Rubicon Beach

Three

There is a number for everything. There is a number for justice. There is a number for desire. There are numbers for avarice and betrayal. But when the scheme becomes utterly one of avarice and betrayal, then there are no more numbers other than those that quantify what we possess and lose. It is in the land of dreamers, it is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the second: they were one and the same. You know its name.

He was born in the northern heartland of his country in the year before the outbreak of the first world war. His name was his father’s, Jack Mick Lake, three cracks of gunfire that suited the father as the publisher of a small newspaper outside Chicago. For the son the name was apt less for its explosiveness than for its symmetry. When he was six, the year after the war ended, he discovered the family tree, reaching back to a great English grandfather on Jack Mick Senior’s side, and including two uncles who lived across the state line in Wisconsin. Though too young to understand the thrill felt by a peddler’s daughter named Jane Shear when taken in a London alley by an ancestral nobleman at five-thirty in the morning before the dawn of the Victorian era, Jack Mick Junior could still compute the equation of the illicit moment. As he was staring into the family scrapbook on the afternoon his seventh autumn lapsed into his seventh winter, his mathematical genius found its first expression. After that he closed the book and computed the equations of autumn and winter themselves.

His mother’s past eluded recorded history. She was born to a woman of the Potawatomi tribe, also known as the fire Nation, or the People of the Place of the fire. Originally rooted in the northeast of the country, they migrated southwest. Jack Mick Junior’s maternal grandfather, by what accounts existed, was a white trapper or sailor, perhaps from Europe. Thus there was bastardization on both sides of Jack Mick Junior’s parentage, though it was surmised the union involving the Potawatomi grandmother lacked the thrill that marked the one involving Jane Shear. Precocious enough to compute a number for sexual thrill even though he did not yet understand the experience, he would nonetheless need several years to find a number for rape, let alone humiliation, let alone subjugation. As with avarice and betrayal, once these experiences became a part of the scheme, the scheme became so utterly bankrupt as to defy numbers altogether. Thus his mother, who assumed the name Rae in place of a Potawatomi name for which there were no English sounds, remained to him a woman of mystery as well as strength and depth, until she died at the age of forty-one or — two, when the son was twenty-two or — three.

She was forty-one or — two. I was twenty-two or — three. I know I saw her on the tracks that night; the moon was too full for my eyes to play that kind of trick on me. It would have been better, I suppose, if we had found some remains, some body; yet no one particularly regretted that we didn’t. It had been a troubled time for my father, the ten or twelve years that preceded that night, and it seemed there was nothing left to happen to us.

First his uncle died when Jack Mick Junior was ten. Jack Mick Senior was the youngest of three brothers: the middle brother, Dirk (a family of gunfire names, this was), had gone west in 1915, venturing back once the next year and then dis appearing for good. Eight years later Jack Mick Senior and his oldest brother Bart got a wire on a night when, as it happened, they were returning to Jack’s home together from a card game in Chicago, where Bart would sleep off the bourbon before going on to Milwaukee the next day. It would later strike Jack Junior how the influence of bourbon on this particular night was a harbinger of things to come. Of course Bart did not go to Milwaukee the next day but, looking odiously green, accompanied Jack Senior in his motor car out west where they would either bury their brother or bring him back. For three unnerving weeks no one heard from them, either at the Lake home or the newspaper office. The ten year-old Jack Junior waited hours by the dirt road running along the railway tracks, watching his own shadow shrink before him in the mornings and slither out behind him after noon, until finally one day he rose from his bed and came on his father and uncle sitting in the family room before an empty fireplace. His mother was standing in the doorway of the kitchen; she had found the two men the same way. She asked if they wanted coffee. She, made them coffee. She asked about the west; she asked about their brother. They only stared before them with their mouths slightly open. Jack looked at his mother and his mother looked at Jack; he looked out the window at the car crusted with dirt and there flashed across his mind the image of these two men sitting in the car and looking just like this all the way back from wherever they had been, never saying anything. By that evening Jack Senior had gotten out of his chair and built a fire in the hearth, which he watched until the flames died. He did not look like a ghost anymore, but he did not talk about the west. He did not talk about his brother Dirk. Bart went to Milwaukee.

The boy was a bit of a runt, compared to his father and uncle, both barrel-chested and filling rooms. It was supposed his size derived from the Indians on his mother’s side. His hair had the coarseness of his mother’s and the lightness of his father’s. His temperament was his mother’s stony inscrutability, into which, as his father said, one dropped words and did not hear the splash for days. When the boy was seven the father noted, as did Jack Junior’s teachers, that his eyes were bad; the parents drove him into Chicago on a Saturday to get him glasses. As they left Chicago the blur that had accompanied him on the way in was transformed into a panorama of revelations: the blast of the lake in the distance and a great hubbub in the streets on behalf of a newly ratified constitutional amendment. Women carried on as men watched in silence from the doors and windows of the shops. Young Jack looked to his mother who smiled to herself. He looked to his father who looked to his mother and said something to the effect that he hoped her first contribution to democracy would not be the election of Harding. In her way she turned from the window with her knowing smile and answered without saying a word; in his way he smiled too, once she had turned back to the window. Jack gazed at it all through his heavy glasses, gladly bearing the burden of their weight in exchange for a thousand distinctions, colors that cut.

He had eyes of a blue that vanishes with infancy only to return a lifetime later with old age; in all the years between, the blue journeys to some unknown place, presumed dead and, upon homecoming, is received with some resentment as it lays out a treasure of sights the eyes can never understand. That the eyes of the boy retained the blue didn’t mean the blue never journeyed, didn’t mean he more sensibly deciphered its treasure; but it may have explained the numbers. Behind his large thick glasses the blue took the form of dual spheres, as though his eyes were two moons that had always been in the sky but had never been seen because they were exactly the sky’s color, and now they had fallen to hover before the face of a child. He was also a little hard of hearing. This may have explained the music.

I was out in the fields behind the house and I heard it. I don’t know how old I was, twelve or so; it was after Pop and Bart came back from out west. Part of the field was ours but a lot of it was no-man’s-land, where lived a few Indians the country tried to run off until my father made a thing of it in the paper. Not my mother’s people at any rate. It was early in the evening. The sun was down but there was still a cold light left, and from out of the ground came a music, cool and hazy and windy like the light, and in the music were a hundred numbers, sixes and sevens and threes waving back and forth in the sound of the light. It was the music and light of a person’s sleep, as when you dream in the morning and everything is very sharp except the background, people’s faces sharpest of all against back grounds that go nearly blank. There was a big burly Negro man who ran a mill down by a creek a couple of miles over the ridge, and in my dream when he laughed his Negro face was sharp and clear and the room behind him fell away utterly: he laughed a five. A deep full five. The light now in these fields was of that kind of sleep and the music of that kind of light. But no fives. Sixes and sevens and threes. Honestly I don’t think it was a dream when I heard that music; but honestly I have to say no one else heard it or admitted to hearing it. My mother and father hadn’t heard it. I asked Bart once and he hadn’t heard it. They didn’t laugh at it when I told them; l had never made up such a thing before. They knew about my numbers.

It was true he didn’t make up such things. Even as a child he didn’t imagine things; he never feared the dark. Moreover his talent with numbers was already clear; he mastered the basics of mathematical deduction by the time he was six, geometric principles by the time he was eight. By the time he was “twelve or so” he moved into the realm of calculative theory, with the fledgling University of Chicago watching him closely. His other intellectual capabilities were above average but not spectacular. He read occasionally but not feverishly; geography interested him but not history. So mathematics was his genius, and that he heard numbers in music and music from the earth did not alarm his parents. They didn’t wish to make his talent any more of a chasm between them than it already was. Therefore he did not ask them and they did not ask him to take them to the fields where he heard the music; if they were to go together and he were to hear it while they did not, the chasm would only be wider: they did not need to confront each other’s distance. Fully aware of his son’s genius, Jack Senior, who in all other ways encouraged it, did sometimes wonder at its usefulness and remark to his wife, “Be nice if he lived in the real world now and then.” She gave him that look, like in the motor car in Chicago on that day of her suffrage. She knew (he knew) the numbers came from her, from a place back beyond her being born, traveling up through her to the son as though she were an underwater cave, the sunken burial ground of the Potawatomi tribe, the Fire Nation.

It is interesting, given his proclivity, that everything in Jack Junior’s real world happened when he was “twelve or so,” “twenty-two or — three.” Later it drove his father a little crazy, a perfect example in the father’s mind of the exotic futility of the son’s abilities; this was a man who, every day of his life, checked the exactitude of the date on every page of his newspaper, who numbered his achievements by such dates, every memory recorded by a number of significant intractability. Ten. Thirty. One thousand nine hundred twenty-nine. On that date his newspaper announced the pending economic collapse of a hundred million lives. “Yes,” Jack Junior would remember later, “I was about sixteen.”

He and I were different in a lot of ways, and as we got older he got more and more like who he was and I got more and more like who I was. He always needed people around him, he was always taking them into his orbit; down at his paper he’d be mixing it up with the printers or whomever, his sleeves up to his elbows and his hands black from ink and blue from the metal filings beneath the first level of flesh. He put up with things for which, from his own family, he wouldn’t have had the patience; sometimes I thought he had more patience with those he employed than with those he loved. By the time I was nearly twenty I felt as though I had no patience for anyone.

If you’d called him a reformer or liberal he would have stared at you aghast. If you’d called him a crusader he would have been disgusted. Later after my mother was gone, close to the second world war, I’d hear people in bars call him a crusader. When they called him this it wasn’t meant as a compliment. But when I was younger, after I began hearing the music in the fields, I woke one night to a red glow over the ridge down by the creek; the Negro’s mill was afire. The Klan had come over from Indiana at the news that a woman in Gary had been affronted by a colored man in broad daylight. Given the broad daylight, you might have thought they’d have a better idea of who it was, but it probably didn’t matter; they picked on the first colored man they came across and the fact that he was in another state just made it all the more inconvenient in terms of legal prosecution. The Negro got out of it roughed up but alive. Pop ran about seven or ten stories on it and got copies into Gary. He shamed two states into extradition proceedings. He was always running stories about the Indians too. But call him a crusader, he had no use for it.

In fact Jack Senior considered himself rather a conservative, in that his values were unabashedly traditional, and his self-identification, when asked about his politics, was simply “Patriot.” This in an age mesmerized by the convulsions of the East, in which the vanguard held hopes that had nothing to do with countries. “Prattle,” said the father to one-worldism. Still, in the son Jack Senior saw an inner withdrawal that struck him as luxurious and irresponsible. This triggered an argument. It was late in the day and they were driving back from visiting Bart and his new fiancée in Milwaukee, and from Chicago where Jack Junior had applied for admission to the university. The road curled above them like a blue vapor and across the valley in the wet rust of twilight the wheat silos of the farms, burning moments before, were doused to silver. When the valley went dark the sky went riverblack, houses and barns cauterized in stabs of gold and slash-red. Into the dark father and son drove angry and speechless. Finally the father sighed. “I know you’re not like others. I know you hear things others don’t hear, I know you hear your music. But all the more reason, you know. All the more reason. You’re curt sometimes. You’re abrupt. You ought to think about other people sometimes.”

“I don’t give a damn about other people,” the boy said. The older man was crestfallen. They got home and parked the car. The boy had a lump in his throat; hating himself, he said to his father as they walked to the house, “I didn’t mean that.” He had meant something else. He had meant he felt alone next to his father who knew people so easily. He had meant that no matter how hard he tried, he could not be who his father was, his father who got more and more like who he was. The father barely heard him. “I didn’t mean it, Pop,” the boy pleaded. At the door Jack Senior nodded.

When he was admitted to the university, the month before the economic collapse of a hundred million lives, Jack Junior filed his papers under the name of John Michael Lake (no junior), which was a fiction, not so much to mute the gunfire of the father as to escape the symmetry of the son.

Bart first married in the last years of the nineteenth century, when Jack Senior was still a boy; for that matter Bart was still a boy, barely twenty. By the time he was thirty the marriage had ended, the young wife having met a saloon keeper about whom she made no secret of her excitement. Jack Senior would later conclude Bart’s drinking started in those days as he wandered saloon to saloon looking for the man who had stolen the wild Mrs. Lake. One night he found the saloon, with the man, with Mrs. Lake, upon which confrontation the new couple demonstrated to the abandoned husband the full extent of their crashing passion, in a kiss that couldn’t begin to match the demonstrations Bart had seen in his mind time and again. Bart ordered another drink. He left only after the keeper went off his shift and took Mrs. Lake with him. Bart and his wife had had a daughter who was well into marriage and motherhood herself when he met his second wife; the daughter was two years older than the prospective step mother.

The match was even more curious than this. Bart was now in his late forties, the edge of his masculinity dulled in a previous decade, a man of some ascendant means, and a large man of height and girth that bespoke recent fortune. Melody was a pretty blonde. She had much humor and was not wild like her predecessor; she didn’t want or need wild things. Given her own childhood, it was enough that she had a man who would care for her, it was enough to have an affectionate love rather than a passionate one. They lived in Wisconsin, a Wisconsin couple. It never occurred to Bart when he met her that he had a chance with her; when he got the chance it never occurred to him he could actually keep her. They married in 1921, quietly. Jack Junior knew nothing of it until it was over; later in his life he couldn’t even remember a ceremony, at which his father was best man. Every month or two Jack Mick and Rae and Jack Mick Junior drove to Milwaukee to visit; sometimes Bart came down alone, as on the night they got the wire about Dirk. After the marriage the drinking did not abate but became worse as Bart waited dreadfully for the new wife, blond and pretty, to get wild and leave like the old wife. That she did not, at least not until life became intolerable for her and her love for Bart was rendered so clearly inadequate, only tortured him more.

This business with my uncle and his second wife went on over some time of course. I was growing up through most of it. I never understood anything was wrong anyway, the insurrections and dashed treaties of the bedroom were beyond me, and mostly I remember Melody laughing all the time. Also I was at the university. Also I was in my own world, as my father always complained: I barely saw the soup lines, the liquored amber flash of gangland nights. I don’t think it occurred to me something was wrong in the country until one evening in the door of a flophouse I recognized a man from my bank, a man who’d been sitting behind a desk nine or ten months before, deciding whom to give money to. Then I noticed every road off the college grounds seemed to be an alley of sleeping men, and the yellow lights of the flophouses were dim not because the houses were closed but because they were so full that men inside were sleeping against the windows one atop another, the light from the bulbs barely seeping out between the fingers of their hands. I think one day I said to myself, Life’s different now. Meanwhile my family was coming apart too and I didn’t know it. In my third year, when I was nineteen or so, a couple of things happened. I met Leigh. I found The Number.

I was computing an equation one night in my room at my desk when everyone else was sleeping, and there it was. I shouldn’t have been startled: it was the twentieth century. Mathematics was new. It shouldn’t have startled me that there was this other number no one had ever found. It was there between nine and ten. Not nine and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. For the next year I tried to compute the moral properties of this number; it was not the number for justice or desire, or avarice or betrayal. It was the number of an altogether different promise made from an altogether different place. No field or plain had ever sung it. No dream or memory had ever known it. I told no one of it, not yet.

Young “John Michael” fell in love with Leigh the second time he saw her only because he was incapable of so unequivocal a response to anything the first time; it was also one of those rare instances when he remembered a real life event with such statistical certainty. Jack Mick/John Michael had never gone with a girl, discouraged by his wiry slightness and the dark Indian quarter of him which he supposed would frighten the creamy girls of Chicago. Leigh was in fact attracted by this lndianness. She was the creamy daughter of a district judge and had scandalized her family by becoming a Red. Her cadre worked out of the shack of a newly failed boat-building operation on Lake Michigan. Jack/John saw her distributing leaflets one morning to eight hundred laborers in line for three jobs who watched her with open mouths. It wasn’t what she said to them, they had heard that before, it was the gold of her, as though in the windblown flame of her hair was the transience of their luck, the flight of their futures. They would have ridden her hair to other births, somewhere out west, where there was no history. “Ah, utopia,” the boy said when she handed him the paper, and he nodded knowingly. “Go back to your books, college boy,” she answered, and took back the leaflet. But it meant, of course, she knew who he was.

He asked her out twice and twice she refused. The third time she said, “I want to drink whisky tonight. Come if you’d like.” He said, “It’s not legal,” and she laughed and walked away. He followed and she led him to a blue speakeasy down a back flight of steps where the patrons drank and danced to Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and she barely paid attention to him. She got a little drunk and the two of them stumbled down the street under the eyes of the cops until they arrived at the brownstone of her father and mother. He had assumed she no longer lived with her father and mother. “I assumed you wouldn’t get along with them,” said Jack, “on account of the politics.” She laughed again. “They decided I’d only be wilder on my own,” she said. “Besides Daddy has a soft spot for his princess.” She leaned into the front door beneath the light of a gas lamp; up the street the iceman dropped a white glassy block from the back of his truck. She looked at the Indian virgin in hot silence. “What now?” he finally said, his mouth dry. “Utopia,” she answered, and opened the door and pulled him in. “But your parents,” he said, and she curled her lip and sneered, “College boy.” The seduction took place at the bottom of her father’s stairway, her claws predatory and her moans provocatively unrestrained. When it was over she laughed, “You do it like a bourgeois. Tenderly.”

Nothing but trains. I moved into the far wing of one of the outer dormitories and stared out my window at the convergence of tracks. I went with Leigh to her political meetings and met her political people. “This is a college boy,” she told them. For utopians who espoused a brotherhood of man, they had impressive reserves of contempt. Later she asked what I thought of them and I explained I wasn’t a political person. Everyone’s a political person, she said. I attended the speakeasies, new subversive that I now was. Sometimes Leigh made love with me and sometimes she didn’t. Let’s say she never did me any favors. She got it when she wanted it. She took it till she was full of my Indianness, till she had drunk the quarter of my juices that came from the underwater cave of my mother. I went mad for her. Sleeping alone I slumbered into Leigh-madness and woke one night to the black roar of trains and the knowledge that this madness, it was my new number, beyond desire. Beyond justice. The communication of the maternal blank of my past with my most passionate dream, the most untouchable part of my integrity. What I felt for her was the new place beyond nine; when I entered her I was on a far journey into what I was capable of being. I was the anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country.

Pop and I got into it one night in the city. We were supposed to meet at Gene the Wop’s for supper, off Clark; I was late and didn’t arrive until he’d finished his meal. He glared at me as I walked in. I also smelled of bourbon. “You’ve been in a speakeasy,” he whispered. “I thought you’d changed your mind about prohibition,” I answered, and all he said was, “Law’s still the law.” Then he saw some of Leigh’s handouts I had with me. “Oh you’re a bolshevik now,” he said. “No,” I said, and forlorn pain shot through me because I thought of her and wished I was a bolshevik, I kept thinking I’d gladly be one if it got me Leigh, and yet the fact was that, for some reason inside me I couldn’t understand, I wouldn’t be one, glad or any other way. From there on Pop and I just began yelling at each other across the table, and the more I thought of Leigh the worse it got. Finally he just pushed away, stood up and put on his coat, and walked out without a word; it was the last conversation we had in a while, until my uncle died.

In the face of the Depression, as he struggled to save his paper, in the face of his estrangement from his son as he struggled to save his family, Jack Mick Senior received a letter one day from Bart’s wife, Melody. By now Bart was nearly sixty. The early sexual disappointments of the marriage had come to be, after ten years, profound failures as his wife, past thirty, lived in the late afternoon of her fertility. “These things never mattered to me,” Melody wrote, “but he doesn’t believe this.” She was frantic. He drank all the time. “There’s one soul prohibition never saved,” Jack said bitterly to Rae. “I can’t continue with this much longer,” Melody went on. “I don’t know what to do.” Two months later she left him.

The last time Leigh and Jack made love it was at twilight on a cold May day down by the water, where she unzipped and straddled him, her coat pulled around her neck and a flurry of revolutionary announcements flung from her fingers. “Damn you,” she snarled in his ear when they had finished, and he knew by the way she looked at him as she left that he would never have her again. In the subsequent nights he continued to wake to the black roar of the trains and the despair of an irretrievable connection with her; and he would throw the sheets from him and go to his dark window naked, erect and aroused, standing in the window and pressing his whole body against the glass so as to freeze the black roar of his veins. He supposed he could put out the fire this way. To the tracks below, to the country beyond them, he called her name, and the hardness burst beneath him, the wet white of him rivering off into the beyond country; and he called her again. Later he could not remember how long he stood there or how many times he said it.

On the day of John Michael’s commencement Bart died, some six months after Melody had left him. The father and son accepted a mutual truce long enough to journey to Milwaukee, where they and Rae spent the afternoon with Bart’s daughter and her own children. Most of these hours were taken up with a general discussion among members of the family about the tragedy of Bart’s end and his awful second wife. Bart’s awful first wife — that is, his daughter’s mother — went unmentioned. Jack Mick Senior did not comment on any of this except once when he interrupted a rather euphemistic autopsy report to say, “Medical complications due to kidney disorder hell: the man drank himself to death.” After that the entourage traveled to the mortuary together amidst the continuing castigation of Melody Lake. The mortuary was small and filled with light; the open casket was at the front. The family filed in and there in the corner of the room, in an empty row, Melody sat sobbing with such a spastic grief that John Michael couldn’t imagine she would ever stop. Her face was invisible in her hands and she choked with desolation, gasping. The family stood watching in cold mortification.

And I was looking at her, and I was thinking that someone crying like this could never stop, and then I saw my father walk over to her and touch her gently on the shoulder and just rub his hand back and forth on her arm, over and over. I guess my cousins were stunned. My mother’s eyes had that way-back look in them. And my father stood there a long time, rubbing her shoulder over and over, not saying anything as she clutched the bottom of his coat and held on. It was the greatest thing I ever saw anyone do for any one. He didn’t care whether the family liked it or not. It didn’t matter that the last of his brothers was gone, well of course it mattered, it mattered in that he’d lost everything of his childhood, but it mattered a little less than the fact there was this stricken woman alone in an empty row who needed the mercy of the living to survive the judgment of the dead. And my father stood there alone with her, and all I wanted was to know that sometime in my life I would do something as good. “She gave him the worst moments of his life,” someone said to him later. “She gave him the best too,” he answered. That night we sat in our house by the fire where I had found the two brothers so stunned on that morning years earlier, returned from the west; and my father remembered all the nights they had sat there, back to when I was an infant sleeping in a bed by the heat, and they talked about the war and whether we’d be getting into it or not and how Jack Johnson lost the heavyweight championship of the world. Now on this night he said to me gently, “Go easy on the drinking, son,” thinking I guess of our argument in Gene the Wop’s and how I had smelled of bourbon. I flushed with shame. “I will, Pop,” I said. We had fights to come; we were still different. But not on this night.

On the last morning of her life Leigh got into an argument with Jack about his father. She dismissed the stories Jack Senior had printed in his newspaper about the Klan and the Indians as mere bourgeois reformism, the last throes of a dying society trying to resurrect itself. “My father,” the son answered, “is worth three of you.” Walking away she said, “Go do it to yourself, college boy.” She said it without her usual malicious gaiety; the scorn was bottomless.

He wasn’t in college anymore anyway. He was in town trying to get a job. Since everyone was losing jobs, he didn’t have much luck. There had been a riot at the market two days before with people nearly killed by the police; on this morning there were rumors that unemployed workers were building a barricade of blocks pried from the brown stones along the street. All Clark Street was brownstones with holes. Men passed the stones down a line to those mortaring them into a wall in the middle of the road. He could hear the pickaxes chiming all the way up the block; by that afternoon the wall was a man’s height and ten feet long. For a while he sat on some steps with other passersby and watched.

At some point he looked up and there was nothing but police.

The sun was burning and rows of police stood snapping sticks in their hands, and the men building the wall in the middle of the street began raising their heads, looking up at the police and dropping their arms to their sides. There were many people just watching, children with their faces between the rails of the fences along the walkways and old women with yellow sashes around their waists, stopped in midstroll. Jack had an idea that there was some zone where the police couldn’t touch them, those like himself who weren’t political. But there wasn’t any zone like that. The police sealed off the street and everything stopped, the air itself stopped; and when Leigh suddenly appeared in the middle of it, it was as though her auric flash was a signal for everything to begin.

Years later he had a vision that, right before the fall of the stick across her head, she turned to him there in the street where she stood and called to him. “I love you,” he heard her say in this ludicrous vision. Then there was the splash of her hair on the ground and the gush from the deep red well of her face.

There is a number for everything. There is a number for defiance. There is a number for the lethal vertigo one feels when a bash of brain matter floods the inner ear. Once I would have supposed that the number of every demise was nine, including the demise of the New World. But then I became older, and found it wasn’t so.

And she was forty-one or — two; I was twenty-two or — three; and I saw her on the tracks that night, the moon too full for my eyes to play any sort of trick. For a moment he thought he was back in the college dormitory, looking out the window at the trains of the city; he woke many nights this way, gripped in the six-month fever of Leigh’s death: the fever hadn’t stopped when he came home. Absently he reached his fingers to his brow to feel the bandage that hadn’t been there for at least four months. Absently he clutched his nose and his mouth so as not to taste or smell the smoke of the riot. Then he remembered he was in his father’s house, and that was when he looked out the window and saw his mother on the tracks that ran by the road down which Bart and Jack Senior had returned from the west many years before. She just stood on the track staring at the fields; and out of the red moon of the east, as though it were a tunnel, the train was suddenly there, insidious and silent. John Michael screamed to the glass. The train screamed back.

She must have heard it, he thought later. But then perhaps she hadn’t. Over the following three days, as men paraded up and down the rails looking for a sign of her, while his father stood devastated among them, hands in his hair, the son crossed the rails to gaze out at the same fields that had entranced his mother and, with a chill, every bit of the down on his flesh standing on end, considered the hush. The hush. Where is the music? he thought to himself: The music’s gone. Did she come out here that night to hear it? Did, in the face of everything’s decomposition, she wish to hear the music of dreams, when no one could dream anymore? The son’s guilt was immense. Had I only kept it a secret, he anguished; had I only never spoken of it. Then he wondered if she had heard it; and wherever she had gone, back through the underwater cave of herself, he wondered if she had taken it with her.

He came to the field every day after that, but the music was gone for good. His father languished awhile, then slowly took himself back to the tasks of the newspaper. The fervor of the past was gone for good; but John Michael didn’t ask that everything be the same as it was: he would accept it that anything could even be similar. He thought of changing his name back to Jack Mick Junior and decided this would somehow make it worse. His father, as he had done in the case of Bart upon comforting Melody the prodigal wife, would not insult or demean his tragedy by calling himself a victim. For his father the concept of victimization would always belong more appropriately to others of even more unfathomable tragedies. Intuitively Jack Mick Senior understood that the greatest tragedy was not the loss of Rae but of the music she had taken with her, even though it was music he had never heard or perhaps even believed. In the sense that she was the last to hear the music, John Michael thought one day, my mother was the last American. In the sense that he must now survive never having heard the music at all, John Michael thought, the last American is my father.

One day in 1937 he had walked from his house a mile down the track to catch a ride on the same train he had watched from the dormitory window of his Leigh-madness, the same train he had watched take his mother. He rode it across the state about a hundred miles, which was ninety-nine farther west than he had ever been before. He came to a wide river that ran to his left. He believed he should have come to this river about ten years earlier. He walked down the beach looking to the river’s other side.

He fell asleep on the banks of the river in the last light of the sun and woke that night to a sound he’d never heard. He couldn’t tell if this sound came from the sand beneath his head or from the river, or from the other side of the river or the very air itself. The night was cold and, pushing the palms of his hands into the sand, he shook his head slowly to the sound, rousing himself and saying, or perhaps someone said it to him, Nothing swims in the dust.

Or perhaps someone said it to me; and I looked up and there were men carrying torches, and debris scattered over the sand, and the dark form of something in the middle of the river. Its sail draped the beach and the remains of the ship washed to shore bit by bit: there’s been a wreck, he told himself. And then, standing there by his head, he saw the little girl gazing at him intently, a little girl who seemed to belong to no one. She wore no shoes and had a tangle of black hair that fell over her face; she was a very serious little girl, three or four years old, and she didn’t smile. She looked as though she might be Indian. I don’t know if she saw me looking at her in the dark, I could barely open my eyes. I managed to say, “Did you speak to me,” but when I opened my eyes again she was gone. I felt the weariness of this far journey and slept some more.

When I woke again none of it was there, no men with torches, no ship in the river, no sail on the beach. I was still exhausted. I finally shook myself to consciousness in the earliest hours of the morning; I felt a rush of anxiety about Pop. I can’t be worrying him like this, I thought to myself he has nothing but me to lose anymore. The red moon was out, its tunnel gate having shifted to the other side of the river. In its red light I was surprised to see small footsteps leading across the beach to the water; I had figured the little girl for a dream like the rest of it. But there were definitely the steps, and I followed them to the river and at the edge I heard it again, the music I’d never heard before. I had figured it for part of the dream too. It was right there, coming from the other side of the river; and with the same chill as when I’d stood staring across the tracks that morning after my mother had gone, with my hair standing on end just the same way, something occurred to me. It occurred to me that this particular music was the music of The Number, the number and music of the black distant part of me beyond desire, beyond justice. This number was no mad fancy then, no theoretical conceit, it was out there, beyond the river that stunned the fathers and uncles of America into incommunicable silence; and it also occurred to me, standing where the small steps of the Indian child vanished, that my mother had heard this music too the night she left, and that at this very moment I was very close to that which had taken her. Confronted by it, courage fled. Before I bolted I listened once more to the farthest beach where the red tunnel ran to the end of the night; and it sang to me. It sang.

When the country declared war he was nearly thirty years old. Because his sight and hearing were poor he was not enlisted to fight. For a while he was a military engineer, and his facility for numbers and mathematical theory took him to Washington. He became a secret part of the dour devoted days of the country, secret even unto himself. He had been working three months on a special project when he requested an interview with the project director. He did not receive it till after a seven-week period of infuriating his supervisors by insisting that what he had to say was for the ears of the director and no one else. Late one sweltering September Friday he was ushered into the director’s office. He was seated in a chair before the director’s desk by a window that looked out to the sun setting behind a pool of water and a monument. He was there alone for ten minutes when a man he had never seen before came into the room and sat behind the desk, folding his hands on top of it. Mr. Lake, the man said. Are you really the director? John Michael asked. Yes, the man said, I really am. He waited, and John Michael cleared his throat and pushed his heavy glasses with his invisible-moon eyes up the bridge of his nose. He began slowly, trying to sound as sane as possible. Like everyone else, he said to the director, I do not know the exact nature of this project. However, I thought I might have information that would be helpful. The director waited as John Michael continued. There is a number, he said slowly, that we have never known. It is a number between nine and ten; not nine and a half, not nine and nine tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nine’s missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself. I discovered this number some time ago and have tried in the years since to calculate an equation that proves the number, beyond the primary equation that led me to discover it. I have to tell you that I have so far failed to develop such a proof. I must also tell you, however, that l have been unable to disprove this number. Moreover, if one hypothetically presumes the existence of such a number, heretofore unforeseen possibilities come within our grasp. He stopped to see if the director was having a reaction to this; the director was not. John Michael sighed and produced a sheaf of papers which he offered the director, who took them. The director glanced over the first several and then laid them on his desk. He looked at his hands a while and then up at John Michael. He asked John Michael why it was nobody else had ever found this number, and John Michael said, Because it isn’t to be found over there; and he pointed east. It is rather, he said, to be found out there, and he pointed out the window to the sun setting behind the pool of water and the monument. I know it’s out there, said the young man, because I’ve heard it. It’s across the river. The Potomac, you mean? the director said. John Michael shook his head. The Hudson, you mean? the director said. Of course not, the young man answered in disbelief. The river, he said: it’s across the river. The director, after watching him a while, asked if he’d told anyone else about this number, and John Michael said no, and then the director said, Of course there is no such number, Mr. Lake. We have all the numbers already. We know all the numbers, we found them hundreds of years ago. If that’s so, answered the young man across the table, then tell me why the Old World came to the New; and the director smiled a little, quizzically, and dismissed the young man. Thank you for your interest, he said formally; he did not return John Michael’s papers. John Michael continued to work for the project another month, when he was transferred to an accounting bureau in the Pentagon where he added numbers of tanks and divided them by numbers of platoons. On the seventh day of August in the year 1945 he was released from service and returned to Chicago, where his father was dying.

My father sold the paper during the war, and when the war ended he sold the house, which was too big for him and too small for his memories. He got a room in the city. I set up residence with him. I didn’t have much and I think he was happy I was there. I got a job in the payroll department of a business down on Clark Street. Pop asked when I was going to find a woman and marry and I told him I had no plans. Leigh had been dead over ten years. Pop reprimanded me if I stopped at a bar on the way home. I never drank much but it was always too much for him. “You’ve been hanging out at the speakeasies again,” he said. “It’s legal now, Pop,” I’d point out, “it’s been legal a long time. They’re not speakeasies anymore.” His eyes would look hurt. “Take it easy with that stuff, son,” he’d say. The doctors didn’t give him long, a year or two.

Of course he fooled them: he was around another five. But he wasted away the last half of it, becoming more dispirited and living just for the arrogance of it. “I don’t know where I am anymore,” he’d say, reading the newspapers. One day not long before the end, some government men came to see me. They asked allusive questions, referring vaguely to this or that. My involvement with the war project was of some interest. They asked about Leigh and the people we knew. “She knew them,” I said, “I knew her. What is this any way?” I finally told them I would explain anything they wanted to know about me but not about anyone else. They told me I knew some things that could help my country, and I said I didn’t know anything about Leigh that would help my country. You don’t know that, they said. You just said I did know it, I answered. Do I know it or don’t I know it? We know, they said, what it is you know and what it is you don’t. I’m not a political person, I said. Everyone’s a political person, they said. I finally told them, You want to arrest me, then arrest me; l haven’t done anything except fall in love with a girl who’s been dead ten years. Is that a crime? Could be, they said.

They didn’t arrest me. I continued with my job and put some money away; some nights I would go to a bar and listen to a baseball game on the radio. My father got smaller and smaller until he was smaller than I. That was what I couldn’t stand, that he was smaller than I. He read the newspapers over and over about congressional committees and counterfeit confessions, nothing but committees and confessions. “Something’s wrong,” he said in confusion, shaking his head, “it’s different.” Forget the papers, I said. One night I tried to wake him and could not; I called the doctor. I sat with him two days and at the end of the second day he woke, desperate eyes in his small white face searching the ceiling. Pop, I called to him. “Something’s wrong,” he whispered. “It’s different.” Pop, I said. He dug his fingers into my arm and lunged for his last breath. “My God,” he cried, “where did my dreams go?”

In the autumn of 1951 a small dark American who styled himself John Lake arrived in the seaport of Penzance on the far southwestern tip of England. This was a time when the tide of GIs that had flooded the island during the second world war had long since ebbed; the summer flux of tourists was gone as well. After disembarking Lake made his way up past the civic promenade and took a room at the Blue Plate Inn on the northern edge of town. A Mrs. Easton ran the inn. For two pounds a week Lake received room and board. In defiance of a proud national reputation for disastrous cuisine, Mrs. Easton cooked well enough. After several weeks Lake applied for a job loading crates down at the docks; it was a position for which he was singularly without qualification. The man in shipping explained this to the American with quiet tact. At a year or two shy of forty, Lake was rather old for such a job when he had never done any physical work in his life; he was also overeducated, something the man in shipping could deduce without knowing anything of Lake at all. Eventually Lake found himself attending to the company books. He had dreaded this inevitability, wanting nothing to do with numbers; but the numbers found him.

Mrs. Easton’s daughter Anne Bradshaw came to the inn each day to work in the kitchen. She lived on the other side of town, which in the case of Penzance meant a twenty-minute walk, in a small cottage with her own seven-year-old daughter. She had moved into the cottage twelve years before as a girl of nineteen, with her husband, Thomas Bradshaw from London, who had met her while vacationing on the coast. The husband did not come back from the war. Now Anne earned money cooking for her mother and running errands for people in town. Several times in the passing years she had considered selling the cottage, but she clung to those things of an earlier life which she still could hold onto. It was odd to be barely thirty years old and to have had an “earlier” life, but in many ways this was true of England in general and the Old World it belonged to. Anne had dusky yellow hair and a weary generous smile, and she noticed the new American in town on the stairs of the inn as she was leaving to take some weekly groceries up the road to the only other American left in the area, an old man who lived out on the moors.

Lake had a good view of this road from his window, which was on the third floor of the inn and looked out to the north and the expanse that stretched from Land’s End on the left to the Bodmin moor a couple of hours in the distance to the right. At first he thought he would rather have a view of the sea, on the other side of the building. But the guest room downstairs had such a view, and after a week or two he became drawn to the desolation of the moors, their chrome light dribbling over the heath. In the flash of the storms the land disappeared altogether, leaving the window a square of rain. After a couple of months of walking the coastline Lake exhausted his attraction to the bay and the ships and the castle of St. Michael’s Mount; but the moors, which on the face of them offered much less to see, never bored him. It’s true that for a long time he went out into them to listen; the wild brush and hidden ponds seethed with their own life and, he might have thought, their own sound. It’s true that he thought he might hear some kind of music there. When he didn’t he thought he was disappointed, until he realized that what he mistook for disappointment was immense relief. That he loathed himself for such a surrender seemed a small price to pay.

As I understand it, my great-grandfather and — grandmother came here once, about a year before Victoria became queen. My great-grandfather, Edwin Lake, was married to another woman. My great-grandmother, Jane Shear, was the daughter of a peddler. The affair between the two lasted three minutes and took place in the alley behind a sweat shop off King’s Road, and it wasn’t nearly enough for her; she pursued him as he vacationed with his family in Southampton and, the story goes, was walking up the street to his hotel one morning when he saw her through the dining room window. He set down his tea, patted his mouth with his napkin, and excused himself from breakfast; his wife asked if he felt well. Quite well, he told her. He explained he would return in a few moments. He walked from the dining room, out the back door of the hotel, and to the train station. He took a train to Exeter. By now of course he knew everything was over, he had already passed the point of no return. He had made the mistake of toying with a girl who did not understand that passion was a country where there were definite borders. She did not see the borders; she crossed borders as though crossing an empty avenue at midnight. In Exeter he contemplated his ruin for several days until Jane Shear showed up there as well; then he took another train. This time he crossed the Tamar River from Devon into Cornwall; he crossed, then, into the final no-man’s-land of the Old World, he went as far as the Old World could go. She followed without a second thought. I have had the miserable misfortune, my great-grandfather thought ruefully to himself, to make love to a woman who will pursue her passion to the edge of her world and perhaps beyond. At Land’s End he jumped into the sea. She might well have followed except that while her passion was such as to transcend borders and worlds, her maternal instinct was not; she watched pregnantly from the rocks of Land’s End and turned around, going back to London where she bore a son, giving him the name of his father. The son in turn would go to America and bear three sons, Bart, Dirk, and Jack Mick, names that were in spirit rather the antithesis of Edwin. Thus my great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived in a country they each called passion but which was in fact two different countries; each crossed into the country of the other without knowing it. When they did not honor each other’s borders, they believed each other to have committed treason; for each, treason was the same crime by a different law.

Lake had casually noticed Anne many times before he saw the similarity with Leigh in appearance. In fact the Englishwoman seemed almost softer to him, though he decided later it was the person who was softer rather than the face. As he watched her wandering up toward the inn through the streets of the town that tumbled back down the hillside, the wind of the bay lifted her hair in a way that the wind off Lake Michigan would lift the hair of a judge’s daughter. On the other hand, Leigh was now of so long ago he couldn’t completely trust the memory this new woman resembled. In every other way Anne was utterly different. Sometimes Lake could barely hear her when she spoke to him, and she flushed slightly and looked anxious around the corners of her smile. Her heart was different, bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live.

Rather dully, he took even longer to understand her interest in him, since she wasn’t the kind to express it directly. By now the long sexual death to which he’d committed himself almost twenty years before was no matter of steely will but willful resignation; for a while he hadn’t realized it was happening. A year passed after Leigh’s death before it occurred to him he hadn’t had another woman since; but the resolution of this abstinence became apparent not with Leigh’s death, not with his mother’s death, not with any other death at all but rather with the night on the banks of the river when he heard the sound of his own number and followed the small footsteps to the water’s edge. With his retreat he put something of himself behind for good; in Cornwall he had re treated out of his world altogether.

He didn’t know what she saw in him, a small dark man with heavy glasses. Perhaps she wasn’t sure herself, unless it was the pain of his retreat and that he was a man who had sealed himself off from any more loss. She didn’t need another man who flung himself into the thick of things. She was insightful enough to know that what some were unimaginative enough to call passivity might be a wounded stoicism, a life bound in a tourniquet and fighting to live. Then also maybe she was a little like Leigh after all, though drawn to his Indianness not for its exoticism but for the rooted depth of it. Anyway, she wasn’t one to flirt. But every way she could find to pass the inn wherever she was going, she did; and one day, forwardly, she brought him lunch down at his office on the docks. It was roast beef and potatoes and a fruit cobbler, with a pint of ale. “It’s so English,” he said smiling at her, spreading it out over the desk. “Imagine,” she laughed.

I worked four days a week with the other three off. Sometimes I’d go with her onto the moors on Saturdays when she took old man Cale his weekly groceries. Her daughter would stay behind at the inn with her grandmother; the little girl was the very image of Anne. I tried not to think of her as yet another bit of Leigh; I tried not to think of them as Leigh in different stages, the little one innocent and new, Anne older and sadder. Of course Anne was not really an older sadder Leigh: if Leigh were still alive Anne would be eight or ten years younger. I knew that. I knew they weren’t the same at all. I knew Anne was a better woman than Leigh in a hundred ways I hadn’t even seen. She laughed without calculation. She was kind to the old people in town. She did more for more people than a hundred of Leigh’s revolutions. She seemed a part of the moors, she was like the moors, exhaling silence and sending forth the inner light of her. On the way to the old man’s house we’d find ourselves caught in the sudden storms of the country, where it is the land that seems to rain on the sky rather than the other way around.

The old man lived in a stone house that had been built a hundred years before by a farmer who grazed cattle on wild moorish grasses. Some in Penzance speculated that maybe the old man grazed on wild moorish grasses too. He was going on seventy but looked eighty-five: stooped and utterly white, with a long beard, like a troll that lived beneath a bridge. He didn’t say much when we came with the groceries, just nodded to Anne, but we heard him talking up a storm when we left. He obviously believed the only person who understood what he said was himself and no one would have contradicted it. He had been in the house alone nearly thirty years, since the day in 1923 when I was probably standing in the dirt road waiting for Pop and Bart to return from out west and the old man, then about my age now, was washing up on the beach near Land’s End where there’s barely any beach at all. They found him caught in a thicket of trees bashing back and forth against the coast, not a few trees but a whole woods of them, as though someone had sailed the forest to shore, guiding it from the highest perch. Though they found him alone, they said he constantly called through a fevered night for a nameless girl with a deathless face.

Lake and Anne borrowed a car one Saturday and, at her suggestion, drove out to the tip of England. Also at her suggestion, they took the old man with them. “He’s a fellow American, after all,” she said, “you two can have a grand talk.” Lake answered that the old man seemed to have his grandest talks with himself, to which Anne replied, “Then you may each have your own grand talk.”

In fact the two men did have an interesting talk, but only after an hour of riding in silence, when they got out of the car and slowly made their way to the edge of the rocks that over looked the blue sea, not far from where the old man had been found among his tangle of trees on the beach three decades before. Clearing his throat and expecting nothing, Lake said to the old man, “I was born in America as well, you know.” For a moment he thought he hadn’t been heard.

But the old man slowly turned to look up at him, a wild comic look in his eyes and his mouth parted in both skepticism and anticipation. Then he said something curious to Lake. “America One,” he asked, “or America Two?”

“I’m sorry?”

“America One or America Two?” the old man said again.

Lake shrugged in confusion. “Uh. . just America.” He tried to smile, and shrugged again.

“I never could get that straight either,” the old man said, nodding confidentially. He added, “I was also born in just America.”

Lake looked past the old man to Anne, who was trying to keep from laughing. “Exactly where in America,” he said, “are you from?”

The old man waved at the sky. “Beyond it,” he said.

“Where the annexes run out.” He turned to Lake. “You been out there?”

Lake shook his head. “No, I don’t believe so,” he said slowly. He thought for a moment and said, “I’m from Illinois,” with the sinking feeling this would explain nothing. For a moment the old man narrowed his eyes as though Illinois was a name so unremembered as to be alien, but then he nodded and just looked at the sea. In the distance was a lone lighthouse and for a while the three contemplated it, Anne pointing out that it had been deserted for many years, unmanned and unlit. Sometimes the old man seemed unsteady where he stood; there was always a gust from the sea against which Lake and Anne had to support him upright, taking him by his arms. When they were ready to go Lake said, almost whimsically, “So this is the end of the Old World. What will the end of the New World look like?” And the ancient by his side raised his white face to the younger man and whispered, “I know what it looks like. I’ve been there. I’ve been there.”

I watched autumn pass. The Penzance winter was surprisingly mild. There were the constant sheets of rain but not the marrow-chilling cold of Chicago. The tide was in nearly all season, sealing off St. Michael’s from the rest of the city and keeping the boats docked. I’d go down to the water to do the books twice, maybe three times a week, and the rest of the days I’d sit in the guest room by the fire looking out to the Channel. Sometimes Anne would sit with me. She was waiting for something from me. She never regarded me with reproach, but the hope was unmistakable.

Sometimes I would nap in the afternoons, up in my room under a quilt Anne’s mother had given me, with a candle burning on my table. More and more I was drifting away from myself; beneath the lids of my eyes I could see out the window the black smoke and blazing green grasses of the moors and the dazed barricades of rain. I barely heard her when she came in one day, standing at the foot of my bed; only at the last moment did I find the presence of mind not to call out Leigh’s name. She was shaken and breathing hard; she thought I was sleeping. She slowly pulled off the sweater she wore, looking at it in her hands for several moments before she laid it down and unfastened the rest of her clothes. As though just thinking of it, she went to the door and locked it, but with no haste; she didn’t actually expect to be interrupted. The whole inn was quiet. There were no sounds from the kitchen below, nothing from outside, just the falling walls of rain. Soon she was naked and standing at the foot of the bed. Her body was fuller and browner than I would have expected of an Englishwoman. It was a long time since I’d seen a woman this way but now it didn’t seem so long, it didn’t seem long enough. A distant part of me wanted her but the heart I lived with these days couldn’t find its own door to beckon her in. I knew that for her to have done this was courage beyond fathom; she was struggling to continue looking at me, to not lower her eyes, though to have lowered her eyes would have been to confront her own nakedness, which was another courage too. I could not find the door for her. I sat up and tried to explain it to her.

“I’m thirty-eight, thirty-nine,” she heard the mathematician say with his usual imprecision concerning personal statistics. He pulled back from the light of the candle on the table as though to hide behind his dark lndianness in the darkness of the room. “I look in the mirror sometimes,” he said, “and I think I’m fifty or fifty-five.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how I got so damned tired. When I was younger I despised anyone who gave up so easily, but that was when the world sang to me, that was when there was a number for everything. I couldn’t imagine I’d ever feel this old and this tired.” Now he leaned into the light of the candle. “It isn’t your fault. It isn’t that you’re unbeautiful, it isn’t that you don’t deserve what you want. The humiliation is mine, not yours. In a musicless moor at the end of a numberless world all I can manage now is to grieve for what I once felt and for how much I felt it. How is it I’m so old now and I don’t hear the music anymore, I don’t find the numbers anymore?” He said, “Please.” She watched him pull the quilt from around him and offer it to her; fighting back her tears, she picked up her clothes and put them on. It seemed to take her forever to pick up her clothes and put them on as he sat watching her. Then she went from the room, taking curious care not to slam the door behind her; she was the kind who would never slam even the doors that others were closing to her. She got her daughter from the hearth in the guest room below and the two made their way through the drizzle back to their cottage on the other side of town. Sometimes she would see him in the weeks and months that followed but they didn’t speak anymore and they didn’t walk on the moors. In the spring she sold the cottage and moved to a town in Devon.

After that the long distant part of who he had been drifted so far it was out of sight. He held to it in the way of a man who holds the string of a kite that is so high he can’t see it any more, knowing that any moment it may break and the only way he will know it has broken will be by the sudden ripple of the string as it dances slowly groundward. Then he stands watching a fragile white line winding across the country before him and wondering if the end lies in a pool or a bush. There seemed no way to draw back in the long distant part of who he was. He was terrified by the prospect that some current in the air would thwart him, he was terrified he would draw it in and nothing would be on the other end. Better to risk a sudden collapse of the line on its own. Of course something in the cordiality of Penzance changed when Anne Bradshaw left; though no one blamed him directly, the people of the town couldn’t help the sense of violation, the sense that this dark Yank had divided the town’s present life from its future life, England and events having already divided present life from earlier life. Mrs. Easton became flustered in his presence. Lake considered leaving the Blue Plate Inn and then wondered if this would compound the insult. If I had compromised her, he thought of Anne, I’d be wildly popular; he told himself this with sardonic indignation. But lie knew the sardonicism was false and uncalled for, let alone the indignation.

In the spring I began walking out onto the moors every week to see the old American. What with Anne gone, someone needed to take him his groceries, which the town contributed: some bread and a couple of meat pies, some potatoes. He did a little gardening out in front of the stone house. Feeble as he was he did all right for himself. He’d barely speak to me when I first arrived, but if I stayed long enough he’d finally talk. It became pleasant in the spring when we sat in front of the house until nine or ten in the evening without feeling the chill, in little chairs that seemed made for children, rocking back and forth. Across the moors could be seen the lights of church steeples, churches not even there in the silver sheen of the moor days, as though they were beneath the earth and their lights shone up through the ground after dark. He watched the lights very intently, counting them in his head. Twenty-eight, he reported, I got twenty-eight. What do you get? I counted. Twenty-eight, I told him. He nodded in disappointment.

I couldn’t vouch for it that he wasn’t a little out of his mind. He was certainly confused about things: time and dates and places. I told myself I should become more careful about time and dates or I would be confused too when I was older. One night he asked me the year and I actually had to think a moment. Nineteen fifty-two, I said; he shook his head peculiarly. It was as though he didn’t understand the very number itself: No, no, he said, that can’t be it. He understood the numbers of churches but not the numbers of years. I could never get a straight answer out of him; I asked if he’d been to Chicago. Again he looked peculiar and shook his head, as if Chicago were Asia or the Antarctic. I asked if he’d been in New York and that seemed to ring a faint bell. Once I think, he said, nodding. Very long ago, before I went to prison. Prison? I said, startled; and he answered, Out in the annexes. Montana. Saskatchewan. And then I went to a city, he said, where there were a hundred canals, and storefronts that wept in the distance, and whores that slept in the lagoons. His whole little white face struggled with the memory of it. He said, A terrible music came from the earth. He said, A boat circled day after day, and she was on it. He said, In this city I died, over and over.

Music came from the earth? I said.

It’s you, isn’t it, he said. He said it in my presence but he didn’t say it to me. It’s you I hear calling over the songs of a zombie city. I cast myself in flight for the decapitation of my own guilt, to live where I once died, to resurrect my passion, my integrity, my courage from out of my own grave. Those things that I once thought dead. By the plain form of my delirium I’ll blast the obstruction of every form around me—Mr. Cale, I said to him—into something barely called shadow. I sail. Mr. Cale? I swim to you. I reached over and shook him roughly by the shoulder. I know the water. Mr. Cale, I said again, shaking him.

He turned to look at me, and I pulled my hand away. I saw her there waiting for me as I came out of the water, he said. It was dark there on the peninsula, nothing else around; but I’d been wrong about one thing, and that was the light. The light that had called me across the bay. I thought it was the thing she hid beneath the folds of her skirt (as though at this point she could actually deceive me). But it wasn’t that at all, it was her eyes, they were the fire that had warned a hundred sailors.

Perhaps they were meant to warn me. I stumbled onto the beach, falling down on one knee but then getting up, and she walked up to me in the same dress, her feet bare as I’d always seen her, and her black hair and bloody mouth. She still held her hands behind her skirt. We stood inches from each other and she gasped slightly when I wouldn’t take my eyes from hers, when I held her stare with my own; I knew if I looked away, if I turned away, she would have done it to me, as she believed she had done it before, in other places, on other beaches.

Done it?

On other beaches, in other places. But I looked at her and she finally said in her bad funny English, “It is you, but it is not you.” I said, It’s me but it isn’t me.

We slept on the beach, not together, warmed by no fire because I knew the feds would come if I made a fire. Several times I woke in the night to see her leaning over me, right above me, her face in mine, and I could feel the thing she held against my neck. I’d look in her eyes a long time and soon she’d pull back. Several times I think she tried to work up the nerve for it. I didn’t care. I’d died many times in the city; there was nothing with which anyone could threaten me anymore. There was nothing that could be done to my life that had not been done already to my conscience or honor. Finally, after everything, the prison and self-torment and the larceny of my dreams, I was beyond the touch of every fear other than the fear I would lose her. I was in this place out beyond America One or America Two or as many Americas as they supposed they could invent. I knew she knew it. I knew she saw it in my eyes and understood I was not whoever she had believed me to be. I would not be surprised that men cowered before the things her face once dreamed, before the dream that destroys what is not fulfilled; but I wasn’t like them, and finally she left me undisturbed. When I woke she seemed to be watching me, sitting in the sand with her hands in her lap. But though her eyes were open, she was only sleeping.

Off in the distance I could see the boats coming. I could see him standing by the side of the boat, his black size diminished. I shook her until her open eyes blinked and lifted to me, and I told her we had to get away from there. We made our way up the side of the hill. By the time we reached the plateau I could see the cops pulling their boats up on the sand; he walked steadily across the beach looking up at me, even from atop this plateau I knew he was looking at me. I’ve long since forgotten his name. He was not a bad man. Circumstances made us adversaries but I don’t believe he was a bad man. He clung to his reference points, He lived in silly times. She and I continued into the hills and finally came to a cave.

We went into this cave that was clearly dug by men. At first I figured it as a shelter for the nomads of the area, or perhaps a mine. Thirty feet in we found old railroad tracks that came out of the ground, so we followed them for a while. I couldn’t see the end of the tunnel but cops were behind us, so it didn’t matter, there was one way to go. In the bare light, growing dimmer by the moment, the tracks before us rose and fell, and there was the hushed roar of a distant wind. I could make out graffiti on the walls. We were tripping over the tracks and the stones, making the best time we could, and at some point we were aware of another tunnel running on our left, parallel to us, and another tunnel running parallel on our right. Every few seconds we could peer through an opening to see the other tracks on each side of us, and running along, we could feel the wind of these other tracks. We were running among these three currents and I lost a sense of something. I don’t know. It was just a sense of something I lost, as though she and I could step into either of the other currents and be swept somewhere and somewhen else. It wasn’t that I’d never felt this way before. Rather it was that I’d been feeling this way all along, it was a wary exhilaration that I’d come to the geographical and temporal longitude where and when anything was possible, and that the accompanying latitude was in me: I was a walking latitude, finding its conjunction with the world’s last longitude, out there beyond America. After we had walked a very long time, after I had lost track of the when of it, we came to the end of the tunnel.

We were on the other side of the peninsula. It was gray twilight now and the cove was plain except for a group of trees down by the water. The railroad tracks shot out over the water suspended by old wooden pillars; in the distance they disappeared into the fog billowing in from the sea. We made our way down the tracks to the bottom of the hill and then crossed the cove to the trees. In the trees we decided to rest. Any moment I thought I’d see cops coming out of the tunnel in the hillside, but they never came. As we had done the night before, she and I watched each other a long time, her full gaze never changing beneath her black hair, until I fell asleep among the heavy forked branches where we waited.

When I woke it was morning. I remembered right away I was in the trees of the cove on the north side of the peninsula, and I dozed a while until I thought of something. I was thinking that the cops had never shown up, and as relieved as I was about it, it surprised me a little; and I turned where I’d been sleeping to look at the mouth of the tunnel. And that was when I saw the mouth of the tunnel wasn’t there. Actually, not only was the tunnel not there, the hill wasn’t there. The peninsula wasn’t there. The railroad tracks over the water were nowhere to be seen. I sat up in the tree and looked all around me and saw the cove wasn’t there; the tree I was sleeping in was the same, the small forest in which we’d camped the night before was the same, but the beach was altogether different. It was straight and flat, and the hills in the distance were green. I looked up to the top of the next tree and the girl was there with her eyes wide open; I called to her until she woke. I asked her where we were, what had happened to the cove and the peninsula. She gave no indication that she understood me, but when I motioned to the land scape with my hand she smiled slightly and then stared off to the ocean; after a while she went off to pick some fruit. I walked a little way down the new beach to see if anything was familiar, but of course nothing was. Finally I came back. Our small forest bobbed on the water like a boat. A single vine tied it to shore.

Every morning when I woke up, we were somewhere else. Sometimes we would be on a barren beach, sometimes on a rocky coast with a little fishing village in the distance. Sometimes there were towering mountains with snow on the crests. Sometimes we were on an island. Our forest went with us, or rather we went with it. The previous day always seemed beyond recollection, as though it were in another age; sometimes I would look at my hands to see if, in the course of the night, they had grown old. But I was not growing old; my memories were growing old. My memories were becoming my dreams. The only difference I felt physically was a little seasick.

Every morning she would be perched in the highest tree from where she could see all around her; her hair had grown longer and longer and sometimes I’d find she had tied herself to the trunk. Exhausted from the nightsailing, she would still go to look for food. During this time nothing happened between us. I guess we had decided that whatever was to happen between us had to wait until we arrived where we were going. Once I climbed up to her place in the highest part of the tree and sat there watching her, tied by her hair; I reached to touch her, as I had touched her once before in a far cell in a far jail in a far city. But I didn’t. I drew back my hand and slept another hour next to her, precariously sitting in the mast of the forest, and when I woke she was awake and looking at me.

I was in love with her. I had fallen in love with her long before, though I’m not sure when. I don’t think it could have been the first time I saw her, but it might have been the second, one night when I realized she was in the same room with me and looking at me, even as twenty other people were there, never seeing her. I don’t know what she felt for me. I don’t think she loved me, I have to say that. But we were bound by a dream that destroys what is not fulfilled. The closest we got was on one afternoon when I came back from exploring the landscape and there she was, out on a limb, looking into the water at the reflection of her face, as though she and that reflection were bound too. Without a shudder, without a sound, with no sigh of grief or rage, one long tear slid down her face to her mouth, to drop slowly onto the mouth of the face in the sea, salt water to salt water; and I reached over and brushed her cheek, And she looked at me sadly, and I turned and climbed to my place to sleep, wondering where she would take us that night. Before drifting off I looked down at her once more through the branches, just at twilight among the limbs of the trees, watching the sea. That was the last time I saw her, thirty years ago.

The next thing I knew, the cold sand was beneath me and I felt as though every bone were broken inside, as if I’d been thrown somewhere hard. I lifted my head to see our forest scattered across a stretch of cruel coast, jagged and strange; men were lifting me up and carrying me to the top of a ridge. I tried to tell them about her. I told them there was someone else, she was out among the trees, tied by her hair to the tallest one; I told them and passed out. When I came to, we were on the ridge and I could look down and see the remains of the forest sinking into the sea.

I was taken into town and put in the back room of someone’s store, then moved to an inn for a couple of months. The people of the town were very good to me. I don’t think I ever extended much of anything resembling gratitude. I kept asking them about her, and when they humored me, as I knew they were doing, I accused them of callous disregard, these people who had saved my life. I know they thought I was crazy. I don’t wonder why. In my delirium I talked of the nightsailing and the forest; soon I stopped talking of that. After almost a year I stopped talking of her too. I could have left, gone back to my country. Perhaps I should have returned to the city where I first saw her, assuming I could ever find her again. But I waited instead for some sign of her, because I was afraid that if I left I would sever forever the possibility of seeing her. It got to the point at which I would have settled for her body washing up on the beach; then, at least, I would have known my dream was over.

I moved out onto the moors with the twenty-eight churches. Time passed and I became the old man I am, hobbling up and down the overgrowth waiting to come upon her. Sometimes someone comes out to see me. There was a young woman who came, blond hair and widowed; they tell me there was a war a while ago. She brought groceries and took me for rides in a car, down to the place not far from where they found me once. Then she stopped coming. I heard she’d left. People in town still think I’m crazy, I know that. But they’ve taken care of me more years than I’ve deserved. I am sixty-eight, sixty-nine.

Then this American started coming, I had seen him with the woman a couple of times. A curious fellow, but then he thinks I’m a curious fellow. Dark, with sad blue eyes that his glasses magnify; there are ways he reminds me of me, but all old men are reminded of themselves by all young ones. When we talk of America, we. . I don’t know what he’s saying. The names are. . I don’t know the names. Anyway, we talk of America. He tells me things about himself without realizing it; I think he doesn’t believe I understand anything at all. He doesn’t feel compelled to be careful about what he tells me. I told him about the city I knew, I told him about the nightsailing. He nods in that way that says he’s going along with the cracked things an old man says. He has a few cracked things of his own. Not so much the story about his mother on the railroad tracks but other things. He made a mistake once. I don’t know if he knows it. He was standing on the banks of a river listening to something from the other side, something he had never heard but had always known. And instead of crossing the river, he listened for as long as he could stand it and then turned his back and returned the way he had come. And he’s never heard it again. He should have crossed that river. Little bits of his life come out the nights he comes to see me, sometimes the bits are cracked and sharp. Off they fly into the moor skies, and we watch them go. Tonight the moor skies are filled with rain and light, and he has driven through the heath in a truck he borrowed from town, dashing from the truck into my stone house. Tonight he said the only thing he’s ever said that’s made complete sense to me. When he said it, it got me crazy; I got this terrifying feeling that all these years something had been right under my nose and I hadn’t seen it. Something that only I could have seen, the way I saw it from the window of a tower one night in a city thirty years ago. Tonight the young American told me about The Number.

One night I told him about The Number. There’s a number out there, I said, pointing to the west, another number they never found. For a long time he didn’t seem to hear me; the rain was blasting the roof and the sky was filled with sound. And then he looked at me as though he under stood perfectly what I was saying; and I wasn’t sure what to tell him, I hadn’t thought of it in close to fifteen years because I didn’t believe in it anymore. Another number, he kept saying, another number, and the more he said it the more excited he became; and I was sorry I had told him, because I hadn’t thought he would become so excited. He just kept saying, Another number! over and over. The Old World, I tried to explain, is just a number off. Yes, that’s it! he said, and soon we were talking about church steeples and lights. The Old World’s just a number off, he kept repeating, and there are twenty-seven churches in the moors rather than twenty-eight, because here they’re a number off I nodded and smiled; I didn’t see that it made any difference. But he said it made all the difference, because he and I had counted twenty-eight lights and that meant there was another light out there, the twenty-eighth, that wasn’t a church, and it had been there all along.

Then he had me in the truck driving him out into the bitter storm, heading to the point where the land ran out; the rain splashed against the window and there was no heat in the truck, and the moors were treacherous, a thousand in visible lakes. I should never have done it. Later the townspeople would say, An old man, and you took him out into the storm, it’s not enough that you drive our women from town. But they hadn’t seen the way he was, almost crazed by the idea that this other light had been there all along and he hadn’t understood it. We drove toward one light after another; we would get a hundred yards from a light and then lightning would flash over the terrain and in the momentary white glow we could make out the dim form of an old gray church rising from the waving grass. Then we would make for the next light, counting them down. We seemed destined to spend the night going from one church to another except that the old man was right, the twelfth or thirteenth or fourteenth light was not a church at all but rested out over the sea half a kilometer or so off Land’s End: the lighthouse that Anne, the old man, and I had watched and talked about that first time we drove out, the one she said had been deserted for decades. Someone was certainly there now.

A boatman lived down on the rocks above the water. I parked the truck and got the old man out the other side, and we made our way down the walk to the boatman’s house. I still remember the light from the sky swaying across the old wooden door and the knocker in the form of a cat’s head gnashing at us. The boatman was short and round, with hair putting above his ears; he wasn’t happy about being awakened and he was less happy when we told him we wanted to go out to the lighthouse. He told us we were both off our bloody nuts. He pointed out that in case we hadn’t noticed, there was a rather violent storm taking place at the moment. But the old man, blue and quaking with cold, was out of his mind to get to that lighthouse. He wouldn’t hear of it any other way. The boatman said the lighthouse had been deserted forever and the old man literally pulled him out into the rain by his shirt and pointed him toward it. The boatman discounted the light as some kind of optical illusion. “I’m tellin’ ya, there’s no one out there, “ he said. I offered him twenty pounds and he still wouldn’t go for it: “Not till sunrise anyway,” he said. Then we will wait for sunrise, said the old man. We would have stayed in the truck the next three hours but the boatman said that we could sleep in the house, assuming the twenty pound offer still stood. I had just begun to doze when dawn came through the window and the old man was shaking me by the arm, telling me it was time to go.

The storm had passed. I wanted to get to the lighthouse and back, since I had my work in Penzance and a truck to return. As we motored across the water the boatman kept advising us that this was a waste of time and our twenty pounds. “Don’t be complainin’ to me when there’s nothin’ out there,” he said. Personally I didn’t doubt he was right. In the sun over the cliffs the old man looked ghastly there on the deck of the boat: white as rock and chattering fitfully. Repeatedly I tried to get him down in the boat out of the wind, but he was mesmerized by the long white tower before us, and when I tried to shake him from his obsession he looked at me as though he were rabid. We crossed the water in a quarter of an hour; we hadn’t gotten the boat up onto the island rocks before the old man was scrambling for the door at the lighthouse base.

The door was all splinters and holes, sodden from years of the sea bashing it. We didn’t so much open it as pry it apart. The boatman was down by the water tying up the boat. When we got into the bottom of the tower, the old man flinched, looking up the stairs that wound to the top; he knew, he knew what was up there. Now I wasn’t sure if the convulsions were fever from cold or another kind of fever altogether. Slowly he started up the steps before me. The rail shook in our hands, and above we could hear the wind crying through the broken windows. Once he stumbled and fell back against me, almost sending us both tumbling to the bottom. When he reached the top I heard a gasp, and he stood in his place a long time until I pushed him the final step. Behind us the boatman was climbing the stairs too. I pulled myself into the observatory and found a bare room of wooden plank floors and pale blue walls, flooded with sunlight through the shattered glass and the roof tom partly away. Through the floor and to the roof extended the pillar around which the stairs had curled from the ground. There, tied to the pillar by her black hair, was a girl.

She had a face like none he’d seen. He stood agape, gazing from the girl to the old man to the girl again. The old man was frozen, his eyes narrowing in distrust now that he had found what he came to find. The boatman peered up over the floor and his jaw dropped. Immediately Lake’s impulse was to turn from her face, the beauty of which struck him as uncivilized; finally he found the presence of mind to free her from the pillar where she slumped. Her hair was in impossible wet knots. He had to cut her away with the boatman’s knife. Her dress had been made a rag by the storm, her feet were bare. Like the old man she was chilled deeply; her eyes were open but she showed no awareness of what was happening. Lake shook her hard as if to wake her. She blinked slowly and raised her face to him; she watched him a moment, then closed her eyes and fainted again in his arms.

Lake concentrated on getting the girl down the winding stairs and into the boat while the boatman attended to the old man. They headed back for Land’s End. All the way the girl slept, bundled in blankets the boatman had pulled from a metal box. The old man just sat staring at her. Sometimes he would lean his head back and shut his eyes, then sit up again expecting her to have vanished. He was still convulsed with fever but his gaze was somewhere past fever. The boat reached Land’s End, and Lake drove the old man and the girl back to the stone house on the moors, where a man from town was waiting, furiously, for his truck.

Lake did not feel equipped to nurse a young girl and an old man. He settled them both in the cottage, the old man in his bed and the young girl in bedding on the floor. When word got out, Mrs. Easton showed up with a doctor. Lake was trying to cook soup on the stove. Neither the woman nor the doctor said anything until just before they left: “l don’t believe Mr. Cale’s going to make it,” the doctor told him. He asked who the girl was. Lake said he didn’t know. He said she was an acquaintance of the old man. “A relative?” the doctor asked. No not a relative, Lake said. “Of yours, I mean,” said the doctor. I said l didn’t know her, the American answered.

The old man fell in and out of delirium, muttering. Sometimes he spoke of her. The girl had a senseless resiliency; by the second day she was sitting up awake. Lake watched her many hours during the time she slept; and afterward, when he spoke to her, he made himself meet her eyes. She did not answer. She gave no indication of understanding him though he was convinced she did. He asked who she was, and she made no reply. He asked if she knew the old man, and she only looked at the corner where the old man lay. After a while she went to sit by the old man’s bed, and as more time passed she came to touch the old man’s head and hold his hand. Of course Lake understood there was no way this could be the girl of whom the old man had spoken: that girl, if she had ever existed in any place other than his derangement, had lived over thirty years before. This girl wasn’t twenty. Yet the old man had known someone was in that lighthouse, marked by a light Lake couldn’t determine; and this girl was nothing if not the image of what the old man had described, tied by raven hair to a tower as though bound to the highest tree of a woods that sailed as its passengers slept. That night Lake had many dreams. He woke amidst them, trying for the life of him to remember the name and face of a blonde he had once loved, and why in the world he had loved her.

Then it seemed all he saw was her, black-haired manifestation of an old man’s invention. He became dismayed at the pathos of it, a man nearly middle-aged who in his life had known one woman half a lifetime before, and who by choice had known no other, who by choice had committed himself to bury his passion deep in the heartland of his years. Now he was ignited by a girl born the moment of the previous passion’s interment. There wasn’t much chance he would approach her. He had buried faith with passion. There was moreover the old man; Lake could not take from him the last dream that fired him, in either his frantic sleep or waking dementia.

Sometimes, when Lake looked at her, she looked back.

The old man slipped. He filled the room with his rattle till it quavered the flame of the candle on the sill by his bed. He was wide-eyed and thrashing toward death. The interludes of slumber became brief. The girl watched without expression, staying by his bed constantly, holding him and wiping his face. The old man burned when he looked at her; when he touched her face he saw the old white flesh of his hand against the pastless red glow of her brow. His eyes did not deny their confusion. With no conversation between them, Lake and the girl came to take shifts watching him, one sitting as the other slept.

Mrs. Easton brought some food at the beginning of the third day, when the old man rested better than he had the previous two; Lake slept in the afternoon. He woke just after dark as another spring rain scattered across the roof; he woke in the way dogs wake to a tremor in the earth that hasn’t happened yet. He lay there less than a minute on his side, facing the girl who sat dozing in a chair by the bed. Her eyes were closed. Then the old man began to wheeze. She opened her eyes and looked at the old man and then at Lake with the first sign of alarm he’d seen in her. He leaped from where he slept to the side of the bed.

The old man dug his lingers into his arm as another old man had done only the year before, though it seemed in an utterly different life. “You made a mistake once,” he croaked to the young American.

“I know,” said Lake.

“Should have crossed that river,” the old man said.

“I know.” He looked at the old man who was beseeching him for an answer, and tried to explain: “I had never gone so far before. Sometimes you come to a road or a ridge or a river and it seems as far as you can go.” The old man moaned and shook his head. He slowly turned to the girl, holding his other hand, and then stared between them a moment at the ceiling as though into a tunnel that ran to the sky. Was it for the sake of the dying man or the living witness that Lake cried desperately, “That beach was as far as I could go.”

“No,” the dead man said, “there is one farther.”

She did not cry. But he knew she mourned the old man, as the dream that finds itself left full-blown and stranded and subject to the antibodies of mundane dawns mourns the dreamer that dreamed it. She helped Lake dig a place in the moors. That morning the smell of the rain lashed the air. When they had moved the dirt into the grave, the two of them looked up at each other, there together on their knees hidden by the high grass, and it was as though the rain smell would choke them; the color of her eyes dropped out altogether. With the death of the old man something in her face seemed to spin; the long-stunned inner clock of her finally began to tick again. Clasping his hands, he reached back to pull the last of the soil into the spot, and his heavy glasses fell from the bridge of his nose onto his lap; when he had picked them up and wiped them against his shirt and put them on again, she was gone.

She was gone. He thought for a moment he saw her, there in the grass against that bottomless sky; but what he’d taken to be her hair was a once white wind gone mad in a caged place, gathering the smudge of the place’s darkness; what he’d taken to be her mouth was the clotted snarl of the pale plains. What he took to be her eyes were only recollections, psychic mementos, talismans of distance: tones across the bank, a red moon of aspirations, small footsteps that lead to the water and vanish forever. “Hello,” he called, as though she would step into view. But she had never answered before in all the times he watched her. “Hello,” he said again, without hope.

He went to town to look for her. She wasn’t in town. He went down to the docks to see if anyone matching her description had booked passage. They had seen no one like her. He asked about her everywhere; he was driven back to the moors by their reproach. He partly walked, partly hitched out to Land’s End so as to be there when the sun fell; he sat all night on the cliffs watching the lighthouse for the sight of her telltale eyes. The lighthouse was dark. He went back to the cottage and now turned the place upside down, what there was to turn upside down: a chair here and there, a deathbed. She was not to be found beneath chairs or beds. She was not to be found behind the walls or beneath the floors. He scoured the moors for the next week, and then a month, and then many months. He didn’t find her, and no one knew of her. He went back to the stone cottage again and waited there in the nights, foolishly trying to blot her from his sleep; sometimes he believed that if he slept long enough he would wake to her. Sometimes he believed that if he stayed awake long enough, he would tumble into her unconsciousness, wherever she had taken it. Those footsteps that once led to a river’s edge haunted him; he loved, as does every man who is born to a vision, that unseen future that his courage once failed. He hated, as does every man who is born in America, that irrevocable failure that his heart won’t forget.

On the stone walls of the cottage he added things, he subtracted them. He divided things and multiplied them. Sometimes he used chalk, sometimes coal, scrawling the equations the length of the room. After a couple of weeks the entire inside of the cottage was filled with additions and subtractions, multiplications and divisions; he then moved to the outside of the house. When the outside of the house was covered, he began writing equations in the earth. When he went to work at the shipping company, he began filling the company books with this arithmetic and then the top of his desk. Soon the moors where he lived were filled with arithmetic; he then took to adding and subtracting on the roads leaving Penzance, down on his knees with his back to the end of the island, adding and subtracting himself into a corner of Cornwall. The townspeople noted this behavior. They consuIted among themselves and wondered what it was about this part of their country that attracted such preposterous Americans, one more preposterous than the other. Months passed, and when the spring gave way to summer, and the summer to autumn and winter, and when the year gave way to the next, Lake was still writing equations, new ones in the spaces between the old.

His was not aimless adding and subtracting, however it might have seemed to the native people. He had determined to disprove, once and for all, the existence of The Number. He had determined to show that ten followed nine after all, that the only presence between the two was the debris of fractions and percentages, nothing more, and that The Number was only a terrible delusion, a personal fable he had told himself, and that there was no reason to follow the music across the river that night years before because there was no music: that The Number did not exist and the music of The Number did not exist and the passion of the music did not exist. In this way he would justify a private collapse. While he had tried once before to so disprove this thing, he had hoped then not to succeed; he had attempted to disprove it only in order to affirm it. Now, however, he laid siege to it.

He failed. He could not disprove his number or his music or his passion. He disproved everything else. He disproved the existence of the very walls of the cottage on which he wrote the equations; he disproved the existence of the books and the desk at the company where he worked. Under his employer’s bewildered watch, he disproved the existence of the employer. He disproved the existence of Penzance. He dis proved the existence of the sea and the boats on it, and the castle in the middle of the bay. He disproved the existence of the moors and the sun in the sky. He disproved the sky. He mathematically and empirically disproved his memories, one by one, all the way back to the blonde he had loved whose name and face he couldn’t remember. But what he could not disprove was the love itself and the huge reservoir of hunger of which it was a part. In the end he hoped to disprove his own existence and the huge hungry place of which he was a part and which was a part of him. But he could not. When he had disproved one, two and three, when he had definitely ruled out four, five and six, when he had banished from all conceivable reason seven, eight and nine, and every exponent thereof, there was still his awful number left, the last number in the world, The Number of No Return. The next year passed into the next, and the next into the next. Five passed into ten, and he hurtled through his middle ages past his half-century mark. People around him came and went. In this time the company for which he worked declined and failed, a new company flourished and vanished. The Blue Plate Inn changed to some other inn, which did not matter because he had proved, certifiably, there was no such inn. All the things that he had proved to himself never existed passed in the manner of things that never existed.

When fifteen years had gone by, and the mathematically disproven end of the empirically disproven Old World was mad with his numbers, he had no choice but to believe that which he had spent a life trying to disbelieve. One morning he woke, closed the door of the old stone house behind him for the last time, and went down to the sea where he bought a ticket for home.

There was a number for everything once; there was a number for justice. I remember men half-crazed with it. They counted to it in their sleep and went no higher because there was nothing higher. It was a number that couldn’t be divided by any number other than itself even though every other number was a component of it. Mathematically this is impossible but that’s the sort of number it was. That’s the sort of place it was, where dreams had the precision of numbers and passion was a country, and the country was called. .

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what it was called. It’s like forgetting the last line of a joke and trying desperately for a lifetime to remember; and then it comes at the end, right before you go, and it isn’t the same. It isn’t the same because in the forgetting of it, it has changed to something else. It’s hard to decide what’s the worst thing, whether it’s that justice does not have a number anymore or whether it’s that those who lived where passion was a country forgot their dreams and so scrambled to invent the memory of insomniacs, the small stingy arithmetic that counts no higher than avarice and betrayal.

I’m going back. I ‘m sorry it’s taken me this long. I don’t pretend to be strong enough for it. I don’t pretend to have the passion my dreams once had. I don’t pretend I’ll hear the music I once heard or that I’ll even reach the place where I heard it. Entering the last half of my life I could feel myself tire; entering the last quarter I feel myself succumb. I’ve tried every way to disprove what, in my heart, I knew to be true; I suppose it’s in the nature of most men to spend lifetimes trying to do this. I cannot watch, sitting on the shores of the Old World, the ripples of my country going down for the third and last time. I would rather know, when I die, that faith betrayed me than that I betrayed it.

In the mornings, as Lake was shaving, he would look up from the white round sink to the blue round hole in the wall which was the sea; the boat slipped slowly to America. Sometimes at night he woke with the urge to fill the walls and ceiling and floor of his cabin with equations; he resisted this. There were no equations left, and he didn’t want trouble with the ship’s crew; he imagined being put in a small boat with a compass as the captain pointed vaguely back in the direction of England. So he simply sat on deck facing the west waiting for the sight of land and always listening carefully, should he hear something.

He spent no time in New York except what was necessary to cross town and get a train out of Penn Station heading west. Within the hour the train was past Newark. During the night the train came to Pittsburgh. The train continued across country; the morning of the third day Lake arrived in Chicago. In Chicago he found the buildings painted with pictures of human parts. On the side of a store would be an open hand and on the back of a gas station would be an open eye. There were human parts set against backgrounds of rainbows and ocean waves, desert plains and outer space. Walking to his old room between the railway tracks and the university, Lake went down a street of mouths painted in wilted colors, and from every mouth came bright splotches of sound like electric word balloons. None of what he heard was the music he was listening for; none of what he saw that he remembered was anything but a trapdoor for him. An old store sign, a familiar archway, the perennial sound of a bus stopping at a certain corner, the smell of beer in the wind, sometimes even a long-forgotten face now many years older: these were all trapdoors, opening beneath him and sliding him down a chute to 1934, 1935. I should have been more careful about time and dates. Crossing an old bridge, he would feel the falling black rush and find himself standing where he had stood thirty years before, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “West End Blues,” and a dead blonde lying at his feet.

He went back to the station. He asked for a train west. They gave him a schedule for Rockford. They gave him a schedule for Peoria. Pressed, they found a schedule for St. Louis. I said west, he told them. Finally they gave him a schedule for the West. One train that left at no particular time; one had to wait for it at the station. One train with no signs of destination on the side; one had to know the particular train. On the fifth night he saw it, a white eye roaring out of the dark from somewhere above Lake Michigan. At first it seemed very far away, rising and falling; then suddenly the rhythmic huff of it became an overwhelming howl, barely stopping at all. Just before he jumped on he had this funny light-headed feeling, right at the end.

The train flew west. Lake stood in the aisle of his dark empty car watching the passing small towns while the cold air came through an open window. There was a field in a flood of stars; he had known it once. There was a house beyond the field; he had known that once too. The train flew past all of it. For a while he heard the sound of a dog on the ground below; it ran along barking until the train passed a wooden fence by a road and then the dog was left behind. Soon they were at a river; he knew this river. As the train flew past, as he turned to look toward his destination, he parted his lips as if to say something or cry out or simply breathe a little. The train wound its way into the open red mouth of the moon.

He fell asleep in his compartment by the window to the sight of the black river beneath him. When he woke several hours later it was morning, and the river was still there. He decided they had stopped a while on the track during the night; he looked back in the direction they had come and strained to see the banks of the river behind him. He wasn’t sure whether he saw them or not. The train hurtled on, a moving tunnel unto itself, the space of the west clearing before it and collapsing behind it. Lake fell asleep again; occasionally he would wake with a start, only to determine the train was still moving and had not yet reached the other side. When he woke again at dusk, he sat up abruptly to stare out the window; the river was still beneath him. He was certain the train had not stopped for any significant period of time. The horizon looked utterly different from the way it had looked that morning, and now Lake was sure the riverbanks behind him were far out of sight. The train seemed to him to be moving fast, though it was difficult to tell since there was nothing but river and sky against which to measure.

He languished in and out of a stupor, overwhelmed not simply by the weeks and months of his journey but by the fifteen years he had lived on the moors disproving everything of his life except for a sound he had heard once long before from the other side of the river he was now crossing. As he dozed he dreamed only of the river and how he would wake to the white banks of the other side. People went west all the time, he reminded himself in his sleep; this is not unusual. It’s in the nature of the times to go west. But when he woke the next morning the train was still moving and the white banks of the other side were still not in sight. Lake explained to himself that it was one of the world’s major rivers.

Sometimes an islet would appear or something that resembled the early stages of a marsh. By the end of the second day there were more islets; the water was magenta and the clouds were low and rumbling, barely a hundred feet above him and rushing ahead like rapids to the edge of the earth. On one of the islets he spotted a red windmill spinning against the sky, and then on another islet another windmill; within the hour there were waves of them as far as he could see, red windmills slowly spinning against the sky on a thousand islets spotting the water. The clouds rumbled on. We are approaching the other side of the river, Lake told himself with some relief. But within another hour, before darkness fell completely, the islets began diminishing, the windmills began disappearing, until there were only a few left on their outskirts, and then just the river again, as before.

He sat up through the night, dread weaving a cocoon inside him, and collapsed at dawn into exhaustion. When he woke that afternoon the larva of dread had burst forth into full blown terror. The river was still beneath him and the sky sagging onto him closer than ever. The sun was white in the west; and as he sat watching it, he saw a geyser erupt from its middle, first a small spittle of black, then a trickle in slow runnels up over its face. My God, he said, and raised himself feebly into the window of the train and held himself there, as he had held himself in the window of his college room many years before, thinking of her and contemplating before him the very track on which he was now stranded. He did not consider going to another car of the train to find someone else; he did not want to find that there was no one else. He didn’t want to walk on looking for someone until he got all the way to the front of the train, to find no one was even running it. He didn’t need to discover this. It was no wonder, he told himself, his mother had disappeared without a trace, standing on these tracks, riding this same train into the dream of America. It was a wonder, he told himself, his father and uncle had ever returned at all, had ever returned to look aghast into the empty fireplace. He was thinking all this and watching the black geyser of the sun when he heard the door of his cabin open behind him.

He whirled around. There, in the door, was a conductor. It was a rather common thing to see a conductor on a train, but Lake stared at him in astonishment. For a moment he closed his eyes, then opened them. The conductor was still there, looking at him questioningly. “You all right, sir?” the conductor said. He had a white mustache and a blue conductor’s suit with red cuffs.

Lake closed his eyes again; he opened them again. “Yes,” he smiled weakly, “I guess I am all right.”

The conductor nodded and stepped back out of the compartment. “We’ll be pulling in before dark,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Angeloak is the station.”

“Angeloak?”

“Before dark,” the conductor repeated, and tipped his hat.

I still could not see the end of the river. From both sides of the train I looked for it in vain. But as the sun set fast into the sea, its geyser continued to spew higher and higher, black and coiled, branching out beyond the star’s outline until the sky filled with it. Even after the sun was gone the eruption grew larger and more powerful. Then I saw it wasn’t a geyser at all. Then I saw it wasn’t from the sun at all but out of the river: a colossal oak that spread in all directions against the billowed ceiling of the clouds, the waves of the water pounding its massive scorched-black and bleached-white trunk. As we came closer the tree became more and more huge. Its top was mostly naked in the wind; on the water below I could see passing leaves, bits of bark. In the frail pink glow of the sun-stained west there was only this tree webbing the horizon until the sky seemed a sea shell curling to its middle, the roof of it beveled gray; and there was this roar, the dull sound of the sea they said when I was a child. .

Soon the train began to slow. A blue fog drifted over the river. By the time the train came to a crawl it had reached the monstrous tree; the trunk was some forty or fifty yards wide. Lake could see it from both sides of his car. A tunnel was cut through the middle and lanterns hung from the archway. The train reached a complete halt inside the tree; it was no surprise at all to Lake that he was the only passenger to step onto the station platform. A wet wooden smell was in the air, and through the trunk roared a gust off the water. The platform beneath his feet still had a rhythm; he wasn’t certain if it was the sensation of the train in his legs or the tree buffeted by the constant crash of the waves. A porter came up to him and asked if he could take Lake’s luggage. “I have no luggage,” Lake told him; the porter nodded and touched the rim of his hat. He looked at Lake in a way that was a little off-center. In the light of one of the lanterns Lake could read a cawed wooden sign: ANGELOAK.

Lake stared through the tunnel toward the front of the train. Through the smoke of the engine and the fog off the river he could see the railroad tracks continuing on over the water into the dark until they vanished from sight. “Will we be pulling out again soon?” Lake asked the porter.

“Not for a while, mister,” said the porter, still not quite looking at him. “You got time to get a hot meal upstairs if you like.”

Lake cleared his throat a little and said, “How far to the other side of the river?”

The porter pursed his lips and after an uncertain moment answered, “Oh, still a ways.”

Lake nodded. “It’s quite a river.”

The porter got a look on his face of almost vicious delight. He began to laugh. “Quite a river indeed,” he said. He kept laughing, “That’s it, all right, it’s quite a river.” He continued laughing as he turned from Lake and walked on down the platform.

Lake walked up a series of winding steps to a level constructed above the tracks. In the hollowed core of the oak was a small cantina and inn: a few tables and a bar in a dimly lit wooden cave, with misshapen gaps in the trunk staring out into the night. Hanging on the inside walls were several odd pictures, all of them the same; behind the bar hung a calendar. The inn consisted of half a dozen very small rooms perched on individual tiers in the most formidable of the upper branches; these tiers were reached by four long rope bridges that draped the branches from the trunk. The innkeeper was a friendly fat man with ruddy skin, clear-eyed but looking at Lake the same way as the porter had, as though he was not quite in focus. He asked if Lake wanted a room. Lake said no, that he would be pulling out with the train, but he would like something to eat. He asked the keeper if many people came through and the innkeeper said, Not as many as there used to be. The innkeeper asked Lake where he was headed and Lake said west, and the innkeeper nodded agreeably to this, but he seemed to nod agreeably to everything. Finally Lake said if it was all right he’d just sit over on the edge of the cantina next to one of the open knotholes where he could look out over the river. The innkeeper said this was fine and to let him know if Lake changed his mind about the room. Lake sat over by the window of the tree and for a while studied one of the odd pictures on the wall: it was nothing but a black spot, framed and lit by a nearby lantern. The other pictures on the wall were exactly like this one except for variations in shape and size. Lake decided he would just as soon get on with his journey. He closed his eyes and listened to the seashell roar, which pulsed and expanded around him. Somewhere in his slumber something struck him, and he suddenly jumped to his feet to see that the roar was not that of any seashell but that of the train, which had just pulled out of Angeloak and was slithering off into the fog.

I watched in disbelief as the train went off without me; cursing, I went back to the bar and began berating the keeper. I ran down the steps to the platform below and stood there as though it would somehow bring the train back. I simply could not get it through my head that I had missed the train. The porter was still there and I berated him too: it wasn’t, after all, as though there had been a throng of passengers. I was the only one, and both the innkeeper and the porter knew I meant to take that train out. The innkeeper assured me I would have a room until the next train came through. I told him I didn’t want a room, I wanted to be on that train, and I asked when another would arrive. He said he didn’t know, that the trains didn’t follow a precise schedule and I must have realized that when I got on. All the more exasperating was the way neither the innkeeper nor the porter would look right at me when I spoke to them, and finally I got rude and snapped my fingers in front of the innkeeper’s eyes. And then I realized he didn’t see me. Then I realized the porter didn’t see me either. Neither of them saw anything.

I was given the room on the highest tier of the oak. There was no key; the porter directed me to the third bridge and smiled broadly as I went on my way. I expected to tumble off the tree into darkness as the railing in my hand ran out. A lantern hung from the branches; I took it with me. In fact the bridge did indeed lead to a room, where the night was warmer and the wind softer than it had been in the tunnel. Hanging in my room were two more pictures that didn’t show anything. There was a single bed and a basin of water on a stool. There was a contraption for bringing water up from the river that hadn’t worked in a long time. I slept restlessly.

I woke early. I looked out my window and just began saying to myself Oh no, oh no, over and over. I turned a complete circle, going from one window to another, gazing to the north and the south, the east and the west. There was nothing out there. I could see for miles and there was nothing at all to see: there wasn’t a sign of land, not hill or beach, and in the west nothing but fog, and nothing on the water but the long gleaming zipper of the railway tracks. The clouds weren’t more than fifteen feet from the reach of my hand.

I made my way down the swaying rope bridge to the cantina. The innkeeper brightly bade me good morning but I still wasn’t in the mood to be civil. I demanded to know when the next train was coming; he explained I had to be patient. He begged me to have some breakfast. I left the breakfast sitting on the counter and went down to the platform, where I found the porter. I insisted that he tell me when the next train would arrive. “Can’t say,” he answered. I stepped out onto the tracks; the planks between were wide and solid. I can walk the rest of the way, I was thinking angrily to myself staring down the tracks into the fog, when the porter on the platform said, “I wouldn’t think about walking if I were you. Tracks are strong enough but what if the train comes? Nowhere to jump but in the drink.” For someone who couldn’t see anything he certainly saw a lot.

The train did not come that week. It did not come the next week or the next. The April page of the calendar behind the bar was torn away; nothing changed. I sat in the window of the oak looking at the fog at the end of the tracks; May came, but the train did not come with it. Exasperated by my exile, I finally asked the innkeeper one day why it was anyone would be living high in a tree. “We could never find,” he said, laughing, “the trunk of the sky.” I nearly said, Would you have found it even if there was one to find? before I was answered by the soundless silver gaze of his eyes.

One night early in June I woke in my room at the top of the oak to a ringing in my ears. It was high and sharp at the beginning and then trailed off for a long time, like the sound of someone firing a gunshot. The sound didn’t stop, as though the shot was always traveling closer and closer. All the next day I heard the ringing. It didn’t fade but rather grew, gradually, almost indiscernibly.

On the next day, with the ringing still in his ears, John Lake woke to a head full of sixes. It was the first time in a long time he had thought of numbers at all. He got up and washed his face, then went down to the cantina. At some point he asked the innkeeper the date. The innkeeper told him it was the sixth of June and that the year, at least according to the calendar, was 1968—that is, Lake realized, it was the sixth day of the sixth month in the sixth year of his sixth decade since his birth in 1913. It was the first time in a long time, and one of the few times ever, Lake had noted so exactly the date.

The ringing was now very loud in his head, but it had also stopped growing; it had stopped growing sometime during the night. The growing had been so gradual for so long that he couldn’t be certain it had stopped at all, but after some hours he determined for himself that it was not growing any more. The only time it grew was when he would walk toward the gnarled twisted window of the oak and look down the tracks westward into the fog off the river. That was when it occurred to him. For a moment he indulged himself in believing it was the whistle of the train, but he knew that wasn’t it; he did not turn there in the cantina to ask if the innkeeper heard the sound since he had, after all, always heard the things others did not hear, like the music of fields, like the. .

And then he knew what it was he now heard. Then he remembered the night he had heard it thirty years before. And for a moment he was furious with himself, and then he remembered that he had, after all, spent half the lifetime since he first heard this sound trying in vain to disprove it ever existed. And though he had never disproved it mathematically and empirically, he realized he had disproved it to his heart: even in passionate pursuit of it, he would not believe it.

He watched down the track westward into the fog off the river and listened as he had listened, paralyzed, on another beach at the end of a train of footsteps. Then he went downstairs.

When he stepped onto the tracks he faltered a moment; as he had done thirty years before, he was compelled to turn and go back the way he had come. But he did not turn. He did not doubt, on the sixth day of the sixth month in the sixth year of his sixth decade, that a dream destroys what is not fulfilled; what was rare was not that he had forgotten this dream, since he was born, after all, in a country that had forgotten the dream of which it was born: rare was that, once having for gotten it, he had come to remember it again. Rare was that, once having feared it, he had made himself brave. The porter ran along the platform in agitation. “Don’t want to go down there, mister,” he cried, “that train may come any time. Could come today. It’s long overdue, could come in the hour. It won’t slow down when it comes, you know that.” Lake walked on down the track. The planks beneath him were sturdy but pliable from the wet air. Some thirty feet down the track he was tempted to turn and look at the huge oak coiling up through the clouds; he could still hear the porter and he thought he heard the innkeeper calling him as well, both of them shouting into the twilight they couldn’t see. It was warm out on the tracks. When Lake reached the fog he continued walking, through the vapor and splattered sunlight, the spray and heat on his face. For a while he walked out of fog; the tracks curved gently; then he walked back into it. All the time he walked the ringing, which he now understood was not in his ears but somewhere down the tracks, became louder as he came closer to it. When he had gone three miles down the track he emerged from a swath of fog out over nothing but wide endless blue river, where there was only the track extending on into the clouds ahead and a figure kneeling in the distance before him. The sound suddenly stopped. He kept walking until he reached her.

She hadn’t changed so much. Older, of course. No longer the girl who had evaporated among the moors fifteen years earlier but a woman; there was a line or two around her brow, and the lips were not as deep red but a bit weathered in color. Yet her eyes were the same, incandescent and depthless, and her hair was a wilder swarm than ever; it glistened with the mist of the river. There was no telling how long she’d been kneeling here in the sun on the planks of the railway. She watched as he came to her. She did not pull away as he knelt down before her and, his hands shaking, shredded her dress down the middle. The dress fell on the tracks behind her and she fell too. His hands ran down her arms to her wrists, down the sides of her body to her hips, down her legs to her ankles. He hovered over her. Her hair hung across the edge of the tracks and blew in the wind. Above was the drained and livid sky and beyond was the long black rip of the monstrous oak; in her a weary clock still ticked. She shuddered with the bedlam of unsounded chimes. For a while neither of them seemed to breathe. Then she felt him exhale across her thighs and taste the red ribbon of her black curls; a new wetness exploded in her. The hot rail of the tracks ran against her face. His glasses fell from his eyes and bounded across the wood. He tried to bring her into focus, and when she grabbed his shirt and pulled him into her, he took in his hands her hair, splayed across the track behind her so as to fix on her eyes; he somehow knew he could not look away. He somehow knew that in the bond formed of their mutual vision he could not be the one to break it: he sensed the doom of it. And then he laughed at himself and she, perhaps misunderstanding, laughed too. The sound of her laugh was foreign to her in the way she had found foreign all the things in a country of face-worship, where the visage is not the slave of the dream but the dream is the slave of the visage. And released into this foreignness that had become her foreignness, joined to the strangeness that had become her strangeness, she surged beneath him, ravening and abandoned, and pulled him wrathfully into her over and over, never severing the look between them, so as to pull him into her new communion with foreignness: she had decided long before she would not be the slave of those who aspired to be dreamers and then only cowered before their dreams. She moaned in his ear. She did not close her eyes. When he tore the virgin tissues of her she bit down hard but did not wince. She stared into his face and dared him to balk at his own vision. And then, for a moment, he looked and she wasn’t there, brown and naked she was gone before me, as though she had slipped through the tracks into the black river far below, even as I felt her in my hands, even as I felt her legs around me, even as I felt myself in her: I couldn’t see her. I think I closed my eyes. No, that isn’t it: it wasn’t that I closed my eyes: it was that I had to turn away for just a moment. For just a moment. It was too much to see that light; I turned from her just at the moment I climaxed to see two blue moons the color of the sky there on the tracks right beyond my reach, and I was thinking, Now where have I seen these moons before? and I was squinting to make them out, two blue moons. And I emptied myself in her; and maybe, for just a moment, I even fell asleep.

“Lieutenant. Lieutenant?”

And then there’s the sound, the sound I followed out onto these tracks: it’s huge, the sound I can’t bear to hear or disregard; huge, like the night of the shipwreck and the little girl on the beach; huge, and close. And I have this funny memory, of all things to remember; I have this memory of Melody Lake sobbing in a mortuary. What a thing to think. What a thing. And I say to myself, A memory, is it only the dream of the wandering blind? And then it’s there, huge above me, the sound, coming from a light so sharp and white that at first I think it’s the sun until I realize the sun’s on the horizon; and then I think it’s the train until I realize the tracks are absolutely still but for the fading pandemonium of our bodies, and then I’m thinking it’s her eyes like the old man of the moors saw them the night of the lighthouse until I realize the light’s in her hand, loud and white and sharp, in her hand as though to sear her fingers with it, as though to extinguish it: and then almost faster than I can see it, it comes to me

“There’s someone out there.”

and it sings to me. It sings