Pacific Edge

6

Been on plane four hours now. Liddy finally asleep. Tapping on lap keyboard. Might as well distract myself.

Strategies for changing history. Invent the history leading out of this world (please) into the world of the book. Causes of utopian process gaining upper hand.

Words scroll up and disappear forever, like days.

Lincoln not assassinated, no, no, we know it didn’t happen that way, we know we can’t take that road. Not useful. Someone appears to lead us, no! No Great Man theory here. No individual can save us. Together or not at all.

Together or nothing. Ah, Pamela—

Some group. In power or out. Act together. Say lawyers, the law? Still can’t escape the feeling that there’s where a difference could be made, despite my own experience. Remake the law of the land. Say a whole class of Harvard Law School, class of ’12 goes out to fill posts of all kinds, government, World Bank, IMF, Pentagon. Save the twenty-first century. Plausible? No. A story. But at least it’s possible, I mean we could do it! Nothing stopping us but inertia, ideology. Lack of imagination! Teachers, religious leaders… but there are few politically active people in any group. And to agree on a whole program of action, all of them. How implausible can something be before it’s useless? It’s conspiracy theory, really. We don’t need that either.

History changed by a popular book, a utopia, everyone reads it and it has ideas, or vague pokes in the direction of ideas, it changes their thinking, everyone starts working for a better world—

Getting desperate. Marcuse: one of the worst signs of our danger is we can’t imagine the route from here to utopia. No way to get there.

Take the first step and you’re there. Process, dynamism, the way is the life. We must imagine the way. Our imagination is stronger than theirs! Take the first step and you’re on the road.

And so? In my book?

Stare at empty screen. My daughter sighs in her sleep. Her sleeping face. It’s a matter of touch, and if you can’t touch the one you love—can’t see her—

We’re thirty-five thousand feet above the earth. People are watching a movie. The blue curve of the world, such a big place, so much bigger than we ever think, until something takes us….

Words scroll up and disappear forever, like

The night of Hank’s Mars party they rode into the hills in a big group, bike lamps bobbing like a string of fireflies. The Lobos formed the core of the party, then Oscar was along, and Tom and Nadezhda, weaving dangerously on a bicycle built for two. They came to the end of the paved road near Black Star Canyon and left the bikes behind. Hank’s backpack clinked as he led them up the dark trail. Oscar stumbled in the forest twilight: “Humanity lands on the fabled red planet, and we celebrate this feat by wandering in the dark like savages. It’s 2001 run backwards. Ow!”

The air was warm. The sage and low gnarled oaks covering the canyon walls clattered and shooshed in irregular gusts of wind. A Santa Ana wind was arriving, sweeping down from the north, compressing over the San Jacintos, warming and losing moisture until it burst out of the canyons hot and dry. “Santa Ana!” Tom said, sniffing. He explained to Nadezhda, touched the back of her hand and she jumped. “Static electricity. It’s a good sign.”

An electric shock with every touch.

After a half hour’s climb they came to Black Star Hot Springs, a series of small pools in a narrow meadow. Sycamore, live oak, and black walnut stood crowded on the flat canyon floor, surrounding the pools. Near the largest pool was a small cabin and pavilion. Hank had rented it from the town for the night, and he unlocked the door and turned on a lamp inside. Yellow window squares illuminated the steam bubbling off the pool’s surface. Stiff live oak leaves clacked together. Branch rubbed on branch, adding ghostly creaks to the susurrous of leaf sound.

“Yow—it’s hot tonight.”

The large pool was two down from the source of the spring. Concrete steps and an underwater concrete bench had been built into it, and the rest of the bottom was a hard gritty sandstone not much different from the concrete in texture. The pool was about twenty feet across, and varied between three and five feet in depth. In short, a perfect hot springs pool.

Hank, Jody, Mike and Oscar put food and drink into the cabin’s refrigerator. The rest shed their clothes and stepped into the pool. Abrupt splashes, squeals of pain, hoots of delight. The water was the temperature of a hot bath, deliciously warm once past the initial shock of it.

Oscar appeared at the pool’s edge, a big white blob in the dim light. “Watch out,” Kevin said. Oscar threw his massive head back; in the darkness he seemed three times the size of a man, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, big-bellied, thick-legged. His friends stared despite themselves. Suddenly he crouched, threw his arms wide, mimed jumping out over them. Just the way he shifted on his feet and whipped his head around implied the whole action of running forward and leaping up, landing in a giant cannonball dive. “No, no! The pool! You’ll crack the bottom!” He pawed the ground with a bare foot, shook his black curls ferociously, took a little run back, then forward to the pool’s edge, then back again, arms outstretched like a surfer’s, tilting with the absurd rhinocerine grace Kevin and Doris had seen in Bishop. Hank and Jody and Mike came out of the cabin to see what the ruckus was about, and with a last great wind-up Oscar took off, into the air like a great white whale, suspended in a ball several feet above them. Then KERPLOP, and an enormous splash.

Wild shrieks. “My God,” said Gabriela, “the water’s two feet lower.”

“And just think if Oscar weren’t in the pool.”

Doris, laughing hard, said “Oscar, you have to stay in so we aren’t beached.”

“Glug,” Oscar said, spurting water from his mouth like an Italian fountain, an immense Cupid.

“What’s the flow rate of this spring?” Mike said. “Ten gallons a minute? We should be back to normal by morning.”

“We’ll have to pour some tequila in,” Hank said solemnly, carrying out a big tray filled with bottles and glasses. “A sacrifice. Here, start working on these.”

Jody passed around glasses, leaning out over the water.

“You look like a cocktail waitress, stop working so hard, we can get this stuff.”

“Hank’s bringing out the masks, then we’re done.”

Hank brought out a stack of papier-maché masks he had made, animals faces of all kinds. “Great, Hank.” “Yeah, I spent a couple months on these, every night.” He gave them out, very particular about who got which one. Kevin was a horse, Ramona an eagle, Gabriela a rooster, Mike a fish; Tom was a turtle, Nadezhda a cat; Oscar was a frog, Doris a crow, Jody a tiger, and Hank himself was a coyote. All the masks had eyeholes, and mouths convenient for drinking. They walked around the pool inspecting each other and giggling. Masked heads, naked bodies: it was weird, bizarre, dangerous looking.

“Ribbit!”

They all joined in with the appropriate cry.

Jody stepped into the pool and whistled at its heat, her long body feline under the tiger mask. Hank hopped around handing people glasses, or bottles for those who needed them to be able to drink through their masks.

“This is Hank’s own tequila,” Tom told Nadezhda. “He grows the cactus in his garden and does all the extraction and fermentation and distillation himself.” He took a gulp from his glass. “Horrible stuff. Here, Hank, give me some more of that.”

“It tastes fine to me,” Nadezhda said, then coughed hard.

Tom laughed. “Yeah, tequila is heavenly.”

Hank stood at one end of the pool, looking perfectly natural, as if he always went naked and sported a coyote head. “Listen to the wind.” He prowled around the pool’s edge. Over the trickle of water they could hear the wind soughing, and suddenly the shape of the canyon was perfectly clear to them: the narrowing upstream, the headwall, the side canyons up above—all that, just in sound. Hank began humming, and some of them picked it up, the great “aum” shifting as different people joined in or stopped to breathe. Over this ground bass Hank muttered what sounded like random sentences, some intelligible, some not. “We come from the earth. We’re part of the earth.” Then a low breath chant, “Hi-ya huh, hi-ya huh, au-oom,” and then more complex and various, a singsong poem in a language none of them knew, punctuated by exclamations. “We come from the earth like this water, pouring into the world. We are bubbles of earth. Bubbles of earth.” Then another language, Sanskrit, Shoshone, only the shaman knew. He prowled around them like Coyote checking out a henhouse, growling. They could feel his physical authority; they stood in the pool milling around to face him, chanting too, getting louder until Coyote howled, and suddenly they were all baying at the moon, as loud as voices could ever be.

Hank hopped in the pool, hooted. “Man when you’re wet that wind is cold!”

“Quick,” Tom said, “more awful tequila.”

“Good idea.”

Jody went to get more from the cabin, and while she was there she pulled the cabin’s TV onto the deck and turned it on, with the sound off. It seemed a kind of lamp, the faces and command centers mere colored forms. Jody dialed up music, Chinese harps and low flute tones, whistling over the sound of the wind. Overhead the stars blinked and shivered, brilliant in the so-black sky; the moon wouldn’t rise for a hour or two. Just over the treetops one of the big orbiting solar collectors shone like a jewel, like a chip of the moon or a planet ten times bigger than Jupiter.

Ramona stood in the shallow end, a broad-shouldered eagle, collarbones prominent under sleek wet skin. “The water gets too hot, but with the wind it feels really cold when you get out. You can’t get it right.”

“Reminds me of Muir’s night on Shasta,” the turtle said. “He was tough, his father was a Calvinist minister and a cruel man, he beat Muir and worked him at the bottom of wells. So nothing in the Sierras ever bothered him. But one time he and a friend climbed Shasta and got caught in a storm up there at the top, a real bad blizzard. It should have killed them, but luckily Shasta was more active in those days, and there was still a hot spring pool in the summit caldera. Muir and his friend found this pool and jumped in, but the water in it was like a hundred and fifty degrees, and full of sulphur gas. So they couldn’t stay in it, but when they got out they started to freeze instantly. It was scald or freeze, no middle ground. All they could do to survive was keep dipping in and out of the pool, lying in the shallows and rolling over all night long, one side in the water and the other in the wind, on and on until their senses were so blasted that they couldn’t tell the hot from the cold. Afterwards Muir said it was the most uncomfortable night he had ever spent, which is saying a lot, because he was a wild man.”

“Sounds like our Hank,” the tiger said. “One time we were up in the Sierras and a lightning storm struck, and I turned around and there was Hank climbing a tall tree—I said what the hell are you doing? and he said he wanted to get a better look.”

Said the rooster, “One time we went to Yosemite and climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls, and Hank, he walked right out knee deep to where he could look over the edge! Three thousand feet down!”

“Hey,” Hank said, “how else you gonna see it?”

They laughed at him.

“It was October, I tell you, the water was low!”

“How about that time we were on top of that water tower on the Colorado and these crazies hauled up in a motor boat and ran up the tower and dove off into the river—must have been fifty or sixty feet! And soon as they were finished Hank just leaned out over, and kept on leaning till he dove in too! Sixty feet!”

“I woulda done it before,” Coyote said, “but it didn’t occur to me till I saw those guys do it.”

The rooster crowed with laughter. “Once we were riding a ski lift at Big Bear and Hank says to me Don’t this look like a great take-off point, Gabby? It’d be just like dropping in on a big wave, wouldn’t it? And before I could say no it wouldn’t be anything like dropping in on a big wave he had hopped out of the fucking ski lift, dropped and turned thirty feet through the air and hit the slope flying!”

“Actually, I cut my forehead on the front of my skis on that one,” Hank said. “Don’t know how.”

“What about the time you took Damaso climbing in Joshua Tree—”

“Oh, that was a mistake,” Coyote said. “He got freaked and came off when we were crossing Hairball Ledge, and fell so fast I had to grab him by his hair as he slid by. A hundred feet up and we’re hanging there by two fingertips and Damaso’s hair.”

“I feel comfortable again,” the eagle announced, head bobbing on the water’s surface. “Or at least safer.”

She floated over to the horse. Instantly Kevin felt a dizzying stallion’s rush of blood coursing through his side as hers touched him. Knees, whole thighs; she stayed there, pressed against him. The blood poured through him, spurting out of his heart in great booms, flushing out every capillary in his skin, so that he had to take in a big shivery breath to contain all the tingling. The power of the touch. Their shoulders brushed, and her newly emergent wet flesh felt as warm as the water. Steam caught the rose light from the TV screen. They were showing a close-up of Mars. The horse considered the idea of an orgasm through his side.

Oscar and Doris, frog and crow, were discussing the most dangerous things they had ever done, in a facetious style so that they spoke only of accidents. Getting caught under a bronze mold, flying with Ramona, wrestling the Vancouver Virgins, trying to rescue a college paper from a burning apartment…. Their claims for their own stupidity were matched only by their claims for the other’s. Hearing this from across the pool, the cat nudged the turtle and made a tiny gesture in their direction. The turtle shook his head, nodded with his round head toward the horse and the eagle. The cat shrugged.

“I think it’s time,” Coyote declared. “Isn’t Mars getting closer?”

“Should I turn up the sound?”

“NO.”

Flute and Chinese harp, and the wind in the trees, served them as soundtrack for humanity’s first touch of another planet. So often delayed, so often screwed up, the journey was finally coming to its end—which was also a beginning, of something none of them could see, exactly, though they all knew it was important. A whole world, a whole history, implied in a single image….

From orbit the expedition had dropped several robot landers, in Hellas Basin where they planned to touch down, and all of these robots were equipped with heat-seeking cameras, which were now trained on the manned lander as it descended. The directors of the TV program had any number of fine images to choose from, and often they split the screen to provide more than one. The view from the lander as Hellas, the biggest of all craters, got closer and more distinct, its floor a rock-strewn plain of reddish sand. Or the view from the ground, looking up into a dark pink sky, where there was an odd thing, a black dot in the middle of a white circle, growing larger. It resolved to the lander and its parachute, then bloomed with white light as retro-rockets fired. The view shifted to a shot from orbit, in super telephoto, the lander a white spot of thistledown, drifting onto a desert floor. Ah yes—images that would become part of history forever and ever, created in this very moment, in the knife-edge present that is all we ever inhabit. The TV seemed huge.

Coyote shaman started chanting again, and some of the other animals provided the purring background hum. Everything—the stars shivering overhead, the black leaves clicking in the black sky, the deep whoosh of the wind, the wet chuckle of water, the weird Chinese music, their voices, the taste of cactus, the extraordinary square of rich red color, over against the dark mass of the pavilion—all fused to a single whole, a unit of experience in which nothing could be removed. The turtle, pulling out of it for a moment, had to admire the shaman’s strange sense of ritual, of place. How better to be part of this moment, one of humanity’s greatest? Then the lander fell closer to the ground and their voices rose, they saw the sand on the desert floor kick up, as if in a wind like the one swirling their wet skin, and the turtle felt a surge of something he had almost forgotten. Grinning inside his mask, he howled and howled. They all were howling. The lander dropped lower, throwing out clouds and clouds of dust and red sand. They screamed at the stars as it touched down, jumping and cheering wildly. “Yaay! Yaay!”

There were people on Mars.

After that the action on screen returned to the business of astronauts and commentators. Hank ran to the cabin and came back with a couple of light beachballs that he threw in the pool. They batted the balls around in volleyball style, talked, drank, watched the continuing drama of the astronauts suiting up. “What will they say, you know, their first words?”

“If they say something stupid like on the moon, I’ll throw up.”

“How about, ‘Well, here we are.’”

“Home at last.”

“The Martians have landed.”

“Take me to your leader.”

“If we don’t turn the sound up we’ll never know.”

“That would be an odd thing to say.”

“We’ll find out tomorrow, leave it down. We’re doing better than they will anyway, you know astronauts.”

A ball in the middle of the pool rolled over slowly on the water, pushed seemingly by the steam that curled off the surface in lazy arabesques. Foggy yellow light. Images of raised arms, flexing shoulders, breasts and pecs, animal faces. They glowed in the dark, their bodies looked like translucent pink skins containing some sort of flame.

They sat in a circle, silent, resting, feeling the water flow over them, the wind course through them. Muscles relaxed to mush in the warmth, and minds followed. The eagle crossed the pool to sit by the horse again, moving slowly, in a sort of dream dance that threw up a wake of steam streamers. A sudden flurry of sycamore leaves spiraled down onto the pond, alighting it seemed just a fraction of an inch over the water on each side of the eagle as she turned and sat. Powerful torso twisting, revealing wide rangy shoulders, lats bulging out from ribs, flat chest. Glowing pinkly in the dark. One leaf perched on the eagle head.

The conversation broke into pieces. Fish and rooster wandered off on their own, towels in hand. Tom and Nadezhda talked about the Mars landing, about people they had known who had been involved in the effort, many years before—part of conversation strategy, after all. Coyote and tiger got out of the pool, sat facing each other, hands twined, chanting in time to the music: Hank small and compact, a bundle of thick wire muscles—Jody tall and curvey, big muscles, lush breasts and bottom. Kevin and Ramona watched them, knees touching.

The frog and the crow sat across from each other at the narrow end of the pool, occasionally batting the ball back and forth across the water, to keep it from floating down the exit stream and away. They didn’t have much to say. The crow, in fact, was covertly watching horse and eagle. And from across the pool, in the midst of her relaxed talk with Tom, Nadezhda watched them all.

“Look at my fingertips,” the horse said. “They’re really pruning up.”

“Mine too,” the eagle replied. “My whole skin is doing it, I think.” She sat on the concrete rim of the pool. She took off her mask, shook her head. Water sprayed out from her in a yellow corona. Hank had accomplished his reversal; it seemed to Kevin that this exposure of the face was infinitely more revealing and intimate than bare bodies could ever be.

She looked at him and he couldn’t breathe. “I’m overheating,” she said.

He nodded.

“Want to go for a walk?”

“Sure,” he replied, and the stallion inside reared for the sky. “Moon should be up soon. We could take the middle canyon up to the ridge, get a view.”

“Whatever.”

They got out of the pool, went to the cabin, dried and dressed. Returned to the pool. “We’re going for a walk,” Ramona said.

They took off up the poolside trail. Soon after they left, Doris sat up on the pool rim herself. Her rounded body looked small and plump after Ramona’s ranginess. “It is getting hot,” she said to no one in particular, in a strained voice. She stood with a neat motion. The frog watched her silently. She walked quickly to the cabin, started dressing.

The cat slid over to the frog. “Don’t you think you should join her?” she said quietly.

“Oh, no,” the frog said, looking down at the water. “I think if she wanted that she would have asked.”

“Not necessarily. If she asked you in front of us, and you said no…”

“But I don’t think so. She wants… well. I don’t know.” He turned to the rim, picked up a bottle, drained it empty. “Whew.” He surged out of the pool, causing a sudden little tsunami. He padded over to the picnic table, drank from another bottle. Turning, he saw that Doris was gone.

He took off his frog mask, dressed. The pool seemed to pulse with a light from its bottom that filtered up through a tapestry of reddish steam. The ripples on the surface were… something. But Doris was gone. Oscar felt his diaphragm contract a bit, and the corners of his mouth tighten. Perhaps she had wanted him to ask to join her. Never know, now. Unless—

The wind coursing over his wet head felt cool and dry. Despite the evaporative cooling he could tell it was a hot wind. It felt good to be out in it. All his body felt cool, warm, relaxed, melted. And perhaps. Well, if he could find her. Sooner the better, as far as that went. Brusquely he pulled on his shoes, walked to the pool, crouched beside Nadezhda. “I think I’ll go take a look for her,” he said softly.

The cat nodded. “She went up that same trail, by the pools. I think she’ll appreciate it.”

Oscar nodded, straightened. The sycamore overhead had a fractal pattern of such complexity that it made him dizzy. So many branches, all of them waving against the stars, not in concert but each in a rhythm of its own, depending on how far from the trunk it was… another drink of tequila, sure. Looking down he saw the trail as clear as the yellow brick road. He lumbered off along it, into the forest.

Tom and Nadezhda sat beside each other, masks off. The wind felt good on Tom’s face. Hank and Jody were still chanting, voices ordering the night’s sound, and feeling it fill him Tom joined in, Aum. Under his feet the sandstone was both slick and gritty at once. Between the leaves the sky to the east had a faint white aureole—desert dust in the wind, and the moon about to rise. Hank and Jody stood, short man, tall woman, and walked across the pavilion hand in hand, stopping only to pick up a towel.

“Well,” Tom said. “Here we are.” He laughed. On the screen the lander stood on the red rocky plain of Hellas. “Such an alien little car.”

“Is that what they’ll say when they step out?”

He shook his head. “That’s what I say here. And now.”

Nadezhda nodded gravely. “But they should say that. Why don’t you get us another bottle of the tequila. I’m developing a taste for it.”

“Uh oh.” He went and got a full bottle from the table. “I’m kind of drunk, myself.”

“Me too. If that’s what it is. You’re right, it feels a little different. But I like it.”

“You do now.”

“That’s what counts. You know, I’m getting colder rather than warmer. It’s like a bath you’ve been in too long.”

“We could move upstream to the next pool. It’s hotter.”

“Let’s do that.”

She stood and stepped into the stream bed, walked upstream with small, hesitant steps. Even in the dark her silvery white hair shone like a cap. Slender as she was, in the dark she almost looked like a young girl. Tom blinked, grasped the neck of the bottle more firmly, followed her.

Odd to have a stream’s water be the warmest part of the surroundings. Nadezhda was just a shape now between trees, her hair the most visible part of her. Something in the sight gave Tom a quiver: naked woman walking up a streambed in the dark, between trees. Wisps of steam were just visible. Ferns on the bank curled in black nautilus patterns, like fossils held up on stems for their viewing.

When he came to the next pool Nadezhda was standing on its concrete bench, knee deep in water, waist deep in steam. The moon was coming up over the east wall of the canyon, and to his dark-adjusted eyes it was as bright as any streetlight. He almost wished it weren’t there. But then his pupils shrank and again it seemed dim, dark even. Nadezhda watched him. “You’re right,” she said. “It is warmer.”

“Good.” They sat side by side on the edge of the pool, feet on the concrete bench below. They passed the slim bottle back and forth. The wind had almost dried their bodies, but after a bit it felt cool, and they lowered themselves into the water.

“I hope Oscar finds Doris.”

“I guess.”

“Well, he has to try.” She laughed. “Pretty bodies.”

“Yeah. Especially Ramona and Jody.”

She elbowed him. “And Kevin and Hank!”

“Yeah, okay.”

“And Gabby and Mike and Doris and Oscar!”

He laughed. “It’s true.”

She took a slug from the bottle, shifted closer to him. “Except, I don’t know, I am thinking they are a little unformed. Like porcelain, or infants. To be really beautiful a body has to have a bit more to it. Their skin is too smooth. Beautiful skin has to have some pattern to it.” She pinched together the skin of his upper arm. “Like that.”

He laughed. “Yeah, they need some wrinkles, show some character!” He laughed again. Here I am, he thought; here I am.

“I have a lot of character,” Nadezhda said, and giggled.

“Me too.”

“And, and their hair is always just one color. No mix.”

“Pied beauty. Give thanks to God for dappled things….”

“Pied beauty, yes. On a chest with some heft to it.” Her fingers traced lines over him.

Tom’s hand found wet warm silt, beside the concrete rim of the pond; he picked some up, drew his initials on Nadezhda’s chest. “Hmm, TB, looks good but subject to confusion.” He changed the two letters to boxes.

Nadezhda got a handful, put stripes on his cheeks and forehead, around his eyes. “You look scary,” she said. “Like one of the holy wanderers in India.”

“Aaar.” He worked on her face too, pulling it closer to his. Just two stripes on each cheek. “Spooky.”

“I bet they don’t know how to kiss, either,” she said, and leaned into him.

When they stopped Tom laughed. “No,” he said, “I bet they don’t know that.”

As they fell further into it, they kept drawing patterns on each other. “Bet they don’t know this.” “Or this.” “Or—oh—this.”

The moon was half full. Tom could see Nadezhda well indeed, her body all painted and pulsing, glowing pinkly, warm as the water under him. A muddy kiss of her breast. Taste of the earth. He was too bemused to hold a thought in his head, there was too much to take in. The wind in the trees, the flow of hot water over his legs, the half moon all marred, the perfect stars, the body sliding up and down between his hands. He held skin and felt it slide over ribs like slats in a fence.

They heard the distant yowl of coyotes, yipping in astounding glissandos that no dog could even approximate—crazily melodic, exultant, moonstruck. From the direction of the cabin they heard a single cry of release, and looking at each other they laughed, laughed at the way everything was falling together in a pattern beyond any calculation or hope of repetition: we do these things once, then they’re gone! The distant coyotes kept howling and the wind picked up, swirled the branches overhead, and Nadezhda hugged him as they moved together.

When they returned to the world she laughed with her breath, shortly. “Our blessing on all of them.”

Kevin and Ramona, horse and eagle, walked up the canyon past the spring and into the darkness of dense night forest. If there was a trail here they couldn’t see it. Kevin smiled, enjoying the twisting between trees, the stepping over fronds and fallen logs. It felt good to be out of the water and into the wind—his body was overheated at the core, and his face kept sweating so that the hot wind seemed cool, refreshing, comfortable.

He stopped as the canyon bottom divided into two forks, and Ramona came up beside him. Pressed against him. He knew these canyons from boyhood, but in the uncertain light, distracted as he was, he found it hard to concentrate on what he knew, hard to remember any of that—it was just forest, night. Moon would be up soon, then he would remember. Meanwhile he chose the left fork and they continued on. Should eventually get them onto a ridge, and then he would know their location.

It was rougher up this side canyon, which rose like a broken staircase; there was a rock with a long oak bannister. They used their hands to pull themselves up. A final scramble brought them up the headwall of the canyon, and they stood on a broad ridge, sloping slowly up to the long crest of the range that led to Saddleback. Here the ground was dry and crumbled—a layer of dirt over the sandstone below. Dwarfish scrub oaks and gnarly sage bushes dotted the ridge irregularly, and in most places it was easy to walk between them.

To the east the horizon glowed, then broke to white. Moonrise. Immediately the stars dimmed, the sky became less purely black—it was a pastel black now. Shadows jumped into existence like solid ghosts, and everything on the ridge suddenly looked different. The half spheres of the sage bushes crouching on the earth like hiding animals, the wind-tossed scrub oaks crabbed and threatening.

When the moon—big and fat, its dark half just as visible as the bright half—when this ball, half light, half dark, was almost breaking free of the horizon, they saw movement in its face. “What?” Then Kevin saw that the movement was on a ridge to the east. Silhouetted against the moon, animals pointed their long thin muzzles at the sky. A few dream seconds of silence later they heard the cries.

Coyotes. “Hank gets around fast,” Kevin whispered. The weirdness of the sound, the impossible slides up and down, the way the yips and barks and sliding yowls crossed over each other, making momentary harmonies and disharmonies that never once held still—all sent great shivers up Kevin’s spine. The skin on his arms and back goose-pimpled. Thoughtlessly he drew Ramona to him (a little static shock). They embraced. This was something friends often did in their town, but Kevin and Ramona never had—given what was and what was not between them, it would have been too much. So this was the first time. They drew back to look at each other in the fey light, and even without color Kevin could see the perfect coloring of Ramona’s face, the rich skin, raven hair—the whites of eyes and teeth… teeth that bit lower lip and then they were kissing. The coyotes’ ecstacy yipped from inside them now, a complete interpenetration of inner and outer. Their first true kiss. Kevin’s blood transmuted to something lighter, faster, hotter, freer—to wind. His blood turned to wind.

For Doris it was not like that. She left the hot springs angry and then morose, and paid little attention to where she was going. Upcanyon, yes, in the direction that Kevin and Ramona had gone. But she would never follow them. It would be stupid. And anyway impossible. But if only she could come upon Kevin and say to him—shout at him—why? Why her and not me? We’ve made love before, how many times? We’ve been good friends, we’ve lived in that house together for how many years? A long, long, long long time. And you never once looked at me like you do at her. We had fun, we laughed, we made love, we seemed to be enjoying ourselves, but still you were never all there, you never committed anything. You were never passionate. Wanting. It was just floating along for you, a friendship, “Damn you,” she said aloud. In the noise of the wind, canyon soughing like a great broken flute, no one would ever hear her. They were in conspiracy together, she and the wind and the canyon, covering for each other, protecting each other. No one could hear. Unless she screamed. And she would never do that. “Not me, I’m not the kind to scream. Shout, maybe, or perhaps a sharp, staccato, cutting remark. A stiletto of a remark. But no histrionics from Doris Nakayama, no, of course not,” voice rising with every word, till she let out a little shriek, “Aah!” Clapped her hand over her mouth, bit her fingers, laughed angrily. She sniffed and spit the snot out on the ground. Dashed tears from her cheeks. It felt good to stumble through the trees ranting and raving, crashing through brush when there was no obvious way. “Stupid fool, I mean just because she’s tall and beautiful and smart and a good fucking shortstop. And she’s sweet, sure, but when will she make you laugh? When will she make you think or teach you anything? Ah, fuck, you’re two peas in a pod. A very boring pod. The two of you together have no more wit than a rock. So I suppose you’ll never miss it, you bastard.”

The canyon forked and Doris bludgeoned her way to the left, up a steep side canyon that gave her a lot of opportunity to work off steam. She attacked the boulders like personal enemies. Overheated from the damned hot springs. Muttering to herself she walked straight into the middle of a sage brush, and a whole flock of sleeping doves shot away, cooing and clucking and landing in a bush nearby together. Their liquid calls pursued her as she continued up the defile. She smelled of sage now, the very smell of these hills, of this wind, of Orange County itself. Before the people and the oranges and the eucalyptus and the labs it had smelled like this. She crushed a twig of it between her fingers, smelled it. Hank and his loony ceremony, she hummed the Aum, smelled the sage running all through her. They were more her hills than anyone else’s.

She topped the headwall of the canyon just as the coyotes began their mad song, and so she had just turned up the ridge when she saw the figures above her. Frightened, she dropped behind a bush. They would think she had followed them. All thought of getting Kevin alone and lambasting him disappeared as she crouched to the ground. Finally she dared to move, to peer around the side of the hemispherical sage. And so she saw them embrace and kiss: silhouetted figures in the moonlight, like a silver on black nineteenth-century etching entitled “Love”. Careless of noise she turned and ran back down the ridge, tore down into another canyon.

Ramona broke away from their kiss. “What was that?”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t you hear it? And I saw something move, out of the corner of my eye. Back the way we came.”

“Maybe another coyote.”

“It was bigger than that.”

“Hmm.”

The shape Kevin had seen in the night, after his first council meeting. He had forgotten it, but now he remembered. And there were mountain lions in the Santa Ana Mountains again, it was said—Kevin had never seen one. It was unlikely one would have come so close to people, though—the areas they liked were higher, up on the back side of Saddleback. Well, he wouldn’t mention the possibility, for fear it would spoil the mood.

“Do you think it could have been a mountain lion?” Ramona said matter-of-factly.

“Nah.” He cleared his throat. “Or at least, it isn’t very likely.”

The coyotes’ yipping seemed to assure them that it was, on the contrary, entirely possible.

“Let’s go down the next canyon over,” Ramona suggested.

Kevin nodded, and they walked the top of the ridge, winding between sage brushes. The rounded edge of the ridge curved in a big bow, until they had the moon at their backs. Their shadows stretched long before them, black and solid. The wind threw their hair across their faces. They stopped often to kiss, and each kiss was longer and more passionate, more a complete world in itself.

To their right, and so back in the general direction of the hot springs, they saw a rather shallow, wide canyon. “Look!” Ramona said, pointing down into it. At the first dip in the canyon floor there was a copse of big old sycamore trees. The biggest stood by itself, overlooking the canyon below, and there seemed to be a vine dropping from one high, thick branch. “It’s the swing,” she said. “It’s Swing Canyon!”

“Sure enough!” Kevin said. “Hey, I know where we are now.”

“Come on,” she said, leading him down, looking over her shoulder with a girlish smile. “Let’s go swing.”

Down at the big tree they found the swing was the same as ever. It was not an ordinary swing, but a single thick rope, tied to a crook in a side branch, so that it hung well clear of the battered old trunk. The ground fell away in a smooth slope downcanyon, so it was possible to grasp the rope over a round knot and run down the slope, and when lifted off the ground one could put one’s feet on a bar of wood holed and stuck above a knot at the bottom of the rope. And so one swung out into space in a long slow arc, above the brush-covered drop to the lower canyon.

They took turns doing this. Kevin rode into space feeling the mounting exhilaration of the kisses between rides, the rough contact of their bodies as they stopped each other, the windy joy of the rides themselves, out in the wind and the spinning moonlit shadows. At the end of each flight he felt lighter and lighter, as if casting off dross with each spin. He was escaping by degrees the pull of the earth. The wind was rushing downcanyon, so that each flight was pushed further out among the stars, and on the way back in he found he could face into the wind, spreadeagle his spirit and land light as a feather, to be caught in Ramona’s strong arms. He felt they had joined the people on Mars, and flew in gravity two-fifths that of the world they had known.

“Here,” Ramona said breathlessly at the end of one run. “We can do it together. Hold on from opposite sides, and run down and put our feet on each side of the bar.” They kissed hard and their hands explored each other hungrily. “Do you think it’ll work?” “Sure! I mean who knows? Let’s try it.”

“Okay.” Kevin seized the rope. Ramona’s hands closed just above his. They took off running. When the rope pulled them free of the earth their feet scrabbled for a hold on the bar, which teetered under them. Finally they balanced on it, and could take their weight off their arms. Standing together, face to face, flying through the night with the hot dry wind, they kissed long and hard, and their tongues spoke directly to each other in a language of touch so much more direct and powerful than the language of words that Kevin thought he might forget speech entirely. Ramona pulled away, laughed. They were spinning slowly. She pressed against him. “Do you remember when we were in third grade and we went behind the school and kissed?” she said in his ear. “No!” Kevin said, astonished. Had that really happened? She kissed his ear, thrust her tongue in it. That whole side of his body buzzed as if touched by some electricity of sex, he almost fell off. He held the big muscles of her bottom, larger than the full spread of his hand. She breathed in his ear, rubbed the hard band of her public bone over his thigh. They were spinning. The wind rushed by as they unzipped each other’s pants. “I want to kiss you all over,” Ramona said under her breath. She reached into his pants and squeezed him hard—Kevin gasped, the shock of it shot straight up his belly and spine, he very well might fall off, Ramona pulled her pants down and kicked them off into the night, pressed against him and they kissed, spinning. They had no weight at all, they were lofted like tufts of dandelion in the dry wind, spinning—

“Oh hey,” Kevin said. “Here comes the ground.” With a rush they were stumbling up the slope, hanging onto the rope to keep from falling over, sliding over the soft dirt, slewing to one side. They fell together, collapsed onto the ground, let the rope fall away. Seemed Ramona’s pants were actually still on, his too, how had that happened? Mind getting ahead of the game. Exquisite delay to get them off, over her butt, down her long legs, shove them to one side. Undressing twice? he noted hazily. Very nice idea. One of the best parts, after all, unbutton each other’s buttons, pull each other free of all that raiment, reveal the naked self inside. When we are naked we are still clothed inside, but the beautiful, physical, sexual thereness of the flesh, pulsing warmly under the fingers, bodies pressed together, seeking maximum contact, skin to skin, everything touching everything and all those cloth barriers gone—it’s easy to be overwhelmed by that. And to be inside her, to be the male half of a new creature the two of them made, to have such a female half there all around him….

He looked up and saw that the rope was swinging idly in the wind, that it had knocked down some of the periwinkle blooms that spiraled up the sycamore trunk. Petals and whole flowers floated down diagonally in the wind and were landing all around them, on his back, in Ramona’s face (eyes closed, mouth open in a girlish O of surprise), petals like leaves falling around them, little fingers on his back, piling up, drifting against their sides until they moved in a mound of periwinkle blossoms, a blanket of them. He saw a pure black mountain lion pad by, purring its approval. It levitated with a casual leap into the lowest fork of their tree, where it sprawled over both sides of a big branch, legs all akimbo, perfectly relaxed, staring at them with big moon eyes, purring a purr as deep and rasping as waves breaking on shingle, purring a purr that enveloped them like the sound of the wind in the branches. Kevin felt it deep inside, vibrating both him and Ramona completely as they plunged toward oblivion, the universal now. They were spinning.

Oscar had lost the canyon trail immediately, almost falling in the little gurgling pool at the source of the spring; he had to sink to one knee abruptly to keep from pitching in. Spiraling blade fronds slapped him gently in the face. He stared transfixed at the roiled surface of the pool, which turned over itself as if a hose were spurting out water somewhere below the surface. So odd—here they were on a desert coastline, the mountains mostly bare and brown, and before his eyes water poured out of a hill. And steaming hot to boot. Where did it come from? Oh, he knew that. Law classes, surprising how much you had to understand for the law to make sense. And the way Sally taught that class, up in Dusy Basin and down on the campus; he felt he understood groundwater basins. He stood on the bony cracked hills, eons old, porous to water right down to the bedrock. So the ground beneath him was saturated, up to some level below him, a few feet, several hundred feet, depending on where he stood. Water down there slowly flowing, down its secret watersheds. A rib of bedrock, an underground upwelling. This was the top of one, pouring out a crack. A reservoir filled with stone. Underground waterfall. And hot because some cracks in deep bedrock were letting the earth’s internal heat seep up. My God. Could it actually be that hot down there? Well, the crust was only a few miles thick, and after that it was a few thousand miles to the core. Essentially he was standing on a ball of molten lava, with something as thin as aluminum foil insulating him from it.

The spring water scalded his fingers, and hastily he pulled away. Uneasy at the heat, which seemed now to have a faint red glow to it, he stepped over the stream and upcanyon, aware suddenly of a Pellucidar below like the insides of a foundry, bright yellow spills of molten metal leaving intense afterimages in his sight. Except in reality the superheated rock below was under such gravitational pressure that it could be called neither a liquid or a solid, not if you wanted to be accurate. A slight variation, a bolide gravitational or magnetic, and the dark night might suddenly explode on him. Have to live with that.

The woods were dark. Black on black. Oscar blundered into branches that were like wooden arms trying to tackle him. He couldn’t see well enough to move around out here, how did the others do it? The canyon floor was irregular and much of what he stepped on was soft. It made him squeamish and light-footed. Needed a flashlight. Definitely dark. Once a friend in Virginia had taken him out to see one of the caverns in the Shenandoah Mountains, and the guide there had shut down the light in one deep cavern, so they could see the purity of a complete lack of light. You couldn’t see your hand right in front of your nose, nor distinguish any motions it made. It was simply a field of the richest, blackest black he had ever seen.

This wasn’t like that. Overhead stars sparked between wind-tossed branches, and a single solar panel station blinked in the west like a streetlight seen from miles away. Presumably these were casting some light on the scene. How many candlepower was a star? Let’s see, a lit candle some eight miles away is supposed to be visible. They did an experiment about that, in the early days, wandering out on a clear desert basin. One man tramped back and forth to find out at just what point he lost sight of the distant candle. Eight miles? Maybe it wasn’t that far. What was stopping the light from being visible, anyway? What got in the way? Imagine that man out there wandering back and forth, a distant prick of light winking in and out of existence.

He could in fact see his hand in front of his face. Experiment proved this. Black octopuslike thing. But what stood before him, or at his feet: inky shapes on a field of sable velvet. It was possible to walk right into a tree. He proved that by experiment too. Subsequently he made his way with his hands stretched out before him, like a sleepwalker.

Nothing to see, but lots to hear. Airy voice of the wind scraping stone, hooting from time to time around sharp corners. The myriad shivery clicks of leaves overhead and around, a sound sometimes like water falling, but with the individual sounds sharper, more individualized—but so many of them…. The creaks of branches rubbing together, eucalyptus trees did that a lot, they were talkative trees. A scurrying underfoot that made him tread even more slowly, more lightly. Tiny creatures were rushing away as he approached, much as little people ran from city-stomping Godzillas in Japanese movies. And maybe some little guys with a superweapon like snake poison would try to bring him down. Necessary to move very slowly. Give them time to escape.

After a while he increased his pace again. Rattlers were likely to be asleep after all, and they were the only superpowers around. Maybe. Anyway he had to venture on. But it was probably best to give as much warning of his arrival as possible, so instead of trying to reduce the noise of his passage he increased it, swinging a stick around and hitting things with it. It also served as a blind man’s cane, warning him of trees and the like. Best, clearly, to move by sense of sound and touch. He recalled an acquaintance’s story, of walking by a lake at night in east Texas in early summer, stepping squick, squick at every step, as each step came down on one of millions of young frogs hopping about. Ick.

He came to the dim bulk of a canyon wall. So it was possible to see something. A bit confusing; apparently the canyon must fork here. He went right, and soon found himself struggling up through thickets of sage and other shrubs. One type was kind of a Spanish bayonet thing, a bunch of long, stiff, and very sharply pointed blades. Best to avoid. Really, this was stupid. What did he think he was doing? What did he expect to find? Surely no one else would have taken a route as crowded with vegetation as this. Bulldozer approach.

Still he struggled on through the tangled mass of branches. One advantage to hiking alone; you can do things so stupid that no two people together would ever carry on with it. Manzanita, or was it mesquite, anyway there was no way he could go through a nest of that stuff, no matter it was only thigh-high. Those branches were like steel. Go around. Keep going. Pure stubbornness, but after all he could turn around any time and get back to the hot springs easily, so why not? He could do this just for the fun of stupid stubbornness, mindless and pure. Holding to a course just because he was on one. Inertia. A gyroscope in the spirit, spinning madly. One time his friends had rated everyone in their group for strangeness, charm and spin. One to ten. Oscar was the only one given tens in all categories. Nice friends. But his placid moonfaced bulk, spinning? They must have been seeing in to this gyroscope.

The bushwhacking got more fun. This was life, after all—bashing around in the dark, fighting through tangles of very tough clutching branches, sometimes knee-high, sometimes well overhead. Allegory, Everyman, bungle in the jungle.

The moon rose, and everything changed. Something like a thick translucent white syrup poured into the canyon, making the trees into distinct beings, the mesquite patches into densely textured surfaces, as in an arty black-and-white photo of the sea’s surface, or snow on a forest, or something equally dappled. The droopy long leaves of eucalyptus trees swung in the wind, clattering lightly together. A spiky-barked, spiky-leaved, dusty little tree stood in his path like a growth seen through a microscope. Bacillus scruboakus. Oak, he has a heart of oak, Hank said when recommending Oscar be hired as town attorney. Should have known that any town that consulted someone like Hank when hiring an attorney was going to be seriously weird. Shadows moved and jumped, quivered and bobbed. He could see just enough to see that everything was moving. The wind didn’t seem as strong, or as loud. Moonlight thick as gel. Sage smell.

The moon itself was an intense white, its violent history marked all over it. A rabbit stirring a bowl of rice, the Chinese saw. Nothing so simple as a face. Moonfaced, like Oscar. Sister moon. Just tilt your head to the right a bit and there it was, the rabbit’s two long laid-back ears as clear as could be. Bowl of rice, well it certainly could have been a bowl of pudding, that was guesswork. But the rabbit was there, looking down at him.

There was a rustle underfoot, and in the distance the wind made a sound like crying souls. Not like the wind at all. Must have been coursing through a hole in the sandstone to create such an eerie sound. Just like a cry. Shadows moved suddenly to the left and in the sudden depth of the third dimension that the moon added to the world he thought he saw a bulk shift between trees. Yes, there it was, something fast and big—

It crashed downcanyon, charging sightlessly at him—

Oscar threw out his hands reflexively. “Hey!”

“Aaa!” it cried, leaping back.

“Doris!” Oscar exclaimed, reeling his mind back in. “Excuse me—”

“What?—”

“It’s me!”

“Who?” The panic in her voice was shifting to anger.

“Oscar!” he said, and then, “You remember, I was down at the pools—”

“Don’t joke with me!” There was a wild note in her voice. She wiped her face with a hand. Something more than embarrassment at being frightened by their sudden encounter. Words burst out of her: “What are you doing following me?”

“I’m not! I mean—I—” A number of alternative explanations jammed on his tongue, as he struggled for the right tack to take with her in this fierce mood. “I was just out for a walk. I figured if I ran into you I’d have some company—”

“I don’t want company!” she cried. “I don’t like you following me, leave me alone!”

And she rushed downcanyon, crashing through sagebrush almost as much as he had.

He stood there in the moony dark, stunned by the dislike in her voice. His heart tocked in his ears, seemed to pound in the earth beneath him. Intense hurt, mood plummeting like a bird hit by shot. Thump thump, thump thump, thump thump. Not fair. Really. A lifetime’s defenses went into action. No schoolmate’s taunt could touch him. “Well,” he said absently, in a John Wayne voice. “Guess I’ll hafta carry on up this here mountain all by m’self.” Muttering with all the voices, the whole cast of an imaginary movie, moving up the scrub-filled canyon. “Terrible vines here, ain’t they Cap’n.” “Yes, son, but they help hide us from the Injuns. Those Paiutes find us and it would be blubberhawk from space time.”

It got steeper, and he found himself on hands and knees, to get under the thickest part of the brush. Sometimes he crawled right on his belly, heedless of the dirt shoving under his shirt and belt. Clean dry dirt. Some dry leaves, not many. The smell of sage was so strong that he gasped. Must’ve dropped the spice rack, Cap’n.

At the end of his struggle he found himself beached on a broad ridge. The moon bathed it in light, and the monochrome landscape was revealed to the eye: bony gray hills rose in long broad waves to the mountains around the bulk of Saddleback. Black canyons dropped into the depths between them. The moon was surrounded with a talcum of white light which blotted out the stars. The wind was strong, a hot breath rushing over him. Occasional treetops stuck up in the air, like black gallows or the ruins of old houses. There, in the corner of his eye, a movement.

He spun to face it, saw nothing. But that hadn’t been just a branch waving in the wind. Had Doris returned to stalk him? Pound on him some more? Or—an absurd little ray of hope—apologize to him for her rudeness? Sure. “Doris?” The hope died. Not likely at best. Besides, it had been—

And there it was again, a smooth shape flowing between two bushes. Shadow in the moon’s twilight. An animal.

And in the distance, floating on the wind, a weird yipping bark, yodeling away. Like the cry he had heard before, only… wolves?

“Not possible, Jones,” he whispered. “The timber wolf was driven into the Tetons in my granddad’s time.”

Still, he hurried up the ridge, as it seemed the easiest route. Possible to see farther, too. His ankle hurt. Up the ridge was a knob of hard sandstone boulders, thrusting up among the stars. Like a refuge. A lookout in every direction.

Getting there was a problem. He zigzagged between bushes and short trees, nearly fell off the ridge. A rose bush caught at his clothes, stabbed him, the roses were a bright light gray, most of the blooms just opening, branches extending all over like ropes. As he struggled out of them the blooms fanned open, dropped blown, their yellow quite clear and distinct even in this black-and-white world. Frightened, he hurried away and up the ridge. He tripped and fell to his knees. Two branches twined together, squeaked out the word “Beware! Bewaaare!” He broke them off—they were deadwood. They struggled for a minute in his hands before becoming a wooden broadsword, thick and solid. Behind him the black shadow slipped from bush to bush like quicksilver across glass. Its eyes were bright.

He stumbled into a cleared area of grass, saw that waist-high boulders had been placed in a circle on it. Maybe twenty of them, casting shadows blacker than themselves across the grass. One stone wobbled, rolled off. Wings dashed the air, dive-bombing him and flitting away. No sound to the wings at all. Owls were supposed to fly like that.

Suddenly the peak seemed a trap, a final aerie he couldn’t escape from. A horror of sacrifice filled him, he turned off the ridge and down the head of a canyon. He ran under trees into sudden dark and fell. Cut, bruised, palm of hand burning. A tree stood over him triumphantly, its knobby arms waving in the attempt to free themselves from their paralysis and seize him. So many bony hands. Whaddyou get? bon-y fingers, he sang in his mind. He rolled in dried leaves and crunchy twigs. Dark. Ring of dimly glowing mushrooms, making a circle like the stone ring above. A rose bush wilted before him and the dread washed in again. He crashed away.

Now the canyon floor was fairly level. Eucalyptus trees filled the glade, and below it was as bare as a room. The trees dripped an herbicide that kept the area all to themselves. Easy walking. Suddenly low white shapes dashed about his knees, and he cried out in surprise. The shapes honked. They glowed like the mushrooms had. Ducks? Bigger, no, they were geese. Geese! He laughed, they scattered and scolded him with angry short honks. Nipped at his calves.

He allowed the little flock to guide him downcanyon. About ten of them, it seemed, scuttling about underfoot and honking impatiently. They guided him left, nipping. Up a gentle slope, side wall of the canyon nearly flat here, opening to the sky. Higher yet up the canyon’s side, and the dark waving canyon bottom was filled with treetops. Ocean of round-topped waves. They came to a broad shelf, floored with silver sand. His breath was harsh in his throat. There was a yip and the geese all honked and gathered behind him, huddling there as if he would protect them. Low doggy shapes whipped around the shelf and stood—long tails, foxlike. Fox and geese? The geese turned as one and hissed at one of the creatures. Coyote, sure. Bigger than a fox. Geese and coyote. The coyote moved like a sheepdog with a recalcitrant flock of sheep. Geese and sheep, similar creatures. No doubt geese were smarter.

Several more coyotes appeared out of the darkness, herded Oscar and the geese to the back wall of the shelf. Here the sand was thick and bright, mica chips flashing moonlight, the geese standing out like cottonballs, dashing about complaining. They nipped back at the coyotes if pushed too far, noisy as they clacked and honked and hissed, in a language very expressive, very emotive. Clear as could be what they meant. The coyotes’ tongue, on the other hand, was utterly alien. Sliding yips, how did they do it? Vocal chords like a pedal steel guitar.

The geese settled down, began to peck in the sand. They groomed their feathers with their bills, their long necks stretching in impossible curves, loops. Grooming each other or the coyotes who sprawled among them, calm and watchful. Oscar sat down heavily, crossed his legs. A coyote still ambling around their beach-like extrusion plopped down behind him, lay on its side, its back pressing Oscar’s. He found he was weeping, he couldn’t see anything but dim white blobs in the darkness. The moon set and the geese themselves provided the light, glowing like little moons. The coyote braced against him sighed heavily, squeaked softly with contentment, like a dog. Comfortable. A few more coyotes heard the sound, padded over to join them. The wind filled Oscar’s chest until he thought it might burst him, or waft him away like a balloon. His eyes felt dry and sandy, his nose was clogged. He breathed in and out through his mouth, trying to keep from overfilling. Furry warmth, the tickle of a tail flicking against his ankle. Contentment spilled through him, he was an artesian well of contentment. The down under the feathers of the geese; nothing softer. They buzzed through their bills when they were happy. He lay on his side, feeling a warm exhaustion wash down through him, groundwater, muscles melting. One night when he was five years old, the shadow of the tree outside his window had waved on the floor, and he had felt something like this—felt how big the world was, and how charged everything was with meaning. It made you breathe so deep, made your chest fill so full! In and out, in and out, in the rhythm of the sand underneath him. Geese slept with their heads under one wing.

When he woke it was not from sleep, but from a dream so vivid and real that it seemed opening his eyes was like disappearing, turning into a ghost. Stepping from some bright world into a dimmer one. He was lying on sand, his side was damp and stiff. The night’s wandering stood clear in his memory, including the flock of white geese and their guardian coyotes. But now the sandy shelf was bare. Paw prints everywhere. He was alone.

He sat up, groaning. The sky was the gray of his pearl gray suit, and seemed low and cloudy, though a few stars pricked it to show that it was actually the clear dome of the sky, cloud-gray in this moment of the dawn. Everything was still monochrome, grays everywhere, a million shades of it. There were thorny weeds edging the patch of sand. Bird song started in the canyon below, and small birds here and there joined in.

Moaning and groaning he stood, hiked down from the shelf. How… He lost the thought. All the intense emotions of the night before had drained away. The wind still gusted, but not inside him. He was calm, emptied, drained. Trees stood around him like great silent saints. He walked downcanyon. Eventually he would come on something. At times he felt sure he was still dreaming, despite a stubbed toe. Warm dry air, even at dawn.

Far down the canyon, where it opened up and joined a bigger one, he came upon a big bare sycamore tree, filled with sleeping crows. A tree very old, very big, mostly dead, no leaves except on one live strip that twisted greenly off to the side; and entirely filled with still black birds.

“Now wait a minute.” He pinched himself. Bit the skin between thumb and forefinger. Yes, he was awake. He certainly seemed awake. Mountain canyon at dawn, Santa Ana Mountains. Yes, he was awake! Anyway this happened a lot, even down in town. There were a lot of crows around, flocks of really big ones, like ravens it seemed to him. Loud birds, pests, little Mongols of the air, dominating wherever they wanted to. He had seen a flock descend on a tree before; in fact they had their favorites, which they stopped in ritually at the end of the day, when heading back up to their night haunts—up to here, in fact, for this particular horde. A whole flock perched up there silently, sleeping, filling every branch like black fruit, on twisting gray branches against the gray sky. The green of the live strip beginning to show.

He took a deep breath and shook his head, feeling strange. He knew he was awake, nearly sober, relatively sane; but the sight was so luminous, so heavy with some meaning he couldn’t express….

An idea struck him, and he walked under the tree. Standing foursquare he looked up; then threw his arms wide and shouted, “Hey!”

The tree exploded with birds! Flapping black wings, cawing wildly, crows burst away to every point of the compass, loose-winged, straggle-feathered, leaving black images of their powerful downstrokes against the delicate tracery of bare gray branches. Cawing, they regrouped in a swirl above the tree, then flew off to the west, a dancing irregular cloud of winged black dots. Oscar stood dazed, face to the sky, mouth hanging open.