, that Jamie says had been in use when he’d been a boy, not so long ago)—you are constantly encountering the same people yet you’re usually on your way elsewhere, hurrying past them with a murmured Excuse me!—or no words at all. The intimacy born of sheer proximity is a curious phenomenon—there is something mocking in it.

Jamie’s middle-aged ex-Marine uncle uses crutches sometimes, though not always; often he can make his way upstairs by hauling himself hand over hand along the banister, and his method of descending stairs is a kind of free-falling plunge. The one thing you must not ever do is offer to assist him: this error, I made shortly after coming to live at Heron Creek Farm.

The man had stared coldly at me. His eyes were fierce and glaring. Along the left side of his face was a zipper-like scar, and a portion of his upper lip was missing. His teeth were grayish, like the teeth of a malnourished child. His breath was coppery-hot. The ex-Marine who called himself Captain Shalom knew how to render me helpless, by not speaking as I stammered an apology.

Finally he said in an ironic, gravelly voice, “When I need your help, ‘Mary Ellen,’ I will request it. Thanking you beforehand.”

The way in which Captain Shalom pronounced Mary Ellen allowed me to know that he did not think much of the name, or the subterfuge which such a name can validate.

Jamie has been concerned about his uncle’s “mental health” but—what can he do? Captain Shalom refuses to see any doctor, even local doctors; he flies into a fury at the suggestion that someone might drive him to Milwaukee, to see a VA doctor (that is, a psychiatrist). Jamie says that unless he overpowers his uncle and ties him up, and bundles him out to the pickup, it isn’t likely that anything can be done for the veteran.

“Does he have a gun? Guns?”—this was my innocent query.

“No firearms are allowed on this property. That is understood.”

How was this a satisfactory answer? Jamie was incensed, that I should even suggest this.

I think it’s likely that Captain Shalom keeps a gun, or guns, in his room. (This room, awkward for the disabled man to access, was his choice when he’d moved in, Jamie has explained.) But I think it’s likely that, if Captain Shalom feels the impulse to fire one of his guns, he would not kill any of us—(out of contempt, or indifference)—but only himself.

For Captain Shalom is heroic, in his tortured way.

I have tried to “sketch” him—though only by memory. I would like to take photographs of his face when he isn’t aware of me—but that isn’t likely.

Captain Shalom is both jocular and despondent, by turns; his moods are not so very different from Jamie’s but more frequent, and unpredictable. By mid-afternoon he’s likely to be moderately drunk, which gives to his manner a playful, bitter-ironic air; as he is a wreck of a man, an object of pathos, he isn’t given to hypocrisy, if for instance someone tells him, as visitors to our house invariably do, meaning to be kind, that he is looking good he will say dryly, “Really? In whose eyes?—yours, or mine?”

Or he will say nothing but grunt in a way to convey disgust, amusement, contempt; and lurch his way past, with the gleeful rudeness of the disabled for whom condescending kindnesses from the abled are particularly insulting.

Between “Captain Shalom” and “Mary Ellen Enright” there is an uneasy sort of truce, I think. As I am Jamie Stiles’s wife, Jamie’s uncle believes that he should respect me; he’s dependent upon Jamie for a place to live and a household, for his own marriage ended shortly after he’d been discharged from the VA hospital in Milwaukee, and had returned to his wife and children in Racine with both physical and psychiatric problems. Yet, as I’m a young woman of only nineteen, an undergraduate at WSU, and, since coming to live at Heron Creek Farm, as Jamie Stiles’s dear companion, a fairly attractive young woman with a quick bright friendly smile, it is quite possible that Captain Shalom resents me, as men often resent women who are unattainable to them, as women. It is the case that when Captain Shalom and I are alone together in a room or in a hallway, we move past each other with averted eyes, and indrawn breaths. Captain Shalom is exceedingly polite with me at mealtimes, and often volunteers to help with kitchen cleanup, a chore Jamie mostly avoids with the excuse that he must return to his sculpting studio for an hour’s work or so before quitting for the day; at such times, I’m grateful if others in the household help out in the kitchen, for being alone with the ravaged and embittered ex-Marine is painful, and makes me very self-conscious.

Here is a man who sees through you. Your happiness, your relentless smile, even your “love.”

Yet, Captain Shalom is an obsessive reader, and has accumulated a library of secondhand books in his room; unlike the rest of us, he rarely watches TV, and never without snorting in derision and distaste. (Anything on TV that has to do with soldiers, armed forces, veterans, “war” he particularly scorns; but also pacifists, anti-war protesters, and SANE—to Jamie’s disappointment.) Often I see Captain Shalom limping outside with a book from his library, in good weather; he has found a place to read overlooking the pond, and has strung up a hammock there, for his own, private use. (Yet Captain Shalom has invited me to lie in the hammock any time I wish, an offer I would never take up for it seems to hold a veiled threat.) One warm afternoon when Captain Shalom went out to read in his hammock by the pond, I hurried upstairs to his room, to examine his books; though I knew that they were mostly historical books about war, as Jamie had told me. (I thought of searching for his guns, but could not so violate Jamie’s uncle’s privacy. I could not bring myself to look, for instance, through the man’s bureau drawers, or between the mattress and box springs of his bed.)

Captain Shalom’s room was sparely furnished, with no carpet on the floorboards; there was a table, a single chair, a floor lamp that looked as if it had been salvaged from a junkyard. Surprisingly, the room was relatively neat, for Captain Shalom had made his bed as if he were in a barracks—tight-drawn, corners tucked in, the single pillow perfectly positioned. (I smiled to think how Jamie would never think of making any bed in which he’d slept. He kicks his covers off, leaves the bedclothes rumpled and churned-looking.) There was only one actual bookcase in the room, that stood about five feet high; but everywhere were books, some of them oversized picture or photography books, on the floor and table, on a windowsill. Hesitantly I pulled out a book from the bookcase, noting its place so that I could return it, and Captain Shalom would never know, but when I opened the heavy hardcover book I saw to my surprise that there were no words on the page—no printed words.

I turned pages, and all were the same: blank.

On the book’s spine there was nothing as well. On the book’s cover.

Shaken, I replaced this book and opened another at random. And this book did have printed pages, but the print was blurred and incomprehensible as if it had melted; and a third book I opened, now quite frightened, and this too had pages that were incomprehensible to me, not like words in a foreign language but hieroglyphic-like words that did not use familiar letters. And the thought came to me, chilling yet somehow calm—That’s because you are dreaming. In a dream, you can never read print.

Quickly I replaced the books, and quickly retreated downstairs to the first floor of the farmhouse. I have never returned to Captain Shalom’s room since.

MY INJURIES WILL NEVER disappear entirely, I’ve been told—they are “neurological deficits.” Always I will be susceptible to migraine headaches. I can’t “play catch” as most others can in the household—playing with my little step-niece and my step-nephew, for instance, is embarrassing, since I so often fumble the ball. In chill, damp weather, both my knees ache. My eyesight begins to fade at sundown. My eyes are weak, and water easily. A mild agitation will precipitate heart palpitations even when I am otherwise serene.

And I still cry, for no evident reason.

And Jamie comforts me at such times, without asking me what is wrong. And Rufus too, if he hears me.

This afternoon, visitors are arriving. I think they are friends of Jamie’s from Madison—anti-nuclear activists, who are also artists. I have no idea how many people will be eating meals here for the next several days but I will have help in preparing these meals, and cleaning up in the kitchen afterward. Strangely, there is a kind of calm amid so many people, and commotion—and then, I can retreat to my loft in the hay barn anytime I wish, or nearly.

Always room for one more at Heron Creek Farm—this is Jamie Stiles’s dictum.

Anytime you are in the neighborhood of Heron Creek Farm, or anywhere in the vicinity of Wainscotia Falls, Wisconsin, you too are welcome to drop by here with all the others—of course.

Please come! I would so like to meet you. Stay with us as long as you like.