Was

Part Three. Oz Circle

Santa Monica, California-September 1989

Now we can cross the Shifting Sands. -L. Frank Baum's last words, May 6, 1919. The Shifting Sands border the East of Oz. Baum was seeing himself traveling westward toward it.

Years later, Jonathan was sitting in Bill Davison's office looking at photographs of athletes on the wall, and thinking of horror movies.

Jonathan starred in horror movies. The fear they generated seemed small and mean now, next to the real thing. You could only enjoy horror movies, Jonathan thought, when you were young and well and your fears had no name. Jonathan had a name for his terror now. He was dying.

The athletes in the photographs beamed at him, football players framed by a hunch of padding, hockey stars with missing teeth. They looked like gods of wholeness, gods of health.

Except that each of them had needed a psychiatrist. Bill Davison had made a fortune counseling athletes.

Football players who developed a terror of falling on Astroturf; baseball players who kept throwing out a knee, a knee that was medically perfect; rookies who developed such stage fright of crowds that they could not play. The photographs were signed with thanks.

Outside Bill Davison's office, Los Angeles gleamed. It was blue and white, blue with sky and smog, white with sunshine, white as bone. Both Jonathan and Bill were a long way from home.

Bill Davison was leaning back in his chair and regarding Jonathan with narrowed eyes. It was toward the end of their session.

"Right," he said. He rubbed the palm of his hand across his face. "Jonathan, I want you to try something new."

Bill Davison was nearly fifty, still handsome and broad-shouldered, though his face was creased and puffy and his chest sagged. His crewcut had been modified to suit later fashions. He wore a blue Lacoste shirt, casual and short-sleeved, that showed his football-player arms. Jonathan was rather in love with him. Counselor Bill, Jonathan called him, as if the whole sad business were a summer camp. It was appropriate. Jonathan had always hated summer camp. And loved his counselors.

Counselor Bill leaned forward on his desk and steepled his fingers. "I want you," he said, "to think of the place where you were happiest."

Jonathan did not try very hard. "I can't think of a place," he replied.

"Okay. Just think of something that you like, and try to remember where it happened."

Jonathan's thinking came slowly these days. Part depression and part drugs and part disease.

"I'm sorry, I just can't," he said.

"Where's home?" Bill Davison asked. His face looked very serious.

"Canada, I guess."

"Okay, Canada. Were you happy there?"

In school? As a little boy tearing up sheets? "How is this going to help the AIDS?" Jonathan asked.

"Maybe it won't help the AIDS, but it could help you."

Bill Davison had a direct approach. There was no time in the business of sports for psychoanalysis. In sports, with contracts worth thousands of dollars at stake, you had to intervene. Jonathan had read articles about Bill Davison. Bill would say to black tennis players who felt themselves adrift in a white man's world, "This is your game. This court here is your neighborhood. Think of it as your own street."

To football players who had suddenly grown angry at the ball, he would say, "Think of it as a woman. Imagine that it's the sweetest, kindest woman you ever met. Think of someone you knew. If it ended badly, then make it up to her this time. Catch the ball gently."

It worked. He had been criticized for merely treating symptoms.

"I can read The Power of Positive Thinking myself without Dr. Davison"; help," one psychiatrist had said. It turned out that Bill Davison was using visualization techniques fifteen years before anyone else. When the chemical pathway between conscious thought and the triggering of immune response was traced, it became, as they say, a whole different ball game.

Jonathan looked at Bill Davison and thought: You've been happy everywhere. What do you know?

"I don't know, on stage maybe, when I'm performing." Jonathan thought of the last play he had been in. "Oz," he said. "I was happy in Oz."

"Go there a lot?" Bill Davison asked, beginning to smile.

Jonathan remembered. "I used to. When I was a kid. Used to take my summer holidays there."

"Okay. I want you to pretend to yourself that you're in Oz."

"You're kidding," said Jonathan.

"No, I'm not kidding. I want you to think of yourself in Oz, all the time. You step out of here, and you're in Oz."

Jonathan closed his eyes and gave a weak little laugh. Jonathan and Bill had a contract: to do whatever Bill asked.

"We're fighting, remember?" Bill said.

"Yeah," said Jonathan. He had thrown up breakfast. He had thrown up lunch. "What's the point of doing this, Bill?"

"I think it could help you feel more at home," said Bill, shrugging as if it were obvious. "You're not. At home."

"I'm in Los Angeles," said Jonathan.

It was time to go. Bill would have another client waiting. Jonathan stood up. His good behavior ran on automatic pilot.

Bill shook his hand. Bill always did that to show Jonathan he didn't think of him as being different from anyone else. It was like the visualizations: Jonathan was aware of everything that Bill Davison was doing. He was still surprised when it worked. He was still surprised by the softness of Bill Davison's hands.

He was surprised by the face; swollen by age, with hatchet marks around the eyes. The teeth grinned out at Jonathan, part of the skull peeking out. Hi, there, the skull seemed to say from underneath its temporary flesh. I won't go away.

"Anyway, see you later tonight," Bill was saying, still alive.

Jonathan's mind went blank. He still saw the skull.

"You're coming to our place for dinner, remember?" It was yet another way in which Bill Davison was unconventional. He was a psychiatrist who invited his clients home.

Jonathan stepped out into the hot white vastness of Wilshire Boulevard. He felt exposed and alone. The traffic roared past, impersonal, as if the cars carried no people in them. There was no one else on the sidewalk, all the way down from Barrington to Bundy. The lights changed; Jonathan began to cross and the traffic still advanced toward him, crawling to a stop, like bulls with their heads down. Jonathan found himself scurrying to get out of their way, even though the lights were still with him.

Jonathan sat down on a bench to wait for a big blue bus. The backrest was covered in a painted advertisement for a funeral home. Gleeful, thought Jonathan, but at least my back is toward it. He looked at the shadows cast by the giant buildings. They marched in rows like morons and gleamed like glaciers. Poor old silver-coated Barrington Plaza looked ancient now beside them. When Jonathan had first come to Los Angeles in the early seventies, the Plaza had been the biggest building all the way from the ocean to the Veterans' Hospital. Jonathan could see the ocean, four miles away at the end of the wide straight road. The sea sparkled in sunlight. Everything was blue with fumes.

Jonathan remembered his contract.

Okay, he told himself, I'm waiting for a big blue bus in Oz. The sidewalks are perfectly laid, because if someone is dumb enough to trip on the edge of a paving slab, they can sue the city. Because the paving is perfect, people roller-skate to work. They wear shorts and shades and a Walkman.

Can I imagine Munchkins here, little people flooding out of shopping malls and insurance offices the size of mountains? Do Munchkins wear mirror shades now? If this is the Emerald City, then the towers are tall because of the value of the land underneath them. And all the windows and doors are sealed because the air inside them is temperature-controlled. If Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man went tripping by, no one would notice. They'd think they were high.

It was a twenty-minute wait for the big blue bus. Jonathan read a free paper. It listed courses in adult education. On the cover an attractive woman pouted in a leotard and tried to look as though she were selling fitness courses and not SEX. RELAX, said the headline, IT'S SO EASY.

There were courses about making money. How to Sell Real Estate in Your Spare Time. How to Make $ in Catering. How to Get Credit Cards.

And there were courses in Self Discovery Through Metaphysics. Coming Alive with Love. How to Flirt and Not Get Hurt. Courses in counseling or shiatsu or how to begin a conversation.

And there were courses that were an odd mix of the two. One offered instruction in Interviewing Techniques for Selecting a Husband:

Dating is time-wasting and inefficient. Before accepting that time-consuming invitation to dinner, you need to apply the techniques of market research to discover if the man is really interested in marriage. Manipulative? Yes-and we make no apologies for that. If you change your makeup and put on a nice new dress for a date, then you're manipulating. This course will simply help you to learn to manipulate for success.

And I was thinking of learning Spanish, thought Jonathan.

He thought of bars where the men all wore nothing but leather harnesses or Dodgers T-shirts, baseball caps and jockstraps.

Oz, he reminded himself, I'm supposed to be in Oz.

HOW TO FIND A LOVER OR A LOVING PARTNER

A solid, proven system for finding that special someone who's fun to be with, able to carry on a sparkling conversation, financially stable-maybe even rich.

Which, thought Jonathan, is why they haven't found love: And never will.

The bus finally came, and Jonathan got on it, wrestling with coins. He had never, in all his thirty-eight years, learned how to count out change quickly. The door whooshed shut; the bus lurched; the driver said nothing, his face blanked out by sunglasses.

Jonathan sat in the back, where he always did. He tried to pretend the bus was full of Munchkins, all of them talking in speeded-up voices. The bus was full of Angelinos instead. Angelinos have never met each other and cannot trust each other. They suspect each other of carrying murder weapons, possibly with some reason. Angelinos sit alone, in silence, no one next to them. As Jonathan was doing.

On the seat in front of him, a very fat man in dirty shorts sat reading the Style section of the Los Angeles Times. The person across the aisle from Jonathan stood up and moved two seats farther back, to be more alone. He was reading People magazine. He was thin and smelly, in what looked like standard-issue Veterans' Hospital couture-a tartan shirt with rolled-up sleeves and khaki trousers. UNITY BY THE SEA, said a passing billboard, JOIN US FOR A LOVING EXPERIENCE.

The bus stopped with a slight squeal of brakes. The squeal came and went with the rhythm of a kiss. An old man got on. He was very thin, very brown. His skin was somehow translucent and splotchy. He stumbled unsteadily toward his seat, and when the bus lurched forward, he fell into it, swinging around one of the support poles. The old man was almost too frail to walk, but he wore a jaunty tracksuit. A yellow plastic Sony Walkman whispered disco music into his ear.

Lighting-fixture shops and banks passed by, with acres of parking in the back. Beside a large drugstore, a sign said PARKING FOR PATRONS ONLY, in lettering that imitated nineteenth-century script. Jonathan loved that word "patrons" and that word "only." An old-time, old-fashioned drugstore with an admissions policy?

At the next stop, a middle-aged woman got on with a boy. Her hair was yellow and she wore black tights that showed how far and loose her hips had spread. The boy was about seventeen and wore long, boxy swim trunks and a vest and a bomber jacket. His upper lip was trying, and failing, to grow a moustache. They sat down just in front of Jonathan. The jacket was shrugged back and the woman began to peel sunburned skin off the boy's back. The windows of the bus were open. Patches of skin were caught up in the wind and were whirled about like snow.

A few moments later, the boy got up and started to ask people for money. "Don't have any, man," said Jonathan, wondering if that was how seventeen-year-olds still spoke. He went back to reading about adult education. If this is what they teach adults, he thought, what are they teaching the kids? He finally found his course in Spanish. It was opposite Hot Air Ballooning.

He got off the bus at Fourteenth Street, and across Wilshire Boulevard there was a billboard, an ad for chocolates. IT'S NEVER TOO LATE it said, TO HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD.

Jonathan lived on Euclid-Thirteenth Street, except that people were too superstitious to call it that. Euclid Avenue was tree-lined and residential and quite pleasant, but it was as if the shrubs and the flowers and the sprinklers and the sunlight and the glimpses of the Santa Monica mountains were all lying. They could bring no real comfort.

Jonathan's property was quite extensive. There were two bungalows in front that he used to rent out in his days of relative penury as an actor. Behind them was his garden, and backing the property, a two-story house for him and Ira. Downstairs were the garage and Ira's office. Upstairs was the house itself. Jonathan trudged wearily up the steps and pulled out his keys.

The key for the house wasn't on it.

What? Jonathan tried to remember what he had done with it. Who could he have given it to? He had his car keys. What could he have done with the key to his house?

It had been happening a lot lately. Forgetting things. Jonathan climbed back down the steps. Well. It was three o'clock. He would just have to wait until Ira got home. He slumped down into his chair, in the garden by the pond.

Jonathan did not want to sit in the garden. It made him feel vulnerable, as if his back were unguarded. He wanted to sit in the house, on the couch just behind the stained-glass window, sheltered in his own little nook, hidden away from people. He wanted to listen to National Public Radio.

Funny the things that kept him going now. NPR saw him through the desolate afternoons like a friend. The music, the features, reassured him that there were other people who thought like him.

Downstairs, outside in the silence, he sat so that no one could see him from the street, and he began to feel a sick and creeping fear crawl up over him. He was going to die, and no sunlight and flowers, no songs, no prayer, could save him. He tried to look at his garden.

He looked at the base of the palm tree. The roots reached down like sinuous worms into the earth. He looked at his ornamental pond and the lilies growing out of a tub under the water, Jonathan remembered. He remembered the party they had held to dig the pond. People had got carried away and dug it so deep that it had to be partially refilled.

What happens to a garden, he wondered, when its owner is gone? Ira had no time for gardening. Would the world, heartless, kill the little blue flowers, the succulent ground cover? Would the dry dead stems haunt Ira, like ghosts? Or would he dig the garden late at night, to keep it going, out of love, for the memory?

Fear was a chill light sweat on Jonathan's forehead. Upstairs the telephone began to ring over and over.

Jonathan remembered the day he had been told he was ill. He had spent an eternal, twisted afternoon waiting for Ira to come home. He had paced the floor, weeping, chewing on his fingers, unable to quell the horrible, quivering animal panic that made him want to run and hide. Then Ira had come, and Jonathan had collapsed against him and told him, and the terror had abated. Ira took the terror away.

"The first thing," Ira had said, "is that we both go into counseling. Did they tell you where to go?"

Jonathan nodded. "They gave me a name. Some hotshot psychiatrist who volunteers."

"Did you get in contact with him? Her?"

Jonathan shook his head. "Not yet. Dr. Podryska had a long talk with me anyway. She gave me some happy pills."

"Did you take them?"

"No. I thought they might be bad for me."

"Stress is bad for you. Take the pills."

"I'm worried about you too, Ira."

Ira sighed and shifted in his smart lawyer working clothes. "It's not your fault. It's not anybody's fault." Ira was puritanically insistent on good behavior.

"You'll have it too."

"Probably," Ira admitted.

"I'll be careful around the house and things." Jonathan meant he would mop up his own blood. He meant they would stop having sex. What he felt was immense relief. Already he knew that Ira was planning to stay with him.

Ira's body jerked with rueful, silent laughter. "You mean you'll eat with a separate knife and fork? Use a different toilet maybe. Maybe I should put some black insulating tape around the handle of your toothbrush. Good thing you have your own electric razor, huh?"

They both looked at each other. Jonathan knew he was in danger of saying something stupid. Stupidity made Ira cross.

"It's a bit late for precautions, Baby," said Ira.

Jonathan retaliated with a practicality. "You should take the test," he said.

"I'm not taking that test," said Ira. They had had arguments about it before.

"Because you said that whatever the result, you had to do the same thing. No casual sex and look after your health. No point taking it, you said, unless you would do something different depending on the result. Well, if you take the test and by any chance you're negative, then we both will have to be a lot more careful, huh? That's a good reason for you to take the test."

Ira was trapped. "Maybe," he said, and he shrugged his beefy arms, convulsively, as if trying to break his way out of his business jacket.

Jonathan knew Ira didn't want to take the test because it would mean coming out to his doctor. Ira's doctor did not know he was gay. Ira was a curious mix of decency and misplaced self-respect. He thought the people where he worked had not noticed that the company lawyer was unmarried and living with another man. Jonathan didn't push any further. He knew that he was right and that Ira would force himself to be logical, force himself to take the test. Talk about the English having a stiff upper lip. Ira forced a set of strictures on himself that were wholly his own.

They had met at UCLA. At twenty-eight years of age, after eight years of professional acting, Jonathan had gone back to school. He studied history. In some quiet place in his actor's soul, he found something very mysterious and soothing in studying the past and in recovering it.

There was a great weight of things that had been lost. Pioneers made houses out of earth and withstood plagues of locusts. The ancient Assyrians left behind them treasure troves of family letters baked in clay. Jonathan's family name was in the Domesday Book. The name meant Dweller by Low Water. They had been a marsh people, farming for their master and hunting birds in the reeds in what was now the county of Hampshire in England.

Ira's people had been Russian Jews. Jonathan met Ira in one of his history tutorials. Ira was huge and jovial and bound for law school, after an improving degree in history. When Ira suddenly invited him to lunch, Jonathan was pleased. It was not always easy to meet people at UCLA. Jonathan was pleased when Ira invited him to play a game of tennis. Jonathan had always found sports easy, though he made no effort at them. Ira beamed back at him, hot, sweaty, his tummy bulging over his immaculate white shorts. What a decent fellow, thought Jonathan. Ira, it turned out, lived at home. His parents seemed to want to protect him from corruption. He was a strange mix of the deeply worldly-he talked about stocks and shares, and the details of Democratic Party politics-and bestilled innocence. At age twenty, Ira lived in the world of a bright seventeen-year-old.

Ira invited Jonathan to an evening of Israeli folk dancing. It did not occur to Jonathan that Ira was doing all the work. Jonathan was amused. Someone else had thought he was Jewish. People usually did. Maybe it was his mother's side of the family, his Cornish ancestors with their black curly hair and Mediterranean complexion.

The folk dances were held in a hall near UCLA. Jonathan had learned all kinds of dancing as part of his training as an actor. He danced with real flair, feet crossing each other, arms outstretched. He danced, his arms around Ira's shoulders. There were bands of muscle from shoulder to shoulder, across the back of Ira's neck. Ira asked Jonathan if he had ever been to Israel.

"No," said Jonathan. "I wish, but I've never really been abroad. My folks live in Canada, so if I have any money, I always end up spending it to go and see them."

"Funny. You don't look Canadian," said Ira. Jonathan did not understand.

"What do Canadians look like?" asked Jonathan.

Ira looked about him in mock secrecy. "They don't know it," he said, "but they look Jewish."

Jonathan was taken aback. Ira touched any area of tension with a joke, to relieve it. Jonathan began to sense a powerful personality in Ira. somewhat obscured by youth and inexperience. There was an imbalance of personal power between them. If they had both been the same age, the imbalance would have destroyed the friendship.

But it was easy for a twenty-eight-year-old actor to appear somewhat exotic to a sturdily conventional undergraduate. Jonathan got Ira into one of his plays for free. The play was a joky rewrite of stories from the Old Testament. The author had written it for children. When she couldn't get it produced, she added a few satiric references and pretended that it had always been for adults. She sat in the tiny audience every night and laughed long and hard at the same jokes, her own jokes.

Jonathan played Adam. Adam made his entrance holding a bath towel around his middle. The serpent was played by a dotty lady wearing a huge red bow tie. Her tongue flickered beautifully. Ira got to meet them all afterward. His cheeks were bright red, his smile wide, his eyes gleaming. He was impressed. That did not stop him from insulting the author.

"Oh, that was you laughing at all the jokes!" Ira exclaimed. "You really sounded like you thought they were funny!" Then he said, still smiling, "You should be an actress." Her smile went thin and tense before she moved on to someone else.

Going home in the car afterward, Ira said, "Hey, you know, that was a really good play." Jonathan wasn't sure to what degree he was being sarcastic. Neither was Ira.

Ira invited him to the sauna that was meant only for teaching staff. They pretended to be staff and sat in the tiny box, naked under towels. They had seen each other naked, and they sat, knees touching, the air thick with some kind of tension. Ira kept wiping his face and shifting and avoiding Jonathan's eyes. It was Jonathan's turn, now, to be innocent.

Then Ira invited him to his synagogue in West Hollywood. He looked awfully solemn as he asked Jonathan, his arms folded. Jonathan began to tease him. "No engraved invitation?" Jonathan asked. And Ira scowled with confusion.

Ira was still tense and anxious as they arrived. He sat stiffly on the bench, his cheeks puffed out, not looking at Jonathan, and Jonathan very slowly realized that all the couples were of the same sex. He began to take in what some of the notices on the wall were saying.

It was a gay synagogue. Beefy, thick-necked Ira was gay. This was the only way he could think of to tell Jonathan.

Outside, in the dark, after the service, Ira stopped and turned around. "So," he said. "Now you know." His eyes had been looking at the ground. Now they looked up at Jonathan, waiting for an answer.

"Yup," was all that Jonathan said. Jonathan was touched when Ira began to look worried. Jonathan found it endearing. Jonathan prolonged the suspense.

Ira's arms made a sudden convulsive movement, the involuntary shrug. "My parents keep asking why I don't go to their synagogue in Burbank," he said.

"I guess they do," said Jonathan.

Ira suddenly smiled, but his lips were turned inward, taut, and he very lightly hit Jonathan on the shoulder. "Well?" he demanded.

"Well what?" Jonathan made himself look innocent.

"What do you think!" bellowed Ira.

"I think it's very nice that you're so religious," replied Jonathan.

"What else?"

"Are you asking about my religious beliefs?"

"I'm asking about you," said Ira, grinning, aggressive, voice low.

Jonathan decided it was time to be serious. He found it was difficult for him to talk straightforwardly. "I'm… I'm kind of hazy about all of that," he said.

"Hazy. What does that mean?"

"It means I don't know. Either way." Jonathan made an embarrassed wiggle with his hand. "I guess I'm waiting." He sighed. "Waiting to be persuaded."

There was a blankness in his sexuality. In a society that valued sexual athleticism, he felt himself at a disadvantage. He had a putative girlfriend, and they saw each other once a weekend for a cuddle and a cultural event. She was a well-known performance artist. She swallowed canned peaches whole while gargling the theme song from Dr. Zhivago. She looked like a librarian, which was perhaps one of the reasons people laughed. She was serious.

"Do you realize," she had said once, to Jonathan, "that there are more artists living in Los Angeles now than did in all the rest of history?"

Jonathan didn't. "It might depend on what you call an artist," he answered her.

What the girl made of their affair, Jonathan did not know. It was part of the blankness. Maybe she was waiting too. It suddenly didn't seem fair to make her wait any longer.

"Are you going to invite me home?" Ira asked. Virginity hung heavy and embarrassing like something around his neck, to be discarded. Ira lived at home and had nowhere to go. Jonathan began to understand the weight that the boy carried with him.

Ira had taken so many risks. He was frightened of himself and of Jonathan-Jonathan might have been shocked or angry or answered with his fists. Ira's eyes were round, watching, hopeful, sad.

It was time for Jonathan to take charge.

"If I said no, just for tonight, would you stop asking me?" Jonathan asked, and quickly added, "Because I don't want you to stop asking."

Ira said nothing. He looked very young, very disappointed.

Jonathan sighed. "It's just that if we did anything now, I'd feel slightly railroaded."

"You're a nice boy and don't do it on the first date," Ira murmured miserably.

"Something like that."

"If you mean no, just say no."

"I don't mean no."

"I'm supposed to show up with my car on Friday nights with a bunch of flowers?"

"That would be nice. Only no flowers. The neighbors might think I was queer or something."

Ira looked so dismayed that Jonathan felt compelled to kiss him, on the cheek, under streetlights. "Bring chocolates instead."

Ira broke into a terrible sweat. It trickled down his forehead and soaked in patches through his shirt. His conventionality had been taxed to its limits. "Well," he said. "I guess I always did believe in long engagements."

Jonathan drove him home. "Ease up, guy," Jonathan said, temporarily sounding American. Somewhere on the San Diego Freeway, Ira suddenly understood that he had won.

Ira became boisterous and bounced up and down on the car seat in time to the radio. He began to sing. He looked younger than ever. From the front porch of his parents' house, he turned and gave Jonathan a wave. For some reason, it was that wave that made Jonathan finally decide. Jonathan could still see Ira, ten years ago, standing and waving and smiling. Ira was history, too.

Jonathan woke up in his garden. It was bleary with sunlight. Oz, he reminded himself. I'm supposed to be in Oz. And as he awoke he seemed to hear laughter, high childish giggles of something hidden under leaves. Or was it only the last of the telephone, fading away?

His mother was there.

She was wearing her mink stole and narrow tartan trousers, blue and green, and little elfin bootees. She also wore sunglasses and was surrounded by a blaze of sunlight.

When had she last dressed like that?

"Mom?" he asked, sitting up. He was horrified. How long was she going to stay? How long was he going to have to pretend to be well? Already, with actorish skills, he was firming up his eyes and straightening his back. He stood up, with a spring in his step. It was like watching a very aged actor trying to be sprightly. Jonathan could see himself move, very plainly, though his limbs were weighted to the chair.

His mother backed away from him. "I'm all right. You keep sitting," she said. Vapor wreathed out of her mouth, like steam. She found her way to another garden chair, uncertainly, nervously.

At first Jonathan thought it was cigarette smoke coming out of her mouth. But then he saw that she was sitting in a field of snow. Sparkles of sunlight blasted back up from it, like sand in his eyes. It was cold, where his mother was.

She leaned forward, uncertain how to begin. This was not the confident businesswoman that his mother had become. Now in her sixties, Jonathan's mother had lost all sense of fear and, because of that, all sense of style.

This was his young and insecure mother, who had no assurances how well her life would turn out, who wanted everything to be new and modern, who threw out anything old, who was a model but who still did not believe she was beautiful. This was his mother when she was younger than he was now. Poor ghost.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

"Did you ever notice," she began, hesitantly, "how in biographies they never tell you much about the adult's relationship with his parents?"

"Yes," said Jonathan. Indeed he had, being interested in history The words flowed out of his mouth slowly and messily like molasses.

"It's because people are embarrassed by it," said his mother. There were no creases in her cheeks, no patches of scaly skin on her wrists. Her lipstick was ruby red and her hair black.

"It's embarrassing for everyone. Embarrassing for the child who needs to become independent. How can you be independent when there is someone who still calls you their child? For the parents, it's a constant reminder how old they are and how strange life is. They look at the face of a forty-year-old man and say, I gave birth to him. I held his hand as a baby."

Jonathan couldn't see what was happening behind the snow-blind sunglasses.

"When you were first born," his mother said, "I took you out into a field of snow, like this one." She held out her hands, and showed him the Canadian field. "I held you up against my cheek and it was as though I were launching you into the future. It seemed to me you were like a branch, that would grow into the year 2000."

Somehow they were back in Los Angeles.

"You won't see the year 2000, will you?" his mother said.

"No," whispered Jonathan.

"I used to think there was some compensation," his mother said. "When you were a baby, and I realized there was something wrong with you, when you rocked and wouldn't speak, when you tore things up, I asked everyone what I had done wrong. Then I saw. You could draw. You could make those heads out of clay. And I thought: There always is some compensation. When you quit university the first time, and I saw you act at Stratford, I thought: There's the compensation. Even when you left me, left all of us and came here to do whatever it was you did in all those bars, I thought: He's got to be there to make it. He's got to be there for his profession."

She looked around at his garden, at the L.A. sun. "But there's no compensation, Jonathan. There's no one to pass anything on to. You'll die, and the future will be only silence. You'll die and there won't be anything left."

Somewhere there were birds singing in bushes.

"I went back to our old house. The one your father built. It has had eight owners since we left. I walked through its rooms. Everything had been torn out, replaced. Even the stone fireplace your father built. Even the tree we planted that had your name. The shoebox at the end of the hall, even the patio out back."

"What?" Jonathan began, words trailing limply. He meant to ask, what did the owners think, with you wandering through their rooms.

"They didn't see me. I wasn't really there." She admitted it, shyly, with a sad shrug of her shoulders.

"You never told me," she said. "You never told me anything about yourself. You shut me out. You were embarrassed. You should always pay attention to embarrassment, Jonathan. It means there is something too tangled to deal with. And humor, when people turn things into a joke. Or when they make them weird or spooky. It means that there is something people cannot face."

She took off her sunglasses, and looked at him directly.

"Have you ever noticed, Jonathan? Being an actor. Has it ever occurred to you that there are only two genres that can deal with family life? One of them is comedy." She smiled ruefully. "And the other is…"

Her voice went rough and deep and harsh and menacing, and her face blossomed out like a flower in time-lapse photography, burst out in an eruption of scar tissue and deformation, marks where knives had passed.

"The other is horror!"

Jonathan howled and threw himself back in his chair, nearly knocking it over. He lost all of his breath, he couldn't pull in air, and his heart was thumping.

He looked around his garden, and there was no one there, and it was dark. When had the sun set?

I was dreaming, he told himself. That was all; I was dreaming.

But he knew his eyes had been open, and he knew he had been awake. He knew his mind was beginning to go. He didn't have as much time as he had thought.

Behind the locked door, the telephone began to ring again, over and over.

Finally, in 1981 when he was thirty years old, Jonathan had been offered a leading role in a film.

It was a horror movie. His agent described the script, euphemistically, as "powerful." The character was so disfigured that Jonathan had assumed no one would know it was him under the makeup.

The film was called The Child Minder. Jonathan played a character called Mort. Mort's face had been slashed by his father when he was a child. The face looked like a crazy quilt, all swellings and stitches. The character Mort loved children, and he loved killing them.

Mort hung them from meat hooks. He pressed cheese-cutting wire through them. Mort kissed them as he killed them and called them "my sweet baby, my sweet child."

Jonathan needed the money. It was with a sense of dread that he showed up at 5:00 a.m. in the scanty little trailer on location in Santa Monica. He assumed he would dry again. He often did, without warning. Despite his reputation for brilliance, Jonathan would sometimes unaccountably be unable to act. It was unaccountable even to himself.

Ira had read the script and described it with one word: pornography.

But as the layers of latex accumulated, destroying his face, Jonathan found he began to feel pity for the character he saw being built up in the mirror. Jonathan found a voice for him-desperate, wild with sadness and humor and betrayed good grace. His voice would be cultured, his laugh hysterical and poisoned. There was something solid there, as solid as history, that Jonathan could grasp.

Jonathan stepped out of the trailer into a gray California morning. He walked toward the lights and stepped into their magic circle. Jonathan spun on his heel once, and something alive reared out from him, took over his face, took over his voice box and his cheek muscles. The latex on his face was as unresponsive as scar tissue. That was right, too.

Children. What the world does to children. Cuts them, scars them, imprisons them, destroys them. It was all so terrible as to be a horrible joke, an embarrassment, a subject for comedy, comedy or terror.

They filmed the last scene first.

"Hey," said the director, a beefy, forty-year-old ex-cameraman. "You know, that's really good." He was surprised. They were on to something.

MEET MORT, said the billboards. HE LOVES KIDS. TO PIECES.

The Child Minder was a monstrous success. For some reason, young teenagers were willing to pay to see people their own age tortured and killed in various ways. Market research showed that many of them went to see The Child Minder two or three times.

Ira never went to see it at all. "I just think it's a terrible shame that the only thing this society can find to do with your talent is that garbage."

Jonathan disagreed. There was something to Mort, something he couldn't define. Mort meant something.

There was a sequel. Mort had died at the end of the first film. Child Minder II resurrected him in a studio-bound hell.

Hell was full of the souls of children. They were made to sing merry school songs, chained to desks. They were drilled by tormenting demons in gray clothes with spectacles and fangs and rulers that beat wrists until hands dropped off.

There was a race of dwarves in Hell. They wore black leather harnesses, just like in certain L.A. bars. They had interesting deformities that took the better part of a day to create in makeup, and they flayed people alive. They sang and danced as they worked, like a Disney movie played backward. At the climax, Hell was harrowed by a visiting priest, and Mortimer escaped in a blaze of fire, out into the real world, an eternal spirit, to kill again and again in a chain of sequels. Mort was the wounded spirit of the eternal hatred of children.

In each of the films, all of the adults were either fools or drunks, wrapped up in work or sleazy sex. They had failed their children utterly. The children were left to defend themselves.

Mort materialized out of their parents. In sequences of special effects, he slimed his way out of parents' sleeping, snoring mouths. Mortimer was wept out of their eyes, to coagulate on the floor. He climbed out of the television set as adults watched the news impassively. The news, in the form of armed alerts, terrorism and serial murders, continued to flicker on Mortimer's face. The children died, slowly, horribly.

Market research showed that there had to be a murder every ten minutes or the audience got bored. In each ending, virtue triumphed in a blaze of light, and another generation would be left to grow up in peace. Except that as each sequel ended, Mort's face would be glimpsed, reflected in a pair of adult sunglasses or waiting for a bus, reading a newspaper. CHILD MURDERED, the headline would scream. With each return, Mortimer made more money.

Jonathan started to get letters. Many of them were from boys, wanting to know about the makeup and the special effects. Some of the letters were from girls who wanted to know about his emotional life. Was he as lonely as he seemed in the movie? Did he have someone to love him? One letter was from a woman who claimed to be a vampire. Was he one himself? Did he want to become one?

Jonathan became a star interview, in a certain kind of magazine.

In full color, the magazines showed how rubber bodies were made so that the skin and flesh could be pulled off in realistic detail as the arms writhed, as the arteries pumped out jets of blood. There were faces of women, with tiny pig eyes and huge mouths the size of footballs full of teeth. The center-page spread would be of Jonathan as Mort, his face in healed sections.

Jonathan endeared himself to the market by showing in the interviews that he had once been a fan of horror movies himself. He would lapse into lines of Bela Lugosi's dialogue. He would pay tribute to the grand old Gothic tradition. He might allow himself a touch of yearning for a time when fear was achieved through suggestion rather than bloody detail. He tried to explore what he thought he saw in the character of Mort. The audience found all of this flattering.

Jonathan was invited as Guest of Honor to something called a Con. It was a convention for fans of what was described as dark fantasy. Darkcon it was called.

Darkcon was held in Baltimore. Jonathan had never seen Baltimore. He spent three days in the city and still didn't see it. He saw the inside of the convention hotel instead.

It was a large, modern facility, with polished corridors and carpets and polite young women in orange jackets wearing name-tags. They smiled behind desks. The smiles grew uneasy as men in long hair, beards and black T-shirts began to take over the hotel.

Jonathan was welcomed by the Con committee and given a pack of publications-program books, more magazines. A plump, fresh-faced young man called Karl had been assigned to him. Karl was in charge of Guest Relations. He took Jonathan on a tour.

The Con had a bookroom, full of paperbacks in black jackets. Just inside the entrance there was a row of realistic, severed heads, caked in blood. Outside the bookroom, a little child was screaming, being pulled inside by her mother. Behind the severed heads, the book dealers were chuckling.

The Con had an art show. Its largest piece consisted of five realistically re-created nude corpses, hanging from hooks over a fan of rusted, bloodstained buzz saws.

Jonathan stood before it, with an expression of rapt and dazzled wonder.

"Toto," he said, in a little girl's voice. "We must be over the rainbow!"

As a Canadian, Jonathan seemed to spend half his life signaling Americans that he had told them a joke. He wiggled his eyebrows and leered at Karl. Karl suddenly grinned and covered one eye with a hand. "Oh, I get it!" he said. Karl's skin was brown, but his cheeks were very pink and his thick eyebrows almost met. Jonathan found himself feeling tender toward him.

A tall, thin woman approached them, all angles. Her hair flew everywhere, and her eyes were bright, and she was the same age as Jonathan. He placed her perhaps a bit too quickly. An ex-hippie, he judged, one of his own kind, a kindred spirit.

"I did the metalwork," she announced, pointing to the buzz saws.

"I'm… impressed," said Jonathan, choosing his words carefully. "You've put a lot of effort into it." Looking again, he had to admit that the metalwork was beautifully done. He suddenly saw the woman in his mind, slim in overalls, with a blowtorch.

"This is Moonflower," said Karl, coughing, shuffling. "She's famous," he added. "She does my fanzine."

"How… This is a strange question. You're obviously talented."

"I usually draw elves," Moonflower said. "And seagulls and stars. Stuff like that."

"Right. So where do the corpses fit in?"

"You're asking me that?" Moonflower seemed surprised. "The elves and this. They're the flip side of the same thing."

Karl and Jonathan had lunch together in the Con buffet. Eye of Newt was on the menu. Karl was obviously starstruck by Jonathan. Jonathan found this charming. To please Karl, Jonathan found himself becoming Mortimer.

"So charming to have lunch with you," he said in Mortimer's voice. "Are you often on the menu?"

"Uh-oh," said Karl, in something not unlike real fear.

"Joke," cooed Mortimer and batted his eyelashes. "People do say my humor slays them."

Mort was a pastiche of different acting styles. Mostly he spoke like a slightly camped-up Boris Karloff.

"Yup, really kills me," said Karl, wincing with anticipation.

"Is that an invitation?" said Mort.

"Ew!" said Karl in delicious discomfort. "Ew! He's doing it! He's doing it!"

The fans didn't know Jonathan's face, but they recognized the voice. They looked up from the tables. They put down their trays and began to gather around.

Jonathan played with Karl's hair. Karl stood, eyes closed, bearing up like a child determined to resist a tickling.

"My little baby," said Mortimer in a greasy, singsong voice. "He's rigid with embarrassment. You might say Mort'ified. Shall we play a nice little game?"

"Eeek," said Karl in a tiny voice. There was an appreciative murmur of laughter. Laugh at me, will you? Mortimer thought. Laugh? Then listen to this.

And Mortimer threw himself from side to side in the chair, possessed by laughter, shrieking with it, loud and piercing as a knife.

"Ooooooooo!" breathed out the audience in fear. It was the laugh of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Later that night, Karl came and drank whisky in Jonathan's room, and slept with him, even though, as far as Jonathan could determine, he was heterosexual. Karl's last name was Rodriguez. Karl Rodriguez. Jonathan kept saying the name. Could you fancy someone for their teeth? Karl had a huge grin full of large bright teeth. Karl's parents had come to the north from Mexico.

The next day, Jonathan was interviewed in front of five hundred people. He sat behind a folding table, next to a scholarly looking woman with plain, pulled-back hair and glasses.

"What's your worst nightmare?" she asked.

"Waking up to find I'm in Child Minder Fifteen." There was laughter. The laughter was uneasy.

"Do you sometimes find the violence hard to take?" the interviewer asked.

"Oh no. I can't see all that meat and blood," said Jonathan. "I can't see red. I'm color-blind."

And he thought: I've got, I've got to find something else to do.

There was to be a charity performance of The Wizard of Oz in the Hollywood Bowl. Dorothy was going to be played by Cher. Nick Nolte was the Tin Man. Sam Shepard was going to play the Scarecrow, but had to pull out.

For the first time in his life, Jonathan hustled. Ambition alone could not have made him do it. Only an overwhelming urge to play the part could have driven him.

He went straight from reading Variety to Aaron Spelling's office. Aaron was producing; Jonathan had appeared in "Dynasty," another one of his tormented character roles, a priest in love with Joan Collins. The character had not been popular with audiences and was speedily dropped-but Spelling still had some time for Jonathan.

Jonathan simply told him the truth. He was the only man in L.A. who could still play the Scarecrow. To prove it, he sang "If I Only Had a Brain" right in the office. He ran full speed at the wall and did a backward somersault from it. Jonathan shook his head like a salt-shaker and knew that he was sprinkling from it something he could only name but not describe. The something was Ozziness, the quality of Oz.

Spelling chuckled and shook his head. "Okay, okay, you sold me." Maybe he needed to fill the part quickly, maybe it didn't matter with all the star names on the bill. There were a lot of maybes.

But word soon went around town that some horror-movie star was playing the Scarecrow. The buzz was that the horror-movie star was wonderful.

"Well, he's always been a brilliant actor," said those who cared to remember the little theaters, his TV psychos, his TV academics.

Jonathan found himself having lunch with Cher. She seemed to take a kind of rueful, maternal interest in him. He told her about his researches into Baum, into Kansas, into Oz. He told her about his visit to Lancaster, California. She changed the subject.

"This show could do you a lot of good," she said. "This show could really break you."

Jonathan was dazzled. Something alive seemed to stir in him, made out of joy. With a kind of twist and a flip of his hands, he folded, out of the corner of the tablecloth, a dog's head. It had little knots for ears, a snout, and a punched-in, toothless mouth.

"We're not in Kansas anymore," said Jonathan, stroking the dog's head. The dog turned around and looked at Cher and cocked its head with curiosity. Its ears rose up, attentive. The dog was alive.

"That's terrific," said Cher.

"I only wish I would stop losing all this weight," Jonathan said to Toto.

A week or two later, he went in for tests.

Ira didn't show up. Jonathan hated driving now, but he drove to Bill's house by himself anyway, alone in the dark, and got horribly lost. He missed the exchange onto the freeway, and he missed the turn off the freeway, and then he wandered aimlessly up and down Topanga Canyon. The roads on the map wriggled under his eyes like worms.

He arrived in a panic, sick at being lost and alone, horrified at how fragile his illness had made him.

"I drove round and round for hours! I couldn't find where I was!" He was sobbing. He had to sit down.

"Muffy, get a whisky, could you?" asked Bill.

Bill took Jonathan in his arms. It was a great comfort to be held. But it was an enfeebling comfort. Jonathan had been reduced to needing to be hugged after a simple drive in the car. Jonathan wiped his cheeks and tried to pull away, patting Bill on his great bare arms.

"There you go, buddy," said Bill, and let him go.

And Bill's wife Muffy was there, holding out a glass of whisky. A glass of whisky in Waterford crystal. Jonathan was terrified he might drop it.

"You must think I'm a real wimp," he said.

"I think you're scared," said Muffy. "It's not pleasant, being alone and lost."

It was alarming how people were the only island of safety he had against terror. As soon as he was around people, the fear went. Most of the time in L.A., he was alone.

"I couldn't read the map," he said, gulping whisky and snot.

"Let me show you around the house," said Bill.

The house was a museum. It was a great old farmhouse from the days when L.A. was a Western settlement of farmers and fruit trees. There were huge wooden spoons on the wall that had been used for stirring vats of lye soap. There were old homemade candles. There were shoes people had made themselves out of hides. There were family Bibles, with names of parents and grandparents.

"Look at this! Look at this!" Jonathan exclaimed. "I didn't know you were into all of this!"

How can you cover so many bases? Jonathan thought, looking at Bill Davison's face. You can talk shop to a ball player, history to a historian. With a face like yours, you ought to be some Reaganite businessman in favor of defense budgets. With money like you make, you ought to be slick and sharp and spouting horrible, phony relation-speak.

"All these things," said Bill Davison. "They're from Kansas. I kind of collect them."

"I only take photographs," said Jonathan.

Muffy walked with them, commenting quietly on the implements. "That object there is for firing pills down horses' throats." There was something European about her. She was plump and pale, with undyed hair, no makeup, and yet there was something forcefully sensual about her. Even Jonathan felt it. Her breasts hung loose, her hips wobbled under the peasant dress. Jonathan found that he was glad for Bill, glad that he had a wife who was his match.

Muffy had gone with Bill on his expeditions to Kansas. She talked about the samplers on the walls. She knew about the people who had made them. One of them had been singed in the fire at Lawrence. Made by Millie Branscomb, aged eight.

"This is the strangest thing," Muffy said. "When we researched this, we found out it was done by the mother of someone Bill knew."

"The mother of a patient of mine. My first patient, you might say," said Bill. "It's all very strange. I got to know a woman about eighty-something. She was living in a Home. She thought she was Dorothy Gale."

It took a moment. "From Oz," said Jonathan.

"Turned out," said Bill, "that she was. She knew Frank Baum."

There was that icy vapor again, from the snow, from the cold. It rose up from the floorboards. Jonathan saw it at his feet.

Later, when Muffy was in the kitchen, they sat at the table and Jonathan said, "I'm having visions, Bill."

"What?"

"I'm seeing things. I'm hallucinating. You're a psychiatrist. You tell me what that means."

Bill went very silent. In front of him was a rush place mat. He traced its spiral pattern with the blade of a knife. "It all depends," said Bill Davison, "on whether the visions are true or not."

Jonathan thought a minute and then said, "I think they are."

Muffy had cooked a Turkish meal. The main course was made of eggplants and onions. They waited awhile before dessert, hoping that Ira would come. Drinking whisky had been a mistake. Jonathan felt himself go quiet and slightly confused. He listened.

Bill talked about the history of Kansas. The Old West, he said, had stringent gun-control laws. You checked your firearms before you came into town. Wichita, Kansas, was the town of Wyatt Earp, of Bat Masterson, the town of all those TV shows along with Dodge City, also in Kansas. For the whole decade of the 1870s, when Wichita was one of the wildest cowtowns, the total number of people murdered in it was four. Four people killed in ten years. In Los Angeles, it was four a day.

"It was the cities Back East that made up the Wild West," said Bill. "The penny-dreadful magazines, and the movies after them."

"What about Billy the Kid? He was real."

"Looks as if he may have been born in New York City."

Jonathan began to hear cattle lowing, somewhere up the canyon perhaps.

"Tell me more about Dorothy," he said.

"She was from a farming community called Zeandale, near a place called Manhattan, Kansas. Its other claim to fame is that Damon Runyon was born there."

"What was she like?"

"Well," said Bill, looking into his wineglass. "It was as if she lived in Oz all the time. She lived in a world of her own. Maybe that was what Baum saw in her, maybe not. I wrote to the Baum Estate to find out more about it. All they could tell me was that Baum had been a substitute teacher there for a short while. They thought it more likely that the character in the book was named after Baum's niece."

He told Jonathan the story, as much as he knew. He told him how Dorothy had died. The room seemed to fill with the low smoky light that comes on winter afternoons, sun through silver mist.

"One day," said Bill, "I might just go to Manhattan and see what else I can find out about her. Speaking of which, how are you and Oz getting on?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Oz. Remember our contract?"

Jonathan had forgotten.

Ira finally arrived in his own car. He was gray with fatigue, and he stared coldly at Jonathan.

"I rang and rang. Where were you?" he asked, as he sat down.

Jonathan's eyes were round, unblinking, feverish. He didn't answer.

Ira turned to Bill. "I'm really sorry, Bill. I wanted to call and say I was going to be late, but I didn't have your home number."

Bill explained. "That's okay. Jonathan told me he was locked out of your house. He couldn't answer the phone."

"I've lost my house keys, Ira," said Jonathan. The room glimmered, as sunlight sprinkles snow with stars. Someone was trying to walk toward Jonathan through the mist. All Jonathan could see was a dark shape, lumpy, in dark clothes. Light came in rays from all around it, cutting through the mist, casting shadows.

"I'll need sunglasses," said Jonathan and grinned and grinned.

Muffy came in, carrying the dessert. To Jonathan, the dessert looked like a chocolate pudding.

"I made this specially for you," Muffy said to Jonathan.

Jonathan imagined how smooth the chocolate pudding would be. He picked up the serving spoon and plunged it into the dish, and then, confused, pushed it into his own mouth.

"Jonathan!" exclaimed Ira and thumped both hands on the table. The pudding seemed to turn into dust in Jonathan's mouth. It was chestnut pudding, bland and with a kind of powdery texture underneath.

"It's okay," said Muffy. "I'll get another serving spoon."

As she left for the kitchen, Jonathan thought: She made it for me, and I don't like it and that will hurt her feelings. I know. I'll eat without chewing it, so I won't have to taste it. There was silence at the table as he gulped it. He took another serving spoonful and swallowed again. He made a noise like a frog.

Muffy came back out. One more mouthful for her. He stuck the spoon in and swallowed it whole, raw.

"Very. Good," he said.

Then he stood up and shambled into the kitchen and threw it up, into the sink, over the draining board.

"Oh God! Jonathan!" shouted Ira.

There was a kitchen chair. Jonathan slumped helpless onto it, otherwise he might have fallen.

Ira was in the kitchen first. He picked up a towel. It was a good dishtowel, too good to use.

"Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," he said and flung the towel against the wall in rage. Muffy came in.

"I'm so sorry," said Ira to her.

"That's okay. I can clean it up," said Muffy. She did not sound cheerful, but managed to be reasonably businesslike.

"No. You will not. That is one thing you mustn't do," said Ira. There were wispy trails of blood in the pudding.

Jonathan had begun to realize exactly what he had done. He wished he was dead. Then he remembered that he would be soon enough. "I'm sorry," he said, in a voice perhaps too low for the others to hear. Jonathan tried to get up and found that he couldn't. "I'll clean it up," he said. Again, no one seemed to hear.

Muffy flashed rubber gloves. Ira took them from her. "Really," he said. "I'd rather you let me do it."

"Okay," said Muffy. "Jonathan, would you like to go outside for a walk?"

What?

Then it was a minute or two later and Muffy wasn't there. Ira was scrubbing, his back to Jonathan, pouring bleach on the draining board.

"Ira? We were talking about Wichita," said Jonathan. "And Wyatt Earp. He wore a policeman's uniform. Mostly he just took in stray dogs. His sisters were registered prostitutes."

Ira did not answer.

"I'm sorry, Ira."

Ira still did not answer. When he was done, he seemed to sag in place. He pulled off the gloves and let them soak in bleach, and he washed his hands, and he turned around, and his face was white like a fish's belly and stubbled with blue-black beard. He looked fat and haggard at the same time. He had been working until nine o'clock. He had been working a lot lately.

Ira walked out of the kitchen and left Jonathan sitting there.

And there was the mist again, and there was someone walking through the mist, out of the midst of the dishwasher.

"Squeaky clean," said Jonathan and grinned.

Whoever, whatever it was drew back as if afraid. Was it wearing a dress?

"No, no, don't be afraid," said Jonathan. It seemed to come back.

Sometime later, Bill was leaning over him, arm across his shoulders. "Who are you talking to, Jonathan?"

"I beg your pardon?" Jonathan replied, on automatic pilot. There was nothing in the kitchen except for the stove, the sink, the dishwasher.

"You've been talking to someone out here for quite some time."

Jonathan didn't remember that at all.

"Who to?" Bill asked.

Jonathan wasn't quite sure, but he could hazard a guess. "Dorothy," he replied.

Ira drove them back home in silence. They had had to leave Jonathan's car behind. Muffy said she would drive it home for them the next day while Ira was at work. "I'll stop in and see you," she said to Jonathan.

Jonathan realized later that he had not answered her.

It had drizzled during dinner. The streets were greasy with rain, slick and shiny. The colors swam in Jonathan's eyes.

"Snakes," he said. "Snakes on the road." He meant that the lights seemed to move. He did not mean that he was actually seeing snakes. Ira's eyes were as hard as the lenses of his glasses.

Getting back to the freeway, they passed an old-fashioned shopping plaza. There was a long low blank white wall, with a row of poplars in front of it. It glowed in blue-white strip lighting, and Jonathan blinked.

The wall looked to him exactly like the face of a faraway hill. He began to see the evergreen trees in its blue mistiness. There must be a deep gully, a valley between him and the slope. He smelled water. A river too, full of cool spray.

"I didn't know there was a valley with a river here," said Jonathan.

"What?" asked Ira. His knuckles on the steering wheel were white.

"There, the valley over there, with the river." Jonathan pointed at the shopping plaza.

Ira was sweating. He kept looking over at Jonathan, and pushing his glasses back up his nose.

"We need some gas," Ira muttered to himself. He signaled and pulled in, under a bright canopy with Coke machines and the glimmer of piped music. A Mexican strode over to the car and saluted them. He held up a bottle of wine. He smiled, face creased, some of his teeth outlined with gold. He held the bottle out to Jonathan. Jonathan smiled blearily back and took a swig.

Ira came back to the car after paying.

"That will be some surprised Mexican if he finds out he's HIV positive," said Ira.

Jonathan suffered a moment of clarity. "It doesn't spread that way, Jo-Jo." Jo-Jo? He had just called Ira by his own nickname.

"You've got bleeding gums," said Ira, succinctly. He turned the car key with a wrench and the engine made a grinding sound. They pulled out into the wide boulevard, toward the on-ramps.

Very suddenly, in the middle of the road, Ira stopped the car. He threw off his glasses and covered his face and sobbed, and wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.

"I don't think this is a good place to stop, Ira."

"Oh, shut up!" said Ira.

A truck howled in alarm behind them, swerved onto the wrong side of the road and, blaring hatred, roared past them.

"You used to be a pretty bright guy, you know?" said Ira quietly. He put his glasses back on and started the car and crept carefully forward.

"I get confused, Ira. Ira?" Ira didn't answer.

Jonathan needed Ira to take the terror away. Jonathan shrank down very small and quiet in a corner of the car, so that Ira would not be angry. So that Ira would not go away. The freeway, the Santa Monica hills, sped past in the darkness.

Jonathan began to sing. He was not aware of it.

I would wile away the hours

Conferring with the flowers

Consulting with the rain.

I would dance and be merry.

Life would be a ding-a-derry

If I only had a brain.

"Don't sing that," said Ira, teeth together.

Jonathan shrank even smaller.

The car pulled into the garage, a reassuring throb of engine bounding back from the narrow walls and a smell of gas and the settling down of light and noise when the engine was turned off. The sensations of coming home.

They walked around to the front, into the garden, and then Ira pitched himself forward. It was Ira's turn to be sick.

"Ira? Ira?" Jonathan's hands danced like butterflies.

Ira rolled sideways and sat in a garden chair, head in hands, glasses dangling.

"Are you sick?" The prospect of Ira being ill too filled Jonathan with alarm. "Let me get you a drink or something."

"I don't want anything." The garden floodlights made Ira look blue-white. He sat still with his eyes closed. "I'm very tired, Jonathan."

Jonathan had to say something. He found that he was fighting. "Maybe we could, maybe we could arrange like a holiday for you."

"Juh!" said Ira, turning away, eyes still closed. With a great effort he stood up and began to walk up the steps.

Jonathan followed him, his head wobbling like an Indian dancer's. Everything felt loose, as if his ligaments had come untied. "You. You could stay at Jenny's for a few days, Ira, in the hills. I'll be okay, I can stay here, maybe see a few people, go out for dinner. You're very tired, Ira, I can see that, I feel real bad about that, I know I make you do everything…"

I leaned on you too hard and you broke.

Ira stopped in front of the door and turned. "Do you think I want to go through all this twice?"

Ira wanted to go away.

"No, no, of course not, that's why I said, maybe a break would be a good thing." Jonathan followed Ira across the darkened living room, into the kitchen. "Maybe the time has come to get a cleaning lady or something or a nurse or something, you know, just to take some of the strain."

Ira was greedily drinking a glass of water straight from the tap instead of the filter. The freezer buzzed, where Ira kept the coffee beans frozen until they were ground. So it would be healthier. Ira turned and looked at him solemnly, heavily, like stone. Jonathan looked at him.

"Please don't go, Ira."

"Where the fuck can I go?" said Ira. He walked with his tumbler of water into the bedroom. "I carry it around with me."

"You're working too hard."

"I'm working too hard to keep away from you," said Ira. He began to undress. He kicked off his trousers, leaving them discarded, twisted. He really was getting very fat. His body was familiar, like an old pillow.

"That bad, huh," said Jonathan.

"That bad. Now if you don't mind, I'd like to get some sleep."

Jonathan stood helplessly in the middle of the room. They slept separately now; sleeping next to Jonathan was unpleasant; he knew that. He shivered, he sweated, he got up. He didn't expect Ira to sleep with him, but he did want to be touched, he did want to be held. He wanted to be comforted.

Without saying anything, Ira began insistently to push him back out of the room.

Jonathan panicked. He began to gabble as he walked backward, as if a tape were being rewound. "Ira. Don't go, huh. I'll ease up, I'll do anything, I'll go away and come back, I'll do anything, only please, Ira, please don't leave me alone!"

The door was closed. He stood looking at it.

"Oh, God," said Jonathan, to the ceiling. What do I do now?

You try, said a more sensible voice, to get some sleep. You try to get yourself calm and try to sleep. You've got a disease to fight.

Even if I want to die?

The room was spinning anyway. Oh God, Jonathan felt himself surrendering the world from exhaustion. He stumbled toward the big easy chair.

In something like sleep, he dreamed. He dreamed he had played the Scarecrow after all. He was swept up in the magic circle of light, and gave the performance of his life. The Scarecrow was goofy and brainless, at war with the physical world, possessed of imagination, another kind of intelligence. He was more magical than the Wizard, kinder than the Tin Man, braver than the Lion. The Scarecrow was the favorite. He and Dorothy danced around and around in circles like a cyclone, filling the vacuum at its heart.

He woke up and knew what he had to do. He did not have much time.

He stood up and emptied his pockets. The garage keys, the bungalow keys, he left on the table in his little niche with the stained-glass window. He didn't want to die in L.A., alone, listening to NPR, waiting for someone, anyone to call. He didn't want to bother Ira, torment him, make Ira take care of him and make himself sick. Jonathan wanted to disappear. He wanted to make one last visit to Back Then.

He left his keys, but no note. He took his little purse, with notebook and credit cards. He smiled. An adventure. What do you want to do? people always asked him when they found out, meaning, Do you want to write a novel? Travel? I want, thought Jonathan, to do this.

He closed the door behind him. It was locked. He could not go back. He went down the steps. There was a silver hint of dawn in the sky. He would catch the blue bus on Wilshire and then the blue bus along Lincoln. He would take the big blue bus to Oz.

After Ira and Jonathan left, Bill had climbed up the wooded hill in back of his house. He looked down on the City of the Angels, at its rivers of moving light. He felt wonder at the world. Unaided by faith or meditation, a visitor to his house was having visions, like a medieval monk. Bill Davison was going to pray to the blank yellow-gray sky, to the lights, to the God that drove them all. He suddenly found that he couldn't.

Manhattan, Kansas-September 1989

"BREAKING THE WILL"

This phrase is going out of use. It is high time it did… But the phrase is still sometimes heard; and there are conscientious fathers and mothers who believe they do God service in setting about the thing.

I have more than once said to a parent who used these words, "Will you tell me just what you mean by that? Of course you do not mean what you say."

"Yes, I do. I mean that a child's will is to [be] once for all broken!-that he is to learn that my will is to be his law. The sooner he learns this the better." -The first paragraphs of a front-page article on child raising from the Manhattan Nationalist of Friday, January 15, 1875. The article goes on to describe, as an example of good child-raising practice the case of a four-year-old boy who was subjected to a two-day campaign to get him to pronounce correctly the letter G.

Jonathan's Canada had disappeared. It had been there when he left in the earliest seventies. By the late eighties, Corndale had been swallowed up by an administrative fiction called Missasauga. It was another Indian name, another vanished tribe.

Missasauga was a sea of subdivisions. Corndale's nearest neighbor, Streetsville, was solid, stolid housing as was Corndale itself. The two realities met as fiction. The farms on which Jonathan had seen running deer as a child had disappeared. When he visited Corndale now, he got lost in the bewildering meander of streets designed to stifle speed

and protect children. It was all about land values and Toronto airport and Highway 401. Urban foxes, urban raccoons were rumored to rummage through trash cans at night.

So where was home?

Jonathan pulled the gray Celebrity out of the parking lot of the airport of Manhattan, Kansas, and suffered a delusion. Outside there were wide green fields, and huge trees the like of which he had not seen since the elms in Corndale had been cut down after Dutch elm disease. He thought he had finally, somehow, found his way back to Corndale. In particular, he was driving along the number 10 highway, the road that led from Brampton.

This made him very happy. This made him feel that suddenly everything had gone right with the world, even though there was for some reason a puddle of blood and stomach juices on the back seat. It seemed to him that he recognized the road signs, the chalky limestone through which the road had been cut. He recognized the huge, 600-acre farms. He wondered what had happened to his childhood friends, and if he could visit them now.

Then suddenly, instead of blood on the back seat, there was a visitor. Oh dear, thought Jonathan. Why did I bring him along?

On the back seat sat Mortimer.

It was going to be terribly embarrassing taking Mort home, because he was in full drag. Perhaps he had come fresh from some Halloween parade. He was dressed as Dorothy.

He had pigtails and a checked apron and balloon sleeves and white surgical gloves. For some reason he was also wearing a bandito hat and was holding maracas. His face was in sections like a quilt.

Mortimer gave the maracas a shake. "Hola!" he cried. "Que tal!"

Spanish? "Bee-ba Meh-heeko!" he cried, lips thick with red lipstick. Jonathan was mildly surprised to see red, but could not remember why.

"This is Mexico, isn't it?" Mortimer was not sure.

Jonathan couldn't remember.

"We're in Kansas?" said Mortimer as if he had stepped in something. The maracas sank to his lap. The surgical gloves were bloodstained. "What the fuck are we going to do in Kansas?"

I don't know, thought Jonathan, still driving.

"I thought you wanted to go to Mexico! That's why you were going to learn Spanish." Mortimer gave a showy sigh. "And I so wanted to go abroad." Mortimer giggled. "Who knows, I might have come back a lady."

Jonathan had never realized just how camp Mortimer was. Jonathan hated camp. Where, Jonathan asked Mort, do you come from?

"From you!" said Mortimer, pointing. He smiled and gave his nose a wrinkle.

I'm nothing like you.

Mortimer pressed his spongy, latex face against Jonathan's sweaty cheek. In the mirror of the visor, Jonathan saw the same blue eyes staring back at him.

"See the resemblance?" Mortimer whispered in his ear.

How? That face? Jonathan thought.

"Daddy sliced it."

My father was good and kind, thought Jonathan. He was an athlete. He wanted me to be an athlete, but he never pushed me. He only hit me twice, once when I had hit little Jaimie Cummings and when I'd stained his walls with berries.

"He only hit you twice!" exclaimed Mortimer and clapped his hands together as if in admiration. "What a sweetie. Did you ever hit him?"

He never deserved to be hit.

Mortimer lounged back in the seat, smiling as if his lips were full of novocaine.

"Did he die or simply ascend into Heaven?" Mortimer asked. "Making a noise like a dove, perhaps. Whroooo!" Mortimer blew on the palm of his glove and white pigeon feathers fell in the car like snow. "And dropping doo-doo on people underneath."

He was killed in a car crash, thought Jonathan, bitter with grief, as if it were some kind of vindication. Mortimer grinned back at him. Jonathan searched his mind and really did find his father without blemish.

"He never did anything wrong!" Jonathan was shouting aloud.

Silence, and a numb smile.

Jonathan muttered, "How else are you supposed to discipline kids?"

"Oh! I am in complete agreement," said Mortimer, hand on breast. There was an instrument of torture, rather like a corkscrew, on his lap. "In fact, the differences between me and your father might be less than you think. Do you like my dress?" Mortimer batted his eyelashes.

Go away! thought Jonathan.

Mortimer's eyes went evil. "I thought you wanted to see Kansas!"

He pressed his face against Jonathan's again and grabbed Jonathan by the chin and made him look in the rearview mirror.

"This face is Kansas. A country is like a child. Smooth and new and virginal until Daddy slashes its face."

Mortimer fell back into the rear seat. Jonathan felt Mort's sweat still on his cheek. Mortimer was opening the back door. "Don't kill any babies," he warned, and launched himself out of the moving vehicle under the wheels of a truck.

Jonathan swerved violently as the truck roared past, horn blaring. Jonathan pulled over onto the soft shoulder and stopped the car, his hands weak, his heart pumping. In the side-view mirror, Mortimer lay on the road like a prairie chicken. A loose, broken wing stirred in the backwash of air from other cars.

Jonathan sat shivering in the front seat.

My God, he thought, my mind is going. I really am going crazy. I shouldn't be let loose, I shouldn't be driving this car. I don't even know what country I'm in, and I haven't been able to keep anything down, even water, since breakfast yesterday. What am I going to do in Manhattan, Kansas? He ran a hand across his damp forehead.

There was nothing he could do, but press on.

Kansas, he told himself, as with extreme caution he moved the car back out onto an empty stretch of highway. I'm in Kansas. God knows why.

Then he looked up, across the road into the fields, and he thought he was having another vision.

Some way back from the road, there was a white schoolhouse. It was one-roomed, immaculate, blazing white, with a blazing white bell tower. It was nestled in trees. Beside it, sitting in a field of autumnal red sorghum heads, was a two-story frame house. The windows were not set square in it. There was a porch. Behind it there was a windmill.

Jonathan pulled the car over once more. He reached over the back of the seat and pulled out his new camera. He had bought it, credit card once again, at St. Louis airport. He had read the instructions on the airplane.

He began to feel his old hunter's urgency. PRIVATE, said a sign. That's okay, he told the sign, I'll photograph it from here, safe in my car. Hands in a tumble of nerves, he pulled off the lens cap and looked through the viewfinder.

1000 1000 1000, blinked the camera, over and over. It was saying the vision was too bright.

Scowling, hands still trembling, Jonathan took out and reread the booklet. Yes, his new camera was on automatic, and yes, a flashing thousand meant too bright, okay, yes, so what do I do about it?

Anyway it was only sunlight. How could ordinary sunlight be too bright?

1000 1000 1000.

He took the picture anyway. There was something dead in the way the shutter clicked.

Suppose, he thought, suppose I hit it in one, right the first time? Suppose this was where Dorothy lived?

He held the fantasy glowing in his mind for a moment. It was enough to comfort him.

Time to move on.

Jonathan got lost. There were interchanges, small cloverleafs, and signs giving highway numbers and town names that meant nothing to him. Jonathan did not have a map. He found himself driving on a wide, sweeping dirt road, between balding hills. They were dotted with small evergreen shrubs. He stopped the car, and got out.

Crickets were singing. At first he thought they were birds, a flock of them, the sounds they made were so loud, so sweet. But the sound was too mechanical, too regular. He looked down on a valley full of trees and white modern houses. In the far distance was a rounded white water tower, stranded alone, it seemed, in a forest. Where was the town? Why hadn't he asked for a map at the airport?

There was a rumbling sound, like thunder, as if thunder had giant hollow wheels and were driving over the hills.

"Rain," said Jonathan. He wanted an umbrella, and he turned and looked at the empty prairies. No rain. Only sunlight.

He got in and drove down the hill. MANHATTAN, said a sign, and as if someone had switched on a light, the road was paved. At the first cross street, Jonathan turned right, and down.

He was very tired. He forgot where he was again. Confused, he thought he was lost in some suburb of Los Angeles. He passed one crossroad, scowled and stopped.

He got out. There was a low modern house, with a long sloping sunroof, and some kind of wooden jungle gym for kids to play on. Jonathan heard the rumbling again, perhaps a bit different in sound.

It was definitely Los Angeles, somewhere out in the Valley. The sound was coming from a wooden ramp built in a driveway. A kid in a bicycle crash helmet was practicing on his skateboard. He rumbled up and down the ramp. The houses had no fences, but stood isolated amid stretches of immaculate, featureless lawn. There was a low hill behind, with many trees, and some rooftops with satellite dishes.

"Where am I?" Jonathan asked.

A little girl answered him. At least, it was a little girl's voice. "Look at the sign," the voice told him.

Attached to the telephone pole were the words LITTLE KITTEN AV. At right angles to it, another sign said OZ CIRCLE.

"Oh," said Jonathan. It made perfect sense. A sign, if you like. He felt quite contented. For a moment he thought that he had somehow managed to drive from Santa Monica to Manhattan, Kansas. Then he remembered the airplane trip.

I have to get to a bank, he thought. He had no money. I have to find a place to stay. He was happy again.

The rumbling went on. It was from the Drop Zones, the Artillery and Mortar Impact Area. The crickets sang, like metal warbling on metal.

Manhattan seemed to writhe its way under his fingers, in sunlight. He drove in and out of shade, turning left, turning right. He passed shopping malls and Texaco gas stations. He was sure that he had dreamed the medieval amphitheater of white limestone. It had crenellations and huge overhead lights. The sky rumbled. Was this Los Angeles having its earthquake? He was elated.

Then the car seemed to plunge into permanent shade. Huge trees sheltered the roofs. Who had had the wonderful idea of building a town in a forest?

And he was there, Back Then. The white frame houses had French-looking, sloping tile roofs and front porches with pillars shaped like Greek columns. There were white trellises and window frames that were not quite square and painted dark blue or khaki. How old? How old? Jonathan's internal clock answered. 1896. 1910. 1880. 1876. He kept stopping the car and fumbling with the camera. Other cars growled behind him, drove around him, beeped their horns. Jonathan thought they were Santa Monica friends, saying hi. He beamed and waved.

30 30 30, said his camera. Too dark. Too dark.

A beautiful girl sat on a porch eating ice cream.

"Whatcha doin'?" she called.

"I'm in love with your house!" Jonathan cried back.

"Well you can't have it!" she answered.

"I can't even photograph it!" said Jonathan, holding up the camera helplessly.

"Oh yeah? Lemme look."

Seventeen and fearless, never having had to be afraid. She wore white trousers and a fawn sweater. She took hold of the camera and looked through the viewfinder.

"The flashing numbers mean something's wrong," said Jonathan.

"Well, s'okay now," she said, mystified. She took a picture. "Here you go. Hope you find a house. This one's not for sale." She strode off. Jonathan looked through the viewfinder. This time a lightning bolt flashed inside it. That meant the flashlight was attached. It wasn't. Jonathan turned to ask her where there was a good place to stay. He saw the screen door swinging shut.

The car nearly lost its oil pan driving over an intersection. The cross streets had high humps and dips for drainage. BLUE MONT, said a drive. Jonathan turned right, and beyond a confusing series of traffic lights and franchise restaurants, there was another sign.

BEST WESTERN.

It was the name that drew him. Jonathan was chorused with car horns as he drove straight through two sets of lights into what he thought was its parking lot. He showed his credit cards at the desk and signed.

Was it the same girl behind the desk? She chewed gum and gave him a map.

"I can't read it."

"I know," she sighed. "Nobody can. The whole town's run out of maps. Everybody just keeps photocopying the old ones, till you can't read them. Anyway they're all so old none of them show the new town center or any of the new shopping malls."

She tried to tell him about the shopping malls and the cinema complexes.

He asked her where the Registry Office was. He asked about historical museums.

"You go up Blue Mont, only you can't read it, and turn right on Denison onto Clafin, only you can't read it."

"What time is it?" Jonathan asked.

"Three-fifteen.''

"What's your name?"

"Angel," she said, smiling. "Dumb name, huh?"

It's the right name, he thought he replied. Only he didn't speak. Outside there was the rumbling in the sky. Gosh, that skateboarding is loud, thought Jonathan. He went hunting.

The Registry Office was in the new county offices. Like everything else in Manhattan, Kansas, they were lost in trees. An old limestone tower rose above the new civic space. 1900, said Jonathan's inner clock, of the tower. 1976, it said of the offices, because the building was still square and flat. There were no postmodern gewgaws, no turrets, triangles or circles. There was a three-story-high portico outside it with three-story graceful pillars. The pillars were rectangles too.

The offices were air-conditioned. There was a mural over the reception desk, but it looked to Jonathan's fevered eyes like a video screen seen too close: the image dissolved into lines.

The Registry Office itself was up one flight of stairs. It was full of desks, slightly outdated equipment and enthusiasm.

Jonathan kept himself standing straight behind the counter. "I'm trying to find someone in the past," he said. He was maintaining, in the way someone on drugs maintains, by conscious focus.

"Okay, we'll do what we can for ya," said one of the women at the desks. She was about Jonathan's age, well groomed, bronzed hair cut short and swept up. Her name was Sally, and she invited Jonathan into the tiny back rooms where records were kept. The first small room was lined with shelves on which thick volumes lay flat.

"How long ago ya talking about?" Sally asked him.

"Eighteen seventies."

That did not surprise her. "Uh-huh. Do you know what section or range the people lived in? Township would help."

Jonathan didn't. He gave her the names, spelled them for her. G… A… E… L. Branscomb. Sally wrote on the sloping surface of a kind of house for records that stood in the middle of the room. Jonathan looked at the walls, at the books. Mortgage Record, Riley County, 217. Record of Military Discharge 3.

More huge books lay suspended under the roof of the little house. On the walls were maps, in colored sections.

"Now," said Sally. "Let me show you what the problem is." She led him to one of the maps and pointed with perfect, frosted fingernails. There was the Kansas River. There was the land, divided into squares which were divided into further squares.

"If you knew the township, we could then start to look for what sector they lived on. You see, when the land was settled, each township and range was divided up into these sectors. And each sector was divided up into quarters, Northwest quarter, Northeast quarter. Sometimes they were divided up even further."

Sally turned and reached under the roof, and with a grunt pulled out one of the huge books. Laid open, it consisted of a page to each half sector. Names and dates were written in lines.

"This tells us who had what sector when and how it changed hands," she said.

Jonathan read:

4-1-72 / Webster J.M. to Louise R.B. Rowe / Book B / page 308

"That tells us where to find the deed on microfilm. And that can tell us all kinds of stuff."

Jonathan scanned the page. "But I've got to know where I'm looking first."

"Yup," she said with a sigh.

The dates were out of order. The land seemed to change hands every two years.

"You can see how tough things were for them," said Sally. "They mortgaged the land, then sold some of it off, then bought it back, then mortgaged it again. It sure gets confusing. The deeds are great; you find out that someone couldn't pay his taxes, or someone else has been jailed."

Jonathan looked up. "That must be great."

"Oh, listen, the stuff you find out," she agreed.

Jonathan paused for thought. "How about school records?" he asked.

"Hundreds. Thousands. But same problem again, we got 'em for the whole county. I can show you."

She led him into a second room, even smaller. Jonathan suddenly saw it had a metal door. It was a safe.

Another grunt and a groan and another huge, beautiful book in leather with marbled endpapers was laid open. A sticker said: Grant and Burgess, Blank Book Manufacturers, Topeka, Kansas.

There were hundreds of schools, recorded by number, and lists of schoolteachers for each year and how much they were paid, fifty dollars a month. Jonathan looked at the tidy, scratchy handwriting done in nibbed pen. The ink had turned orange with age.

"And up there," said Sally, pointing. Along the top of the shelves ran a line of blue-bound papers. "We have everybody's school reports. I even found some of mine up there. And my mother's. But we do not have much before 1903. You see, before the levee was built, we used to have real bad floods, and almost everything was lost in the 1903 flood." She shrugged and held up her hands. "We might have some older records down in the basement."

"I've got to know where she was," said Jonathan.

"Unless you want to look through everything for the whole county. Got a month or two?"

Jonathan stood, eyes closed, thinking. "Do you keep the census records too?"

"Good," said Sally and pointed at him. She had a hunter's look as well. "But we don't have those. Hold on a sec." She leaned into the outer office. "Betty? Sorry, excuse me. Where would census records be for the 1870s?"

"Oh," said her boss, coming in, a hand lightly across her forehead. Her boss wore a suit, blue jacket, blue skirt, blue ruffled shirt. "Let me think." She looked concerned, helpful. "I think that would be the historical museum."

She even gave Jonathan a slightly better map.

Just inside the door of the Riley County Historical Museum, there was an old ship's bell on a plinth. There were some publications for sale, about the Old West. A pale young man in a nylon shirt with pens in the pocket was stapling papers together by a reception window.

"We'll be closing soon. Can I help you?" he asked.

"I," began Jonathan and found his mind had gone blank for a moment. "I'm doing some research. I'm trying to find a family who lived in this area."

The pale young man sighed. "You've only got half an hour."

"I don't have much time anyway," said Jonathan, hunter's urgency upon him. "Can I start?"

"Okay," nodded the pale young man. "Look, things are a bit of a mess. What do you need?"

Jonathan's mouth hung open. Come on, Jonathan. You have a degree in history. You know how this works.

"I need the census. Do you have a census?"

A wisp of a smile on the pale face. "I'm afraid you'll need to be a bit more specific."

No place like home, Jonathan remembered, Millie Branscomb, aged 8, 1856.

"Eighteen sixties. Eighteen seventies."

"Sure. You might as well come in," said the young man.

There were rooms to the right and left, darkened, full of displays of furniture and clothing and blown-up photographs. Jonathan and the librarian passed beyond those into a large room lined with old bookshelves of varying heights. There were tables littered with books and files. On the walls were giant maps of the county and aerial photographs of the airport. There were filing cabinets, giant staplers and a statue of a Paul Bunyan figure with a scythe instead of an ax.

"Jeannie and I have been trying to file all this stuff," said the young man.

"All what stuff?"

"Oh. Everything," said the young man. "We got all these memoirs to file, old photographs, things like that. Have a seat, I'll find you a copy of the 1875 census. It isn't all that long."

Jonathan sat down, shaking. There was a smell. A smell of pancakes. Very hot, slightly charred. Was that wind stirring his hair?

I am losing my mind, he thought.

Very gently, in the distance, he heard cattle lowing. He wanted to weep, but not from dismay. He wanted to weep from yearning. For grass and huge buttercups and the sound of air moving across distances.

"It was, uh, it was retyped," said the young man.

I'll just look her up. Here. I'll find her. Jonathan held a sheet.

That's right, Bill said she didn't live in Manhattan. She lived near it. Where did Bill say?

Madison, Manhattan, May Day, Ogden and Zeandale

None of it rang a bell. There was still the sensation of moving air. Jonathan felt sick. His throat clenched and there was a nasty taste in his mouth.

"This will be fine," he said, his voice clenched. He needed air. "Can you Xerox it for me?"

"We have to charge," said the librarian's assistant.

"Okay. Anything else?"

Dear God, stop me being sick. I can't be sick here.

"Some of those memoirs. One of those memoirs, I can read it tonight." Jonathan clutched his throat. He could feel the ribs of his voice box.

"I need some air. Could I step outside, please, while you Xerox them? I'm terribly sorry. I don't feel well."

He could feel his face coated with sweat as if he had smeared Brylcreem all over it.

The librarian's assistant was concerned. "Listen, give me a couple of minutes and I'll have these ready for you. You step outside, sure."

The Riley County Historical Museum was made of plates of limestone, laid flat into the wall. It was set on a green slope, and halfway down that slope there was a barn and an old house.

1850s, said Jonathan's clock.

Breathing in sunset shadow, calming his stomach and his killer instinct, he stumbled down the hill toward the house.

It was made out of stone, obviously having grown in extensions from a smaller core. A large wooden room had also been added about the same time, now painted orange with green shutters. Another young person was climbing out of it, with a key.

"How old?" asked Jonathan. "How old is it?"

"The first rooms of the house were built in the 1850s. Do you know about the Goodnow House?" The delivery was practiced, polished.

"I'd love to," said Jonathan.

"Well, okay. The first rooms were built in 1855 when Isaac Goodnow and his wife, Ellen, came to live in Manhattan. It was called Boston at the time." She smiled. "Isaac Goodnow was a staunch abolitionist and a friend of Abraham Lincoln's. I'm afraid the house is closed for the afternoon, otherwise I could show you the envelope we have addressed to Professor Goodnow in Lincoln's own hand. The house is fully furnished with pieces either belonging to the Goodnows or to the period. The Goodnow furniture came to us through Harriet Parkerson, one of the Goodnows' two nieces who came to live with them."

"Why are there so many nice young people here?" asked Jonathan.

"Uh?" said the girl. "Oh, that's because of KSU."

It sounded like a symptom.

"Kansas State University," she giggled and made a helpless gesture. "That's where I'm studying. Um. In fact, KSU was founded by Isaac Goodnow. It started out as an agricultural college. Blue Mont College."

"Why is there brick in the wall?"

He was confusing her. He pointed. The limestone wall had a snake of brick down its front.

"That's the chimney. You see how it curves around the window? Well, that's because Mrs. Goodnow wanted to have a window there and they had to build the chimney around it. That room there is where one of the nieces slept. She was Etta Parkerson and she worked for the Goodnows. Um. We actually have her diary from that time, with photographs of the house and family. Would you like to purchase a copy?"

"Oh, please," said Jonathan, in a voice like the wind.

The girl stared at him for a moment. "Okay."

Without moving otherwise he passed her his credit card. He was leaving a trail of numbers behind him.

Then he tried to photograph the house.

30 30 30. Too dark.

"You're going to have to do it without the camera, this time," said a voice.

Jonathan thought it was the KSU student. He turned, but she was gone. There was no one there.

"You'll have to do it for yourself," said the child's voice.

The student came back with books, and Jonathan held out the camera bag toward her.

"Here," he said. "Take this. Keep it."

"I can't take this, this is an expensive camera."

"I can't use it," said Jonathan.

"Look, it's got a book of instructions."

"It will just be a burden," said Jonathan, and cast off one more thing. "I think it will keep me from seeing."

The room at the Best Western was exactly as Jonathan had hoped it would be, clean and anonymous, with a patterned quilt over the bed, and ornate lighting on a brass chain and cable TV. It was stuffy, though. It only had a huge French window that would let in both air and burglars. Jonathan had developed an unreasoning fixation about being burgled. He did not open the windows.

The room also had two doors, one leading out to the pool, the other to the parking lot. This confused Jonathan. He chained and double-locked the door leading to the pool. He went out through the parking lot door to get a Coke. He tried to get back in through the wrong door. His key didn't seem to work. He tried the key in several different doors. This caused nervous women to cry out, "Who is it?" He asked for Angel's help. "Which door did you come out of?" she asked, finally.

Back inside his room, he went to work, sipping a Diet Coke. He still thought that he needed to lose weight.

There was no Branscomb listed in the census.

There was a Bradley, D. W., blacksmith, twenty-six years old, white male, from Illinois, living in Manhattan City. Married to C. W. Bradley, twenty-four, and living with L. H. Bradley who appeared to be both five and twelve years old.

Same ages as Dorothy. Five in the book, twelve in the movie.

There was Brady, Susan, forty, white female, seamstress, from Virginia, Manhattan City. She lived with Lewis and Betty, eighteen and fourteen respectively.

A widow?

Jonathan saw her in his mind, as if in a photograph, wide gray dress with neat black trim and neat black hair pulled back. Susan Brady had an earnest, slightly smiling, honest face.

Then came Breese, a farmer from Indiana, with lots of children.

No Branscomb.

So he looked for Gale. He hit pay dirt.

There it was; he had found her; there was an H. S. Gale, from Iowa, living in Zeandale. Thirty-three years old, born in New York State. Twenty-eight-year-old wife from Pennsylvania, with four children. Only one of them was a female, twelve years old in 1875. Would that be about right? Initials A.L. Anna Louise? Not Dorothy.

But maybe that was where Dorothy came to stay.

Grow, Guduhan, Guinn, Gulch…

Maybe not.

What now? Bill had said she lived near Manhattan, but that could mean anywhere in hundreds of square miles. Jonathan had another thought: Oh, Lord. What if she went to stay with her mother's sister? If she had married, the name wouldn't be Gael or Branscomb. It would be another name altogether.

"Fool's gold," he murmured.

He took out the Xeroxed memoir.

In the upper right-hand corner there was dim Xerox pencil writing: Donated by Annie Pratt, copied by her from papers written by author.

It was typed, in a very old-fashioned, heavily serifed face.

"Pioneer Beauty," it said, without further accreditation.

We came to Manhattan in the fall of 1857 because of the first sacking of Lawrence the year before. We were hardened to pioneer life by then. Manhattan was even then a sizable place, not too unlike Lawrence.

We had nothing to start with except our hands and feet and some land the good Josiah Pillsbury let us have on very reasonable terms. The land was heavily wooded, and so with the help of the Pillsburys and Mr. Monroe Scranton, we soon had a house.

Out on the wild hills, the grass was taller than a man, and my little sister and I used to walk through it back to back because it was said the wolves would not attack if your eyes were upon them. We called them wolves because of the howling. They would be recognized as coyotes now, but they seemed no less threatening because of that.

Sometimes we could see the wild deer ranging on the bare hillsides. Sometimes we could see the wolves basking in the sun after getting all they could eat.

There were many Indians in those days. They used to pass by our house en route from the reservation near Council Grove to cross the Kaw to get to hunting grounds or to raid the Pawnees.

They would come to our door, wishing to trade venison for some bacon or cornmeal. They would visit for an hour or so and piece quilts. They were very friendly and inclined to be neighborly, to our family especially. My father Matthew was an abolitionist and journalist and took the treatment of the Kansas very much to heart. Already squatters were flooding their reservation. Demands were being made to President Buchanan to reduce its size. The stated intention was to remove them from the land altogether! And yet, years later, these same Indians were to be drafted into the Union Army!

My little sister seemed to be their particular delight. She was nine years old and had long blond hair which the Indians found fascinating. They would sit at our table and tell us stories in halting English of the hunt and their great seasonal treks. At this stage, the Kansa tribe still wore Indian dress, headscarves and leather trousers. At first I felt a great deal of concern over their presence. At sixteen, I was able to leave them with the impression that I was the lady of the house, a married woman, which I felt gave me a measure of protection. I was worried about little Millie, but I need not have. First, Millie, as always, seemed to dance over any difficulty. Secondly, the Indians themselves were as far as I could see a peaceable people, interested mostly in trading and the conversation which accompanied it.

Millie soon learned their language. I also picked up a few words, and it is now the most bitter sadness to me that none of us had time to write them down. I am told there is now no record or lexicon of their language-the Indians who gave their name to our state.

Sometimes odd words come swimming up to me as if from the bottom of a creek.

"Caye" meant chief. "Pi-sing" meant game. I know that "zetanzaw" meant big and "basneenzaw" meant little, which is what the Indians called my sister and myself: Big and Little.

I can remember walking with them to the river. It was not unusual in those days to see two or three hundred of them crossing the Kaw. When a party of Indians arrived at it, the men would throw themselves down onto the grass and spend the time in talking and games while the women prepared the meals and fixed things for the crossing.

I remember Millie being able to ask them in their own tongue why the men did no work, and I remember being able to understand the answer: "Big braves do not work."

The women would unpack the bundles and spread out on the ground large buffalo skins. They would then cut themselves lengths of small bushes or hickory about five or six feet long. They would use these as the frames of small boats, bending them across each other and stitching the skins in place, to make a rudderless, prowless square craft. The women would then pile into them the corn and the reed bowls and the naked children.

Then a woman would get her pony and drive it into the river. She would hold on to its tail with one hand, and the boat with the other, and in this way pull life and property across the current. The men simply swam.

I remember one night my father, my sister and I camped with them overnight. I remember the moon. I remember the smoke from the fires and from the pipes. I remember women sharpening knives and feeling no apprehension. I remember we ate a fish caught fresh from the river, a giant channel cat that must have weighed all of forty pounds-or so my father declared.

There was no whisky among them. This may have been unusual. At least my father was not supplying them with it. I remember him picking his teeth with a fishbone and trying to explain mortgages to the Kansa men, who roared with laughter.

My father was always a hero to me, but the next day, he became a hero to others. It was at the time of the June rise and the river was full to the bank. My father and I were up early, to begin the trek home. It was first light, and the women had already begun their crossing.

My father noticed one horse, with woman and boat, pull away from the crowd and start downstream. I think most of the men were asleep, and most of the other women were wrestling with the strong current, for it was my father who ran down the bank and plunged into the water. I saw him swim toward the woman and catch her by the hair, just as she went under. He pulled her back toward the bank, into the arms of some of the women. The boat went spinning downstream, a child wailing on top of it. My father went after the boat as well, which tangled with some branches overhanging the stream. By the time he had rescued the child as well, the entire camp was aroused. I can still remember the gratitude on the faces of the braves. The pony was swept away and drowned.

I grow confused in time, which seems to me to be like a river. Trying to remember is like trying to hold on to the current. It does seem to me that my father was marked for good things by the Indians because of that incident, so I think that my other memories of them must follow this incident.

To this day I think of Indians and my father in "one breath." Neither of them worked and both of them drank whisky and both of them were robbed of their birthright. In the end, both were wretched and miserable. In 1873, Congress finally took the Indians' diminished reservation, and the Kansa tribe was forced to march away from the state that bears their name. My father died the same year.

The air conditioner was clanking.

Jonathan woke up on the thick patterned coverlet of the bed, leaves of Xerox scattered all around him. His throat was horribly sore. Sitting on the chair by the desk, a plump young man looked at him. Jonathan knew his face, but from where?

"It sure is stuffy in here," said the young man. "You ought to go outside for a while."

It was the kid from the Con. "Karl," said Jonathan, sitting up.

"Hi," said Karl, grinning with his huge white teeth. "How are ya?"

"I'm not well," croaked Jonathan.

"Yeah, I heard." Karl's eyes were downcast.

Jonathan remembered and felt a flood of misgiving and guilt. "And you. Are you okay? I mean, are you well?"

"I'm okay," said Karl. "When I heard about you, I took a test. Nothing. We didn't do that much, remember?"

"Yes, yes, that's right!" Jonathan settled back onto the bed with relief. "We didn't, did we?"

"I thought you might like to know that," said Karl. "Come on, there's somebody wants to see you."

He helped Jonathan to his feet, and Jonathan fumbled woozily with the locks on the door. Outside the air was cool and sweet-smelling and seemed heavier, as if it contained more oxygen. White light glowed inside the blue swimming pool. Worms of light wriggled over the walls of the Best Western.

And Moonflower walked toward them. For some reason she was wearing a 1930s evening dress, white satin with a long train. Her small breasts hung unsupported within it. Her hair was still wild, uncombed.

"We were all real upset when we heard about you," she said.

"All of us fans," said Karl.

"Some of us used to talk to you when you weren't there," said Moonflower.

Jonathan held up a hand. "It was just a part. All you could see was the makeup."

"You became," said Karl, "an icon. We saw your picture so much, you moved from the right-hand side of the brain to the left. You stopped being a visual image, you became more like a word sign. You became a meaning."

"That's the trouble with you intellectuals," said Moonflower. She slipped the satin dress off over her head. "You always stare at the images and tell us what they mean to you. You should ask us what the signs mean. We're the people who use them. You should be doing scientific surveys, not staring at your own belly buttons."

She walked away, naked. Her legs and arms were thin, her hips and stomach already settling down with age. Seagulls in the blue light played about her hair.

"You also ought," she said, "to go swimming." She dived into the pool and disappeared amid a flurry of bubbles, white like pearls.

"Let's get some chow," said Karl. "You haven't eaten anything since Bill's last night, and you lost that."

For some reason, Jonathan already had the car keys in his hand.

The new town center was a huge shopping mall that covered the end of Poyntz Avenue, where the bank of the Blue River had once been. Jonathan walked inside and his breath was taken away.

It was glass-covered like a train station, with huge hoops of light in a row along the ceiling's pinnacle. The floor was made out of brick and there were tall fountains and shrubbery in pots and walkways leading off down avenues of shops to the closed and darkened caverns of department stores.

Jonathan walked forward with tiny, almost fearful steps, looking about him. It was late and the mall was just as deserted as the rest of the town center had been in daylight. Somewhere, echoing overhead, were the disembodied voices of children and the imprecations of adults.

He tiptoed down the main corridor, where it was narrowed by flanks of white columns, and out into a wider space. There was the sound of splashing water and emptiness. A sign hung over it. PICNIC PLACE, said the sign in neon.

In the center of Picnic Place was a black, convoluted, and somehow Italian fountain, surrounded by palm trees. Empty tables were rimmed around it. Along the walls were franchises for Mexican or Italian fast food, and for something called runzas. The voices overhead still had to find bodies. An Asian Indian woman strolled past him in a purple-and-silver sari. Her sandals made a flapping sound.

In the far corner there were double doorways that seemed to promise a more substantial restaurant. CARLOS O'KELLY'S MEXICAN CAFE, said a sign. Jonathan seemed to waft into it. Suddenly he was standing before an empty front desk. No one came to help him. He felt foolish. He walked past a kind of structural screen of plaster, meant to suggest a Mexican building.

The place was a confusing welter of decor-stuffed foxes, Pepsi signs, cow horns, old tin advertisements of women who raised fringed skirts like theater curtains over their thighs, antique (perhaps) mirrors. A table full of male students as big as sides of beef roared with laughter. Jonathan jumped as if they were laughing at him. A waiter finally came up, apologizing. "Sorry, it's kinda late, I'm the only one here," he said. For some reason he had a flapper haircut, like a woman from the 1920S. He wore very baggy shorts almost to the knee. He sat Jonathan at a table and passed him a large menu encased in plastic sheeting.

Chimichangas, thought Jonathan. They had not existed a decade before. In the 1970S, you sat down to beans, enchiladas and chile rellenos. Who invented chimichangas? Were they authentic? If not, how long did it take for something to become authentic?

Time seemed to be leapfrogging over itself. Parts of it were missing. The sides of beef had been laughing so long and so hard they couldn't stop and one of them was in danger of choking. He made squeaking noises like a mouse. Jonathan felt distant from them, and sour. How did they get so big, so strong? He didn't want to eat. The waiter came, bringing him a microwaved chimichanga. When had he ordered that?

Jonathan was used to being friendly and tried to talk to the waiter. Was he a KSU student? How did he find time to do this and his homework? Jonathan was losing his conversational touch-university studies are not called homework. Jonathan felt like one of those plastic fairgrounds smiles had been stuck on his face. It was held in place by biting down.

What was he studying? The answer flattened the conversation like some pathetic animal run down on the freeway. The young man was studying the marketing of new textiles. Uh. Did that mean he researched what kinds of new fabrics people wanted?

Not exactly. It was more to do with pricing strategies. "Only people are beginning to tell me the market is bottoming out and I don't know if I'll stay in it." He had a pleasant, intelligent face, a hooked nose. He was enthusiastic when he found out Jonathan was from L.A.

"Oh, I love Los Angeles!"

"I love Manhattan," said Jonathan.

"How come?" the young man was mystified.

"Its history."

"Manhattan has a history?" The young face was crooked.

"Got more history than Los Angeles. Los Angeles, they just bury it under the freeway."

"Oh but the shopping is wonderful!"

Jonathan looked at his pleasant, intelligent face and said, "Your values suck."

Had he really said that? The young man was no longer there. A cold chimichanga was half-eaten on his plate, and Jonathan's throat and gut felt like a wall from which paint was peeling. He coughed slightly, and something really did seem to come free. He swallowed it. The stuffed fox, the orange lights, the drifting beer signs swam inside his eyes.

Jonathan got up to go. He forgot to pay.

Outside, there were humps in the parking lot, like that designer supermarket where there were buried cars for a joke. Knees jiggling uncertainly, as if he were trying to be hip, Jonathan walked forward.

Which car?

He found he couldn't remember the make or the model or the color. He was color-blind, and in this light, they would all look the same. He walked down a row, looking at license plates. He wouldn't be able to tell.

He panicked again. How am I going to get back? he wondered miserably. How will I ever find the car again, how will I get it back to Hertz? Jesus, I can't even go to a restaurant and park a car anymore. It was dark and traffic whined past on the big blue road around Manhattan where the river had been. Trucks, the odd car, wind, emptiness.

What am I going to do? he wondered.

Then he saw the sign, glittering on down the road. BEST WESTERN. Maybe a mile away. He began to walk.

There were ditches and treacherous green humps of manicured grass. Jonathan kept stumbling. He made a sound over and over, like he was about to sneeze. He was dimly aware of it. It was just how he breathed these days. When he was in trouble.

There were train tracks underfoot, hard metal, and splintering ties, and he kept stumbling. Why were there humps and train tracks? Would he get flattened by a train, or would he hear it first? And where was the other river, why was there only one river now?

A child's voice whispered to him: "There was a flood and the river moved."

Very suddenly, everything spun up and under and away from him. Jonathan lost his balance and fell onto the train track and felt the earth spin and his dinner pour back out of him. It hurt, as if he were vomiting up raw sand.

"I can't keep down my food," he said, feeling weak and a little bit tearful. His own body was something precious that had been lost.

It was the beer, he shouldn't have drunk that beer with the chimichanga. Remember, he told himself, no more alcohol anymore. Say goodbye to beer. He managed to reel up to his feet and stagger on along the train track. The train track ended suddenly, no longer wanted. Jonathan veered right and slipped down into a dry, lawn-mowed ditch. Huge trucks buffeted past him, coughing over him. To his left were a Wendy's, a Pizza Hut, alone, isolated and empty, the lights still on.

Ahead was the office of the Best Western, and he could see through its glass walls that it was lit, with a television on. He felt calmer.

Inside, the office smelled like some particularly fruity flavor of bubble gum. Jonathan wiped his face on his sleeve. Angel came out of the back office.

"I'm sorry," said Jonathan. "I can't remember my room number."

He thought he managed to say it very well, with just the slightest catch of tension in his voice.

"Dontcha have the key?" Angel asked, pulling her pallid hair back from her face.

"I forgot it," he said. He made a joke of it. "But I can just about remember my name still, so if I tell you that, will you tell me the room?"

"I'll have to open up for you as well," she said, looking over her list. She glanced up. "Are you all right?" she asked.

What could he tell her? Yeah, I feel great? He felt like mist about to be blown away. "I'm not too well," he admitted.

She waved toward herself. "Lean forward," she told him and felt his forehead. "You got a fever. You want me to drive you to the hospital?"

"No!" he said, too abruptly. He modulated. "No, no thanks, I just want to sleep."

"All righty. Let's get you all tucked in." The keys clinked pleasantly.

As soon as they stood outside the door, Jonathan remembered the room number: 225. The lights were still blazing. Angel opened the door, and everything was just as he had left it: sealed. The room smelled like a headache.

"There's some aspirin in the medicine chest," she said. "If you need anything, just press nine." She pointed to the telephone.

Jonathan couldn't make sense of the words, so he nodded and smiled. Oh, yeah, I'll be fine, he thought he had said. She nodded and closed the door and Jonathan went into the bathroom and retched blood. The droplets spread on the surface of the water of the toilet bowl like stars spinning away from galaxies. Jonathan drank some water from the cold tap of the basin and that promptly bounced back out like sheet rubber.

I can't keep down water, he thought. His stomach burned. The tips of his fingers buzzed. Shivering, he peeled off his clothes. There were patches of sweat on them. The stale, warm air made his tender skin rise up in goosebumps. The sheets felt freezing and he curled up on them, his bones quaking in spasmodic jolts.

There was a knock at the door. "Can I come back in?" Angel asked.

She unlocked the door and looked at him. "Do you want someone to sit up with you?"

Jonathan couldn't answer the question. He didn't know.

"I just thought maybe it would help you sleep if someone read to you."

Jonathan thought that sounded pleasant. "You don't have to."

"It's okay. I got to be on call, kinda, anyway."

"Thanks," said Jonathan.

She sat down primly on the chair by the desk. "What you want me to read?"

"I have some photocopies," he said, trying to think where they were. He had left the papers somewhere on the bed.

"I don't see any," said Angel, leaning forward on her knees.

"That's funny." Jonathan sat up, holding the sheet modestly in front of himself. He didn't want her to see his ribs. Dismay came. "They were just here!"

He went weepy. "They were just here!"

"Ssh ssh ssh," she said. "It's okay, I got them." She coaxed the papers out of a fold of the quilt, thrown on the floor. She tapped them neatly back into order on the desk. "Righty-ho," she said, lightly.

"I'm losing everything," said Jonathan, lying back down.

He told her where to start reading. The memoirs began again. "Pioneer Beauty."

It seemed to him that he was not being read to. It seemed to him that the author of the memoirs was speaking to him with her own flat, plain voice. He thought he heard the crackle of a fireplace.

" 'In those days,' " she read, " 'Manhattan was abolitionist, but St. George was pro-slavery. There were rival gangs, many of them from far afield. Once my father was traveling to Topeka to bear witness to the treatment of the Indians on the Council Grove reservation. He agreed to travel for part of the way with a friend who had an ox team. The friend assumed that my father would travel faster than himself, and so left early, the plan being that my father would catch up with him on the road.

" 'On the road, my father was stopped by a gang of men. Judging them to be from Missouri, he told them he was from near St. George. "Well," the ruffians replied. "It's a mighty good thing you are from St. George or the same thing would have happened to you as happened to that damned man from Manhattan." The gang let my father have his freedom. Further along the road to St. Mary, he found what he was dreading, the body of his friend. He had been murdered and his team stolen.' "

The author remembered orchards of cherries, crab apples and winter apples. She remembered the more uncertain crops of peaches, plums and pears. There were native plums as well, and wild grapes in tame arbors. The fruit had to be canned or dried. Jellies and pickles were made. Paper coated with white of egg would be laid over the contents. Pickles were put up in earthen jars or crocks with a large plate inverted over them and a scrubbed stone placed over each plate for weight.

Jonathan saw woodpiles. Cottonwood, cobs, chips for a quick fire. Blackjack for a steady burn. He smelled apple-scented carbon dioxide, exhaled from fruit in barrels.

Suddenly he was awake. Angel was at the door.

"Oh darn, you were asleep, I'm sorry."

"Stay," he croaked. He was scared. He felt very odd indeed.

"I can read you some more."

"I can't follow it," he said. "Just stay with me."

She sat down again. "So why don't you tell me why you came to Manhattan?"

He told her he was looking for Dorothy. Dorothy of Oz, she had really lived, she had lived near here, she knew Frank Baum.

"Really? Wow," Angel said lightly. "I mean, everybody knows Baum came here once. That's why they named some streets after the movie."

"I'm trying to find her house. I'm trying to find where she lived."

"Why? So you can get to Oz?" A smile.

Jonathan paused. "It's that dumb. Yes." Something seemed to swell in the air between them. "I haven't got that long," he said.

"Oh," she said. "I see."

"I'm dying," he said.

"Mmmm hmmm," she said, pressing her lips tightly inward.

"And," he said with a singsong sigh, "I don't know that I'm going to find her. But I do reckon that I might stay here."

"In Manhattan. How come?"

"I don't want to go back to L.A.," he said, and started to tell her about NPR, and a British pop group called It's Immaterial, and how he loved their single, "Driving Away from Home." He told her about Ira, his friend, how they had lived together for years, and then had a fight. Dimly he realized that she might guess what he was dying of, but he didn't care suddenly. He felt like a scarf tied to a fence post, blowing in a hot wind. His words were hot.

The scarf came untied.

"It's like Gilgamesh," he said. "She goes to find the Wizard, like Gilgamesh tries to find… find… this Noah character and… and… and the Wizard is like a king because he and the land are the same thing, Oz and Oz, they have the same name and when he leaves in a balloon it's like his big bald head, and the land dies, and… and… and Dorothy is… goes to the Netherworld to find life. She goes to the Land of the Dead."

He was raving. It felt good to rave. He finally found words. "She goes to the Land of the Dead to find Life. Isn't that dumb? Why can't we find it here?" It seemed to him a very reasonable question, asked in the spirit of inquiry.

"You're scaring me," said Angel.

Jonathan seemed to settle back. He touched his own forehead and it felt burning even to him. "Sorry," he murmured.

"Maybe if I read to you some more?"

Angel rattled through the pages. The plain Kansas voice spoke.

" 'My sister would never be held down. She was small and pretty, like something in a music box. People were always asking her to sing. I remember that if she liked something, she would try to give it away. She would wrap it up, sometimes even with her best hair ribbons and give it to me, or Father, or the neighborhood gals. And she'd wait and watch as we opened up her gift.

" 'The life of a farmer's wife would never have suited her. I know my father wanted her to be a schoolteacher. When she ran away to St. Louis, he was very unhappy. He need not have been. She became, I am informed, even more beautiful. How I wish now that I could have visited the refined places in which she performed, to see her success, to hear the fine gentlemen, the appreciative ladies, applaud.

" 'After the Angel of Death descended, an exhalation of my sister's perfume was sent to us, a sweet child, her daughter, Dorothy.' "

Jonathan went still on the bed, unable to move

" 'This little girl became a new source of happiness to us. I learned then what I know now, that childhood is the source of all happiness. We remember joy when reminded of our lost years.' "

"Where?" whispered Jonathan. "Where is she?"

"Oh," said Angel and stopped. "You think it's her?"

"What's her name? The name of the author?"

Angel turned the wad of papers over in her hand. No name on the front. There was handwriting at the end of the manuscript.

"All it says is that this was retyped, but that most of the papers were lost in the 1903 flood. But, here, at the back it says the author was E. A. Branscomb."

"That's her, that's her." Jonathan nodded. He looked at Angel. "I'm not making this up, am I?"

"Don't think so," she said and passed him the papers.

He flipped through them, scanning. "Do you remember her saying anything about where the farm was?"

"She mentions the Kaw." Angel shrugged.

"She's got to tell us where she lived!" he exclaimed.

Something stopped him dead on a page before he knew consciously what he had seen. He stopped dead, and seemed to see the word "School" and then read:

I felt as blessed as my little charge to have had Miss Ida Francis for a schoolteacher, and Sunflower School so close at hand.

"I got her!" whispered Jonathan.

And then there was a knock, and Bill Davison came in. "Hello, I saw the note in the office," Bill began, to Angel.

"Bill!" Jonathan shouted, not at all surprised to see him. "Bill, I got her!" He shook the papers at him. Bill stood stunned for a moment. "I found Dorothy!" Jonathan said.

Bill answered him. "That's why I'm here," he said.

After they had talked for a while, Bill gave Jonathan something to help him sleep. Jonathan crept back to bed in a darkened room, and found Karl waiting for him there. Karl's body was smooth and cold. He kissed the tip of Jonathan's nose and asked the question that everyone asked. "What," Karl asked Jonathan, "do you want to do?"

"I want to stay here in Kansas," said Jonathan. "With you."

Manhattan, Kansas-September 1989

"Oz Ev"

"Real Home"-a motto on many trucks in Turkey, usually accompanied by a painting of a white house in green fields by a river

In the morning Jonathan wasn't in his room.

Bill walked out into the parking lot. There was a low, golden light pouring across Highway 24, the trucks tirelessly rumbling past. On the other side of the road there was a warehouse made of aluminum sheeting with an orange sign-REX'S TIRE C. Above that there was a rise of large trees, like clouds, up a slope to a deliberate clearing. MANHATTAN, said giant white letters. On the top of the hill there was a water tower, like a white upside-down test tube. There was an apple painted on it. MANHATTEN, said the water tower, the little apple.

Bill saw Jonathan walking out of the shrubbery. Jonathan was walking backward. A newspaper was curled up and held firmly under his arm.

"There you are," said Bill. "I was getting worried."

Jonathan answered with his back toward Bill. "The river moved. I was trying to find it."

"By walking backward? Come on, Jonathan." Bill tugged Jonathan around to face him. Jonathan was grinning. As soon as Bill let him go, like a door on a spring, Jonathan spun back around.

"Jonathan, turn around, please."

"I could walk into the river backward," he said.

"We're going to have breakfast. Are you up for breakfast?"

"Oh, yeah, I could eat a horse."

"Good, then let me look at you." He pulled Jonathan back around. Jonathan was still grinning. Bill held him in place and peered into his eyes, which had gone yellow.

"What color is your pee?" Bill asked.

"Bet you say that to all the girls."

"Come on, just tell me what color it is."

"How should I know? I'm color-blind!" Jonathan replied.

"Open wide." Jonathan stared back at him like Groucho Marx. "Your mouth, not your eyes."

Beginning at the back of Jonathan's throat there were ulcers, patches of yellow in pink swellings.

"Can you hold anything down?"

"Not even a job." Released, Jonathan spun around again. "If I walk backward, I'll go backward. Maybe I'll disappear."

"Jonathan," said Bill, to his back. "Do you want to find Dorothy?"

Silence.

"If you keep acting up, I'll have to take you straight to the nearest hospital. So turn around. You can turn around."

"Nope. Can't," said Jonathan, and turned around to face him.

"You're jaundiced, Jonathan. You may have something wrong with your liver. And you've got something very nasty down your gullet. You should be in the hospital. Now. I can give you today, Jonathan, but by evening, I want you in the hospital."

"Sure, Ira," said Jonathan.

There was a steakhouse next door to the Best Western, next door being about a fifth of a mile away. They walked across dirt to a breeze-block bungalow. The floor was made of tiles designed to look like blocks of wood. The Formica tables looked like wood. The food looked like wood. The hash browns looked like sawdust, the egg like putty. Breaded mushrooms steamed in tin basins like wooden knobs. Caterers had finally found a way to bottom-line breakfast.

Jonathan stared at the buffet, looking ill.

"You could try some bacon," said Bill. It looked purple and soggy. Jonathan very firmly shook his head, no.

"Jonathan, you've got to take something. How about some coffee? Tea?" Jonathan just kept shaking his head.

Bill's heart sank. The physical symptoms were bad enough, but it was the presenting behavior that was really worrying him. "Okay, let's sit down. Do you think you could swallow some soup?"

Jonathan's eyes moved sideways, terrorized by the prospect of food. He nodded yes. Bill took him by the arm and led him to a table.

A waitress came up to their table. "Coffee?" she asked. She had brown circles under her eyes and slightly hunched shoulders, but she seemed cheerful.

Bill said yes, and she poured coffee, not from the spout, but from the side, over the edge of the black-rimmed glass container.

"Did you catch my awesome backhand?" she asked.

Jonathan was staring up at the lights overhead. They were imitation oil lamps, with pink roses printed on them. Bill could see the dots.

"Are those old?" Jonathan asked the waitress.

"I don't know, we just got them in last week." The waitress giggled. "I'll come back for your order in just a sec." She waddled up to the next table and gave a gladsome cry. "Hi, Horace, how are you?"

An officer of the law in a brown uniform placed his cowboy hat on the table. "Well how you doing, boss lady?" he boomed.

"How was Ira?" Jonathan asked.

At last, a sensible question. Bill almost sighed with relief.

"He's hysterical," said Bill. "He blames himself, he's full of worry. He thinks you can't cope on your own. I told him how you'd used the credit cards to buy a ticket and rent a car and said it didn't sound exactly helpless to me. I-um-told him it would probably be better if he didn't come along."

"He told me to go away."

"He may not have meant that."

"I don't want to go back."

"Okay. But do you think you could write him a card or something?"

Without looking at him, without saying anything, Jonathan took the newspaper out from under his arm and gave it to Bill. It was a local newspaper, and the edge was ringed around and around with Jonathan's handwriting. It was a letter to Ira.

The waitress was back with them, breathing good cheer, perfume and sweat. "Right, gentlemen, what will it be?"

"Do you cook any breakfast fresh?" Bill asked.

They found the car. Jonathan had the keys, and they had a plastic tab that said the license number, model, color.

They drove it to the Registry Office. Jonathan's knees jiggled with nerves, and he hummed to himself. In the office, Sally greeted them.

"Sally, Sally," he said, bobbing up and down. "I found the school!"

"Great!" she said. "Which one is it?"

"Sunflower School?" he asked.

"We'll find it for you. Who's your good-looking friend?"

"This is Bill," said Jonathan, rather proudly. "He's my psychiatrist."

Sally shook hands properly. "You think he could be my psychiatrist, too?"

"Sure," said Jonathan in a faraway voice. "But you have to be sick like me."

Her smile faltered for a second. "Right," she said. "Let's check out that school."

In the safe room, the big book was taken out, and Sally's metallic pink fingernails raced across the pages. "We need its number," she said. "Here we are. Sunflower School, number forty-three. It's Zeandale Township but where exactly…" Scowling slightly, she went to another book. "Uh. Okay. I'll show you where that is."

She led them out of the main records room to the map on the wall and pointed. "That's it, there, Zeandale Township, smack dab where Sectors 23, 24, 25, and 26 all meet." She stood back and with a hooked finger delicately rubbed the tip of her nose.

Both Bill and Jonathan crowded around the map. Beside the main road was a tiny square with a number. It was near the Kaw, not far from the main road.

"So we've got about eight big pages to look through. What were those names again?"

"Branscomb or Gael," said Bill.

"That's right, or another name if there was a marriage."

Another huge book thumped down on the sloping desk, and Sector 25, Township 10, Range 8, was found, northwest and southwest.

"Pillsbury, Lewis, Long and… Monroe Scranton," she murmured.

"Monroe Scranton?" said Jonathan, leaping forward, slightly frog-like. "He was hung for stealing Ed Pillsbury's horses!"

Sally looked up. "Really? How do you know that?"

"I read it last night."

"Well I'll trade you. This guy Lewis here was jailed for theft. And this guy Long lost the property because he didn't pay his taxes. So this was kind of the bad corner of Zeandale. But…" she scanned the page. "No Branscomb or Gael."

She turned the page. "Look at this. This is why we have so much trouble. You got L. H. Pillsbury deeding this quarter to Minerva Wiley in April '82, and then it goes in reverse in the same month-well, she mortgages to him. But then in September '82, you got George Pillsbury giving it to L. H. Pillsbury by relation-but it just doesn't show how George got it. Then in '83 the District Court is giving it to Minerva. Oh, I get it! They've divided the quarters into halves. And I bet that court deed is a divorce."

Jonathan was making a rapid hissing noise through his nostrils.

"Jonathan," asked Bill, "are the tips of your fingers buzzing?"

Jonathan looked around at him in woozy surprise. "How did you know?"

"Because you're hyperventilating. Just breathe slowly, calmly." Bill's hands and chest moved outward, slowly, showing him how to breathe. "Relax. We have all day."

"We only have today!" said Jonathan, in sharp dismay. His face crumpled up.

Sally ignored it. "Right, next page," she said lightly, and looked up and around, still smiling. "Sorry, I just find all of this so much fun, I get distracted."

And her glance caught Bill's as she looked back to the pages.

I wonder how far you've gotten, Bill thought. He watched her scanning the pages. I would say you've probably decided that Jonathan is not exactly a mental patient. You've probably decided there is a physiological element. You're used to puzzles. I wonder if you've worked this one out.

"Here we go," said Sally. "Branscomb." She stepped back and tapped the place with a fingernail.

"You found it?" Jonathan's voice rose high and thin.

The farm was listed in Sector 26, southeast quarter. It passed from J. Pillsbury to E. Pillsbury to Branscomb, all in 1857. They were listed out of date order, widely separated by other sales or mortgages, mostly in the early 1900s. The next entry by date was in 1890-a deed to J. Pillsbury from the government.

"That will just be a late copy entry," said Sally. "I bet when we look at it, the deed will be typed, with a typed signature of Abraham Lincoln."

"So what's the story?" Bill asked.

"Matthew gets in it 1857…" Silence. Sally read, chin resting on her hand. "After that, I don't know. In 1890 it passes from the Pillsburys to the Eakins, So maybe it did go back to the government and then to the Pillsburys."

"That is the farm, though," insisted Jonathan.

"We don't see it passing from Matthew to anyone," said Bill. "Not even his daughter?"

"They should show it passing by relation, but they don't." Sally lifted her hands up and let them drop. "Sometimes they didn't."

"What we're looking for," said Bill, "is the farm going to Emma, and then from Emma to her husband. That way we would know her married name."

"That is the farm, isn't it?" Jonathan's voice rose.

"Unless Matthew had some land somewhere else as well," said Sally.

"That's not the farm?" Jonathan danced with confusion.

Sally looked at him. "Oh, we'll find it. We know it's somewhere around here."

They skimmed the other pages. There was no other entry for Branscomb.

"Okay," said Sally, still cheerful. "That means that must be the farm. Come on, I'll show you."

She walked to the map. "There it is," she said, pointing. The sectors looked dead and cold.

"Could we find the farm from this map?" Bill asked.

"Sure! Sure we could!" exclaimed Jonathan. "Couldn't we?"

Sally's boss came in. "Excuse me. Sally, there's a call for you about those mineral rights in Ogden. I'm sorry, gentlemen."

"I don't know how these sector maps relate to the roads. What I suggest you do," said Sally, talking quickly, "is find that schoolhouse. Get hold of a plat book or something and use the schoolhouse to orient yourself."

"Sally, I'm sorry, they're holding on."

"Okay," said Sally. "Let me know what happens, huh?" She backed away, toward the outer office. She looked directly at Bill and said, "Take care of him."

"Back so soon?" said the pale young man at the museum.

Jonathan seemed to blurt his way through the door, like an unintended remark. He did not wait for the young man to step aside from the entrance and jostled into him. The young man's lips went thin.

"We got it," said Jonathan. "We found the farm!" He was as awkward as a newborn colt. "We know the school she went to, so we can find the farm from that. Zeandale Township, Sector Twenty-six."

"Hold it. Hold it," said the young man.

Jonathan wavered in place, unable to understand why the librarian didn't show more enthusiasm.

"What would you like to look at?"

"Hello," said Bill. "We need to find a particular schoolhouse and farm in Zeandale. Basically, I think if we had a plat book for the 1870s, 1880s, that would help."

The young man breathed out. "Do you mind telling me what this is for? Is it a research project? Is it connected with KSU?"

"It's only a personal interest," said Bill. "We'd be happy to talk to somebody if that would help."

The young man sighed. "Our director is Kathy James. She'll be in about ten today. If you wouldn't mind talking to her."

"Thank you, I'd be happy to."

Back in the big, book-lined room. Hole punches and paper cutters, index printouts, stacks of wooden drawers out of their chests, cardboard tubes with maps inside, globes of the world.

"We've got a very good plat book for 1881," said the young man. "It has engravings of local farms, shows the railways, has a list of businesses."

"Perfect. Thank you," said Bill.

"Your friend owes us ten sixty for photocopies," said the young man. "He left without paying."

"I'm sorry," said Bill. "He's very ill."

The pale young man walked around to the front of the filing cabinets. They faced the wall. Bill sat down at the table, opposite Jonathan.

Jonathan's knees bounced up and down, and the rims of his eyes looked almost brown. He had thrown up his breakfast soup.

"How ya doing, buddy?" Bill whispered.

"I'm going to ring the church bell," answered Jonathan.

"Which church bell?" Bill asked quietly.

"The one in the little tower. In the school."

Then Jonathan looked up in the direction of the doorway and beamed and greeted someone. "Hello," he said.

Bill turned around in his chair. There was no one.

"Who's been visiting?" Bill asked.

"Ira was standing beside the Coke machine," said Jonathan.

"Was he?" said Bill.

"He hadn't graduated yet."

There was the sound of a filing cabinet rumbling shut.

"This do you?" asked the librarian.

He passed Bill a Xerox. It showed a sweep of river in flowing curves and centipede lines of railways. Manhattan the town was blanked out by corduroy lines. At the bottom of the page there was a very fine, tiny engraving of a man on horseback looking at a distant train.

Jonathan stood up and rested his chin on Bill's shoulder, as if it were a pillow.

There was a little square marked "No. 43." It was on the corner of the main road and a lane that ran south toward hills. There were the sectors and quarters with names.

"It says Gulch," said Bill. "Is that a name or a geographical feature?"

"I don't know," said the young man. "I also had this."

He tossed down onto the table a Xerox of a photograph.

It showed a white, one-room wooden building with two windows on either side of a narrow roofed porch. The building also had a small bell tower.

Lined up outside it were about ten children in gingham checks or knickerbockers and a woman. She stood very stiffly, hands behind her back, smiling and young in a long, dark skirt and white blouse with mutton sleeves. In crabbed handwriting were the words "Sunflower School."

"That will make it ten seventy for copies," said the young man.

"Oh golly. Oh golly," said Jonathan. "What if it's her? What if it's her in the photograph? Huh? Huh?"

The pale young man looked at him. "Whatever it is you're looking for," he said, "you're not going to find it in an old photograph. It's only history, you know."

They drove. Bill had great difficulty finding Highway 18 out of town-the on-ramp rose out of the old streets that had not been razed for the shopping mall. Then very quickly they were passing over the levee, a great hump of green grass, then trees, and then they were driving over the Kansas River on a narrow bridge with narrow railed walkways. There were sandbanks in the river and the concrete supports of another modern bridge, crossing diagonally under them. It had been washed away.

Then the river was gone in a flurry of leaves. The highway divided. ZEANDALE, said a sign to the left. The road eased itself up a slope and down again. On one side there was flat, open farmland, on the other steep shaded woodland.

"Look at it!" said Jonathan. To the left were wide fields of almost orange sorghum, the heads in thick clumps. There were windmills far away and old farmhouses surrounded by beech and walnut that had been planted a hundred years before. Trees in a long line marked where the river flowed. Running parallel to the road, through hedges and fields and shrubbery, there was a gap where the railroad once had been.

"Clop clop clop," said Jonathan, very faintly, transfixed.

Bill balanced maps and photocopies on his lap, glancing down. "The river curves in again close to the road just before we get to the school."

"Fwoooo whooosh," said Jonathan. "The river moves. It rolls over in its sleep."

The papers fluttered.

The woodland left them, moving south. There were fields on either side now, flat, rich, and the road was straight for miles. Zeandale village was a blur ahead of them, blue with distance, wavering with rising heat. There were lanes to the right. Bill slowed. PLEASANT VALLEY CEMETARY, said a sign pointing right. They passed another lane, with a clump of trees.

"It's supposed to be on the right," said Bill. They both grew more anxious, leaning forward, peering.

"That's it," said Bill suddenly, flicking on the turn signal and pulling over to the right, the sound of dust under tires.

On the wrong side of the road was the schoolhouse. It had been painted gunmetal blue.

"That's not it," said Jonathan, very quickly, very firmly.

"I think it is," said Bill, and got out. Dust from the soft shoulder still drifted across the road. The silence was very sudden, very complete. Their footsteps sounded very clearly as they crossed the road.

As they neared the old building, a droning noise started. It was as if a hollow tube were being whirled over their heads. Locusts.

"It's the same building," said Bill, holding the photograph.

The front porch had been turned into an extension, its door turned into a window. There was the bell tower.

"That's not it," said Jonathan in a wisp of a voice.

Bill chuckled a bit with exasperation. "It is. Look, everything's there."

Suddenly Jonathan was shouting. "It's the wrong goddamned side of the road!" He ran out of breath. He began to make noises as if he were about to sneeze. "Huh ahuh ahuh ahuh."

"Breathe slowly," Bill said. Jonathan knocked away his hand.

"The memoirs say it's on a lane! Ahuh ahuh. The plat book says it's on a lane!"

"Roads move."

"On a lane that leads to the hills. Where are the hills? A big, bald hill where Dorothy made snowmen!"

Bill went still and cold. That's what the old lady had said. Snowmen, with Wilbur, on a hill. Angels in the snow.

"It's on the wrong side of the road, it's pointing the wrong way. It's the wrong goddamned schoolhouse!"

As if clubbed, Jonathan dropped. He sat down in the middle of the road.

"Jonathan, that's kind of a dumb place to sit." Bill tugged at his arm. Jonathan started to cry with frustration.

"That place was built about 1890!"

"Look, it says Sunflower School. Stand up, Jay, out of the road."

"It was rebuilt in a different place!" Jonathan had flowered into full tears.

"How do you know it's 1890?"

"My clock. My clock is never wrong. Look, the teacher's wearing mutton sleeves."

"Jay, get out of the road!"

"It's my last day, and we haven't found it!" He pounded the asphalt with the flat of his hand. "We've fucked it."

On the horizon, a car was coming.

"Jonathan. Please stand up."

"What for?"

"So we can keep looking."

The car was shimmying like a dancer.

"I just want to stay here. I don't want to go on."

Bill leaned over. "Jonathan. You know what we're going to do? There was a sign back there for a cemetery. Remember? We're going to go to the cemetery."

"What good is that going to do?"

"You're asking me? What are cemeteries good for, Jonathan? Names. Names and families."

Jonathan looked up. "Yeah," he said.

"Come on, let's get up."

The other car began to flash its lights.

The road to the cemetery went up the hills to bald grassy slopes and down again through thickly shaded ravines, over shaded rivulets, toward a place called Deep Creek.

Jonathan snored. His whole face was going an unnatural brown, as if he had spent his life under a sunlamp. Beads of sweat were trickling down him, as if he were melting. Bill felt guilty. I should have taken you to the hospital, he thought. I know better. He promised his profession: Jonathan, I get you back into care by four this afternoon.

Under the blue sky, amid the brown grass and the passing shadows, Bill felt alone. He looked back at the mask that was Jonathan's face and spoke to it.

"I don't believe in God anymore, Jonathan," said Bill. "My faith has gone. I think… I think I need some kind of sign. You have visions, Jonathan. Do you have visions of God?"

Jonathan didn't, couldn't, answer.

Pleasant Valley had a chain-link fence around it and a big metal gate with upright bars and letters cut clean through large metal plaques on either side of stone gateposts. PLEASANT, said one side. VALLEY, said the other. A dirt driveway led between two conifers and circled through the tough little oaks of the cemetery.

It was on a hill far from anywhere. Jonathan and Bill left the car parked in the lane near the gates. The sound of crickets was high, strong, sweet. The air was surprisingly cool, and there was a strong wind, as if the Spirit were moving. Jonathan's eyes were yellow and feverish, and he looked distracted. He blinked and stumbled up onto a concrete platform, with a gravestone at its head like a pillow. At its foot, planted in the concrete, was a rusty old hand pump.

Jonathan played with the pump's long wooden handle. "Can you imagine what a water pump must have meant to them? No more buckets hauled up from the well. I bet this was some old guy who finally bought a water pump. And he was so proud of it, they used it for his gravestone."

They wandered between the stones. The names carved into them were already familiar. There were Pillsburys scattered everywhere.

FAREWELL, said a scroll over a carving of a man's and a woman's clasping hands:

ANNIE J. PILLSBURY

WIFE OF B. MARSHALL

DIED

FEB 26 1857

AGED

27 Ys, 7 Ms, 27 Ds

Down the row from that there was an obelisk:

MARY ANN

REED

PILLSBURY

BORN

JULY 21 1826

DIED

JAN I 1892

There were more humble stones, small, laid level with the ground. Bill leaned over to read them.

MOTHER

HELEN EVA

MAR 14 1869 FEB 12 1937

LIVED ON PILLSBURY HOMESTEAD 58 YRS

Side by side.

FATHER

ELLERY CHANNING

APR 5 1850 JAN 6 1933

KANSAS PIONEER OF 1862

Jonathan began to sing, amid the sound of crickets. His throat was raw, his voice cracked, harsh, tuneless:

My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Bill looked up to see Jonathan staggering up the hill. His singing grew louder. He looked like something that had climbed out of the graves, long legs, skeletal arms flapping wildly.

He is pressing out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored!

Oblivious of the gravestones, Jonathan marched up the hill, out of the cemetery.

"Jonathan!" called Bill. "Where are you going?"

The voice went wild, loud, screeching like a hawk.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Jonathan was marching out toward the prairie, into the high, crackling grasses. There was a barbed-wire fence on top of the hill. Jonathan stumbled into it, entangled, holding out his arms. like a scarecrow.

Bill ran after him, puffing up the slope. Fifty years. The grass streaked with blue and purple slashed his ankles.

On the hill someone had lashed together a crucifix of branches, barkless and polished by the weather. Jonathan howled, arms waving as if blown in the wind:

His truth is marching on!

Like a rag wrung dry, the voice gave way. Panting, Bill stopped running and pushed his way up the hill, hands against his knees.

Jonathan was standing, staring, mouth hanging open. His teeth showed, and his gums, and his staring eyes watered. Bill turned and saw the valley, with its one straight road, its large fields, some of them harvested and plowed under, some left browning. There were woods in bands every mile or so, across the valley, to the hills, piebald in blue and gray.

"Come on, Jonathan," said Bill and took his arm and led him down the hill. Jonathan didn't say anything. Bill could feel the weakness in Jonathan's knees. He trembled, hot, like a trapped bird.

The time was twelve-thirty. Please, Lord, give him three more hours. Three more hours is all we ask.

Back among the dead, Jonathan seemed calmer, more focused. He blinked, and his eyes and head began to move, looking around him. Very suddenly, despite Bill, he knelt.

"Look," Jonathan said, very gently.

There was a low flat grave. He pulled grass away from its face.

HENRY

GULCH

1831-1888

HUSBAND OF EMMA ANGELINE

BRANSCOMB

"A name," whispered Jonathan. "Or a geographical feature." They headed back toward Zeandale. After they had turned out of the gate, Bill asked Jonathan, "Why were you doing all that singing back there?"

Jonathan looked around in mild surprise. "Was that me?" he asked.

They eased down into the valley, passing a road on the left. AIKEN'S LANE, said the sign in green.

"Turn there," said Jonathan.

Bill stopped the car with a very slight skid on the dirt, and backed up. Aiken's Lane hugged the side of the hill. It passed farmhouses. One of them had walls covered in roof tiles. Another was white frame, with awnings. Old houses no longer seemed to interest Jonathan much. He turned away from them toward the fields.

They drove over a ditch. The bridge was made of wooden beams. Reeds and flowering plants grew along the banks. The ditch's bed was smooth, damp, cracked. It ran off into the silent fields and was lost among them.

They came to a house where one wooded slope dipped down and another rose up, a gentle cleft in the hillside. The house had a blank stone front with some kind of ivy growing up the side and along the eaves. The roof had new, smooth tiles and small skylights and a TV antenna.

In the front garden, a woman in a blue tracksuit was pushing a hand plow through a vegetable patch.

"Stop," said Jonathan.

He got out of the car and drifted toward her. The light was so fierce, he was so thin, he seemed translucent. The woman looked up as he wavered toward her.

"I'm sorry to trouble you," said Jonathan in his faraway voice, the one that made him sound like a child.

"You bet," said the woman. She meant it was no trouble.

"I'm trying to find Sunflower School," he said.

"Well," she said, wiping her hands. She was rather old, rather plump for hand plows. Her blue-white hair was tied up in a scarf. She wore running shoes.

"Why sure. You can see it from here." She pointed toward the gunmetal-blue house, across the valley.

"Was there another Sunflower School before that?" Jonathan asked.

"I wouldn't know. But my husband might, and he'll be in for lunch soon."

"I'm very, very thirsty," said Jonathan.

"You're dead on your feet as well. My name's Marge Baker. Who are you?"

"I'm Jonathan. This is my counselor, Bill."

Bill stepped forward. "I would be very grateful if you could give Jonathan a drink," he said. "He's not well."

"I can see that, too," said Mrs. Baker. "Come on in and I'll give you some lemonade." She began to walk toward the house. The front porch had white metal railings around it and wind chimes that tinkled. A Dalmatian stood up in his cardboard box and barked and barked.

"Oh now, Rex! He's not used to visitors."

"Tell me," said Bill. "Did this farm used to belong to people called the Gulches, or the Branscombs?"

"I'm not from around here myself. I just came here to teach school and ended up marrying a farmer. Come on in."

They went through a side door into an extension, a kitchen, with wooden wainscoting and wooden floors, a rainbow rug, made of thick, braided, concentric circles of color, reds and greens and yellows. By the door, there was an old cabinet. It was thick and lumpy with generations of white paint. Inside it was a host of tiny oil lamps.

"Oh I collect those," said Mrs. Baker. She opened up the cabinet for them. She took out one with a blue glass base. NUTMEG, it said in embossed letters.

"Back then people used to buy spice in them. Now mind, these wouldn't be parlor lights. They would be little nightlights for children."

Very carefully, she put it back. "I said I would get you some lemonade, didn't I?"

"I'm sure it's delicious," said Jonathan. "But I think it might burn my stomach. Could I just have a glass of water?"

"Nothing simpler," she said. She poured a tumblerful from a new mixer tap.

"I'd like to look at your shed," said Jonathan.

He wants to get outside, thought Bill, in case he's sick.

"It is quite a feature," said Mrs. Baker.

Bill had not noticed the shed. It had been half hidden beside a newer outbuilding made of corrugated iron.

It was a log cabin.

As they approached, a cloud of crickets jumped up from the grass. The cloud swirled, thickened, thinned again, with cries like windup birds. Bill was pelted by them. They flew into him, their wings throbbing against his chest.

"Hello, Mary Ann," Jonathan whispered to them. "Hello, Ellery."

Mrs. Baker affected not to notice. "This is our storm cellar," she said. There was a doorway into the ground. It was made of wood, framed with limestone, and along the frame was a line of old stoneware jugs. Jonathan was running his fingers through the leaves of a tree. "What kind of tree is this?" he asked.

"That's a hackberry bush," said Mrs. Baker. "You can't do anything with the fruit, but the birds love them."

"What kind of birds?"

"Chickadees," said Mrs. Baker, and she and Jonathan shared a smile.

They walked on, toward the shed. It was tiny, square. A thick limestone chimney rose up one side of it, supporting a vine. The frame of the front doorway was jammed up hard against the frame of a window. There were thick beams holding the whole structure off the ground.

"We have a lot of people asking to see this," said Mrs. Baker. "This is an original pioneer dwelling."

She and Jonathan walked around to the side.

"They were embarrassed," said Jonathan. Bill came around to join them. From under the apex of the roof, flat planks of wood covered part of the log walls.

"See? They didn't want anyone to know they still lived in a log cabin, so they covered it with clapboards," said Jonathan.

There was another door on this side of the cabin. "Why two doors?" Bill asked.

Jonathan touched an outline in the ground with his foot. "There was an extension on this side," he said. "I bet it was a summer kitchen."

"I bet it was too," chuckled Mrs. Baker. "It would get awfully hot without one."

Farther up the hill, there was a 1940s car. Jonathan walked on toward it, more crickets jumping out at him. The car had a long sleek hood, a short rounded trunk. Its paint had faded and rusted.

"That's my grandson, Paige," explained Mrs, Baker. "He collects old machines. Tractors mostly. Some of them you have to crank up to start. He even has one that runs on butane. They're in the other building, if you would like to see them."

Jonathan looked at the car in silence.

"Paige wants to be a farmer. We know there's no future in it. But we just have to hope he sees that for himself. Do you know, they are bulldozing some of the old farmhouses?"

Jonathan's smile was fixed, his eyes unfocused.

There was a rumbling of a tractor up the road. "Well," said Mrs. Baker. "Here comes my husband. I'll just go down and check the oven, if you want to come along presently."

"Thank you very much, Mrs. Baker," said Bill. Jonathan did not move. Mrs. Baker walked back down the hill toward the wind chimes.

Jonathan was holding his breath.

"Breathe, Jonathan, slowly and deeply."

"It's green and red, isn't it, Bill?" he said, without breath.

"What is?"

"The car!" Jonathan was smiling in wonder. "It's green and red, very pastel in patches, like someone had airbrushed it. Very light, very metallic?"

"I'd say that's a pretty good description."

Jonathan turned toward him, still smiling. "I'm seeing green and red," he said, and clenched Bill's arm. "I'm not supposed to be able to. I'm supposed to be color-blind.

"And the trees," he added. "And the crickets, in a flash."

Bill looked at his watch: quarter past one.

Jonathan leaned over and lost all the water he had just drunk. Bill stroked his back.

In the driveway, Mr. Baker was patting the Dalmatian's head. Mr. Baker wore dungarees. He was a big man, but faded, with watery blue eyes and blue veins in pale skin. He held a clean new straw hat in one hand. His wife came out of the house.

"Vance," she said. "These two gentlemen came to ask me about Sunflower School." She introduced Bill and Jonathan. Vance shook their hands and smiled with perfect false teeth.

Jonathan showed him the photograph.

"Well, I'll be," said Mr. Baker. "That's my sister!" He pointed to a little girl in checked gingham.

"And that will be Miss Soupens, the teacher."

"Was there another Sunflower School? One before that?" Bill asked.

"Why yes, there was."

"Where?" asked Jonathan, his voice rough.

"Stand over here, young man," said Mr. Baker. He leaned over Jonathan's shoulder and pointed. "See that hump of trees there? That's where it used to be. You see, the Worrells wanted to be able to say they were helping everybody so they built a new schoolhouse and paid the teacher. But the old schoolhouse was there until, oh, 1961. Thereabouts. Old Paul Jenkins lived in it with his mother. I think he set it alight when she died."

"Yee hah!" Jonathan screeched. His voice gave way, and he began to cough.

The Bakers smiled a bit nervously, and Mr. Baker stepped back. "Well, I'm pleased to have been able to help," he said.

Jonathan kept coughing, unable to speak. He doubled over, hand over his mouth. He danced in place, still happy.

"Thank you, thank you very much. It really means a lot to him," said Bill.

"Well, you're both very welcome," said Mrs. Baker. Jonathan was still coughing, smiling, shaking his head.

"Now, if you'll excuse us, my husband needs his lunch," said Mrs. Baker. "Then he'll go lie down. I'm afraid he's not very well either."

The Bakers walked back to their house, arm in arm.

"We did it," croaked Jonathan.

They drove on down the lane, through fields of plowed, rich, brown-black soil. Off to the right, far away on the horizon, there was a slight rise of trees, with a white, test-tube tower. It was the hill over Manhattan.

"Stop," whispered Jonathan, his voice gone. He patted Bill's arm.

Ahuh ahuh ahuh.

Bill eased the car to a stop. One-thirty.

"The hill," whispered Jonathan, and pointed to the left. His skeleton hands fluttered against the window.

There it was in bald ziggurat layers. Dorothy's hill.

"It's around here. It really is!" chuckled Bill.

"Hurry," said Jonathan.

As Bill drove, Jonathan seemed to fold up smaller and smaller on the front seat. He leaned back, mouth open. His lips were cracked. As the car bounced up onto the main road, he began to talk to someone.

"Sure they will be. I know they will be," he said, hoarse. "They'll be there."

Then Jonathan paused, as if listening.

"But you didn't die," Jonathan answered. "You grew up. Into me."

They came to the lane. rock spring, said the sign. The clump of trees was at the crossroads. Bill turned right and parked the car. The lane was unpaved, white gravel, and it led in a straight line to the ziggurat hill. A row of old-fashioned telephone poles ranged along it on the left, like a line of crucifixes. Two huge farm machines stood some way away amidst the sorghum. On the other side of the lane, the field was harvested, bare earth, thrashed stalks. Everything was seen. Everything was visible.

Quarter to two. We've done it. Thank you, Jesus.

Bill patted Jonathan's knee. "Come on, kiddo," Bill said. "Let's go see it."

Jonathan still smiled. He didn't move.

"Come on, Jonathan."

"Yes, Daddy," he answered in a whisper. He stirred slowly.

Bill helped him out of the car. Bill got out the plat-book map and turned it upside down, south on the top.

"You're not going to believe this, Jay," said Bill, with a nervous chortle. "The Bakers' farm? That was it, Jonathan. That cabin. That was the house. That was where she lived."

Jonathan moved as if he were on a ship at sea. His smile was fixed. Did he even understand?

"Let's go have a look at where the school was," said Bill. There was a collapsed fence of barbed wire that he had to hold down and a ditch beyond it that made climbing over the wire difficult. They had to duck under and around small conifers or larger ash trees. And then, unmistakably, there was a clearing, a clearing where a building had been.

Jonathan stepped into it and smiled toward one end. "Hello," he said. He stood still in the low grass with its purple heads.

"This is where the school was," said Bill.

Or maybe not. In the midst of the thicket there was another building, gray and parched.

"Let's go and have a look at that there," said Bill. He fought his way through leaves and whiplike branches. He swept them away from his face. He saw a window, some kind of shed or outbuilding perhaps.

"Wait for me," he heard Jonathan whisper behind him.

"It's okay, you can get through," said Bill, distracted. Elbow across his eyes, he stood up. There was still glass in the windows, and a glass jar on one of the windowsills. There was a paintbrush in it.

"Wait for me!" Jonathan screeched.

Bill turned around and shrugged his way back through the trees. The clearing was empty. There was the sound of the car starting.

"Jonathan?" shouted Bill.

He heard the car pulling away, dirt spurting out from under the wheels. Bill sprinted across the clearing. Through the trees he could see the gray car accelerate, swerving. Bill got caught on the barbed wire. He slipped down the grass in the ditch. His trousers tore. He pulled himself back up and over the fence, into the lane.

The car had stopped. Dust still rose from it. The driver's door hung open. Bill broke into a run, down the row of telephone poles toward the hill. He got to the car. Its engine was still running. The key was still in the ignition. It swung back and forth like a clock.

Bill looked around him, shouting "Jonathan!"

On the right, bare and harvested, there was no one.

"Where are you?" Bill started to run across the fields, toward Dorothy's farm and then stopped. This is crazy, he thought. There's nowhere to hide. If Jonathan was ahead of him, he would see him, running. If he had fallen over, he would still see him, there was no cover, Bill could see every clump of dirt.

Bill turned and pelted back toward the car, up and over the lane and down into the other fields.

"Jonathan!" wailed Bill. "Answer me!" He thought Jonathan was lying hidden among the sorghum. He plunged down into its midst and ran across the orderly rows, looking up and down them. Nothing. No one.

They had husbanded the lower slopes; they had dug ditches across the fields to drain the wallows, the buffalo wallows where children disappeared.

It was crazy, but Jonathan had gone.

Dreamtime and Zeandale, Kansas-1883

It seems that spring has come once more and farmers go forth to seed their fields. Some oats are already sown. The rain has moistened the earth, making a good outlook for rich harvests. Though nature seems to smile upon the fields, yet some heavy hearts rest among us, grieving over the departed soul of Sister Reynolds.

…Though her body was broken

Through her misery unspoken

Though deformity changed her aspect

Though earth's duties were hard,

She complained not a word,

For all these she could leave in the casket.

She was gentle and kind

Always bearing in mind

That she had a work to perform

And with meekness and love

All things were performed in their turn…

To those children so dear

To their mother while here,

We would say in their anguish and sorrow

Be strong in the Lord

Abide in his word

Eternity is only tomorrow…

– Lines written by "True Friendship" on the death of Etta Parkerson Reynolds, as published in the Manhattan Nationalist, March 18, 1889, as recorded by Ellen Payne Paullin in her edition of Etta's Journal

Inside the cyclone, Dorothy dreamed.

She dreamed she was still on the road westward, walking toward Wichita. Wilbur F. Jewell was with her. Wilbur was still thirteen. He was now as old as Dorothy. Wilbur was dressed like an Indian, with a colored headband with feathers and painted lines on his face. He had gone to the Territory and found the Indians and lived with them. Dorothy's heart swelled with happiness for him. Wilbur had come back from the Territory to find her and take her with him. The Territory would be full of Indians and buffalo and magic. Wilbur was tall and bony and gangling, and he looked so young to her now. Dorothy knew in her dream that she loved him, would have loved him if he had lived.

America walked with them, westward out of the East. Dorothy dreamed that they had stopped in a wayside camp. There were wagons and tents. There were women in gingham dresses and children in smocks and narrow-eyed men in black hats. The men mumbled with metal bars in their mouths.

The adults were in harness. Great thongs of leather led out from the bits in their mouths, and their eyes were circled with rings of exhaustion and shielded by black leather blinders. They wore them even as they sat slumped on the ground, sprawled carelessly around small grubby fires. There was ash and blood on their hands, and they were burning coffee black in greasy tins. Beside the camps there were mounds of buffalo bones bleaching in the sun. Children ran up them barefoot. Under their feet, clattering hip bones had sockets like eyes. All around them, on either side of the road, there were stumps of trees, lined up like tombstones.

There was a constant sound of chopping. Dorothy saw, beyond the stumps, the blue-green tops of conifers. They waved back and forth and then fell out of sight with a distant crash. Wilbur and Dorothy went to look. The sound grew louder, multiplied many times.

There were Mechanical Woodsmen. They were a labor saving device, a sign of progress like telephones. They went on chopping and chopping, cutting out sections of living wood. The Mechanicals were steam-driven, jets of it coming out of funnels in their heads. Wreaths of acrid orange-brown smoke came out of their mouths. Their faces, their arms, their legs, were coated in thick black grease. Whirling gears and belts moved them and they dripped scalding water. They couldn't keep themselves from cutting down the trees.

One of them looked up at Dorothy and she saw he had living eyes. He wept boiling water. The eyes were Uncle Henry's. It's not my fault, he seemed to say, I can't help it. He looked embarrassed, ashamed, as he slammed an ax into the trunk of a cedar.

Dorothy knew then that she was frightened of men, almost all men except for Wilbur. She wondered how she would ever learn to love men or live with them.

A whistle blew, a long mournful sound like all the loneliness that drove the men and the machines. The Mechanicals hissed and chuffed and came to a halt, ready to move on.

"All aboard!" someone cried.

The people of the camp groaned and stood up. The leather harnesses creaked and stretched. The adults were hauling their houses behind them. They were all moving West, to escape the past, escape the East. Why didn't they ever look behind them? Did they never wonder why they were so weary and mean? Dorothy knew and despised them. They were all pulling the East with them.

They carried guns. They shot things. They shot anything that moved. They shot a black man running toward freedom. There were flocks of deer, bounding away, white tails like the waves of the sea. Rifles crackled and the deer fell, their legs suddenly breaking under them like twigs. There were clouds of birds in the sky, darkening the sun. The men raised their rifles like thunder, and there was a rainfall of blood, blood and feathers, and pelting corpses of pigeons. People slipped on blood. Without thinking, without even knowing, the men raised their rifles and fired.

Lift the rifle. Crack. Lower the rifle. Lift the rifle. Crack.

One of them turned to Dorothy, coated in grease, grinning.

"We're civilizing the country," he said.

Dorothy knew that by the time they got to the Territory, it would be gone, always advancing away from them like a rainbow.

They all walked on, toward Wichita.

As the settlers drew near Wichita, there was a great lowing sound and a cloud of dust ahead of them. A herd of Bad Women was being driven toward the river.

"Yee ha!" the cowboys on horseback shouted and herded the women down the banks so they could wash. The women were brown with dust and they skidded down into the water, their dirty stolen dresses billowing out on the surface of the river.

The settlers walked through a shantytown, between lean-to shelters with lace curtains and open doors with women standing in them. The Bad Women were not pretty; they were fat and sour or skinny and mean. Dorothy looked at the settlers but their eyes were fixed ahead of them and they seemed not to see.

They seemed not to see the women running races naked through the streets like horses. Men lined the course, wearing bowler hats and drinking straight from the bottle and laying down bets. The women ran with breasts swinging. Their smiles were fixed; their eyes were dim. Alongside the course, two Bad Women in all their finery got into a fight, tearing feathers and hair. Men gathered around the fight to laugh at it and to cheer them on. The women screeched in pain.

At the bridge, the gates to Wichita, the shantytown was left behind. There were bankers there to meet the settlers. The bankers were the guardians of the cowtown, with vests and rotund stomachs and extravagant whiskers. The bankers took away each man's gun. There was nothing to shoot in Wichita but people and that would be bad for business. The bankers took away the horsemen's blinders and put on blindman's glasses instead. The glasses were tinted green. They made the gray grass and the gray sky and the gray soil look alive. And the bankers sang!

Fine property, with water nearby, in balmy gentle climate!

The travelers sang too, swinging their arms out in front of them like blind people. The pilgrims stumbled through the gates, singing "Land of Goshen."

Wichita had streets of unpaved mud, churned up by wagons and human feet. There were wooden boardwalks and vast puddles and ramshackle tents, and cheap wooden buildings with lies painted on them. FINEST DRY GOODS, said one shack, sweltering in a puddle. FIRST NATIONAL BANK, said a sign over a tent.

Fights began to break out as people tried to camp. Women sat down in the mud and wept. Along the boardwalks, there were freak shows. One-armed men. Women with beards. Tattooed couples, all green and red and pink and lavender. There was a black man with no arms and legs, opening a box of matches with his teeth to light a cigarette. It was a show. In her vision, Dorothy knew that he had cut off his arms and legs himself, to make a living.

There were brass bands in front of the restaurants and emporia. The music they played was loud and squawking, harsh and blaring. They were in competition with each other. They had to make you hear them at the expense of the others. A man in woman's clothing lifted up his dress to step around a puddle. Dorothy peered at his face. He was Jesse James. His face was made of black lines, like an engraving. The look he gave Dorothy stilled her heart with fear.

Behind the shacks and false-front palaces, there were mounds of stinking hides, laid out, with scraps of meat still clinging to them. There were deer's heads, and bears' paws, all in mounds. There were slaughterhouses, full of cattle lowing, smelling blood, knowing they were going to die, voiding their bowels and bladders, so the stink and the flies rose up.

I want, thought Dorothy, to go home.

She didn't want to see any more, because she knew this was a truth. Would her father be here? How could she find out? Wilbur said there might be a list in the County Offices.

The County Offices were two stories high and were made out of brick, with stone arches over the windows. There was a gaslight outside them on the corner and signs by the door saying probate and law office. There was a telephone. Dorothy could hear it ringing and ringing, with no one to answer it.

Inside, the County Offices looked like a bank. Ruined, desperate men lined up in front of tellers, all in peaked caps. Everyone was shouting. A policeman bustled a howling man out of the place. Telegraph messages squeaked like a flock of birds.

Dorothy was in despair, waiting in line. In her dream, she knew no one would be able to help her. They wouldn't even be able to hear her over the din. Wilbur took her arm and led her into another room. Great doors opened, and beyond them, the County Offices looked like a church.

There were Gothic pillars and fragmented, colored-glass windows and beautiful distant singing that was forever out of reach, like a colored scarf being blown away by the wind.

And all around them, the people worshiped, on their knees. Worshiped what was good, able to worship what was good by deliberately using it to cover up the bad. They worshiped the things they had destroyed.

Our Father, who art in Heaven

And Dorothy was afraid and knelt down and prayed.

They worshiped the buffalo. They had his head and horns on the wall, and his hide on the floor.

They worshiped the Indian, his blankets around their shoulders, a row of drums in a glass case. They worshiped their heritage. A heritage is something that was never yours, and which has been destroyed.

They worshiped a child in a manger. The Kings and Wise Men, the shepherds, the cattlemen and thieves had all gathered around the crib. They worshiped the mother of the Child, but only because she was a virgin. All other women were bad.

As Dorothy watched, the Wise Men and the Kings, the shepherds and the cowboys and the mayor of the cowtown lifted up the Child, who was plump and innocent and happy. "Dear little thing," they said. "Isn't he dear?" He smiled at them without guile. And they smiled back, knowing.

Knowing they had a cross. And Dorothy cried out, but all the people around her wore the Green Glasses and couldn't hear, because they were praying. They bound the Child tightly in swaddling clothes so that he could not move. They pulled tighter and tighter on the linen.

They drove a nail through his swaddled feet. The Child screamed and wailed and howled. The men looked around in embarrassment.

"I told you what would happen if you did that again," they said in warning, shaking their heads.

Then they placed a nail on his forehead, and they raised a hammer. No, said Dorothy, no, but the words came out like glue, viscous and silent. And the hammer struck home, piercing the skull, pinioning the babe to the cross, and the cross was raised, and his murderers knelt to worship him.

The Child hung, like a scarecrow, and the wood of the cross bent gently in the wind like a tree. There was a gentle, sighing sound, and the Child stared like the buffalo.

His mind had been ruined. He could only speak now in the language of words. And he looked to Dorothy and cried aloud, "I'm alive!"

I know, said Dorothy in silence, but she seemed to be the only one who heard.

"I think I'm alive, aren't I? Am I alive?"

One of the Wise Men turned and sat next to Dorothy.

"I was alive," said the Child, perplexed.

"Hello, Dorothy," said the Wise Man and hugged her. For a moment Dorothy thought she had found her father. She felt his broad male shoulders and his trimmed whiskers and her heart rose up into her mouth out of fear and desire, which for her were confounded.

Then the Wise Man pulled back and Dorothy saw that he wore a straw boater and had his jacket off, and that metal bands held up the shirtsleeves that were too long for his arms. He had a moustache and merry eyes. He was the Substitute.

Frank, whispered Dorothy, for she loved him too.

"What have you learned, Dorothy?" he asked her.

Dorothy thought a moment and said, "I learned to be disappointed and not to hope too much. I learned how to be beaten and how to beat others. I learned that I am worthless and the world is worthless, and that love is a lie and if it's not a lie, then it's wasted."

"They learned you wrong," he said.

Love is real? Where? How, how do we find it, Frank?

"You don't have to go the way they want you to go," he said. He pointed backward, behind her. And she smiled, and Frank kissed her chastely on the forehead, as a mother might.

Dorothy rose up full of joy in her dream, and she turned, and she walked the wrong way. She skipped out of the bank. It had fallen on hard times. The president had absconded with all the funds and the windows were boarded up. The city was a ghost town. Something about the extension railroad and quarantine lines. The wind whispered in the hollow eyes of its windows, and grass sprouted up between the planks of the boardwalks. Mrs. Langrishe clutched a nosegay over her nostrils. It was to kill the reek of death that rose up from her own body. She stumbled, blind.

The settlers had moved on, hoping to find the perfect pasture, the land that would make them rich. Dorothy saw the great trail they had left behind them, discarded pianos, broken clocks in the mud.

She laughed at them. Wheeee! she said, and spun on her heel. What did they think they would find, but more dust, more work, more dry wells and bankers and mortgages? There was no magical land in the West. They would all have to find another kind of Territory to explore.

One dream was over. Another began.

The train was hauled backward into St. Louis, with sgnilaeuqs and sgniffuhc. Dorothy stepped off it, wearing her white theater dress. It blazed in sunlight.

There was the wooden platform, the brick concourse, the stone frontage, just as Dorothy had forgotten they looked. She began to hear music. Somewhere there were calliopes playing, as at a fairground. The station was full of little people with funny faces she could not quite see, passing out pennants, tiny flags. It was a Day of Independence. Dorothy walked down the steps of the station and saw that everything was different.

St. Louis was a park, full of trees and great open areas. There was prairie grass and prairie wildflowers among them. Great gusts of laughter seemed to be blown across the fields, and Dorothy heard her best lace-up boots swishing through the long grass, with a cripple's uneven gait.

Ahead of her there were swings and a sandbox. There were rhododendrons and other ornamental plants. A flood of children suddenly broke out from under them, shrieking with glee. Surprise! they called. Surprise! Dorothy knew them, from long ago. They danced around her in a circle. Come and play! they said. Oh, Dotty, come and play! They were her friends, they liked her. She knew their faces from long ago. A little red-haired girl covered with freckles who had a high, round forehead. Her quiet little brother in black shorts. Andy and Violet: she remembered their names. Dorothy took their hands and ran with them, and she stood on the swings and pumped back and forth. In her dream, Dorothy felt her hair rise and fall, along with her stomach. She felt the wind on her face. Below, the children turned somersaults on the grass and didn't mind the stains on their clothing.

In the dream Dorothy knew that this was a place where children had been set free. She looked and saw that some of them were not children at all. They were a different kind of adult. They looked like Etta Parkerson. They were tiny and small and giggling, with funny whiskers and conical hats, and they played fiddles or sat with the children who were almost as big as they were, on their laps. They both started fires with magnifying glasses and hopped in sack races. The children and the adults were the same kind of creature.

Bison grazed on the grass and a wildcat lazed in a tree, flicking his tail. In the shade there were wigwams, with white smoke curling from the tops. Indian women sat on the ground sorting dried maize in baskets. The children and the Indians played together on the swings.

All around the park, there were rows of white houses with green shutters. Carts glided past them, pulled by huge gray horses with clopping hooves. The horses wore no blinders and the long white hair around their unshod hooves was flung from side to side by their dancing feet. Over the tops of the houses, there rose great domes of earth. Smoke curled out of them, and Indian ponies grazed on them. The bushes and trees seemed to hiss and whisper in the wind and the flowers made sounds like piano wires snapping.

A dog began to bark. His voice was echoing from far away. Dorothy swung back and forth, over ground that rocked like a pendulum. Then she saw him running toward her, as she always knew he would one day. She always knew he would come back.

"Toto!" she called. "Here, boy! Toto!"

She saw him charging through the long grass, partridge rearing up into the air around him. Dorothy launched herself from the swing and seemed to fly through the air. She landed in the grass and he burst through it and was all over her, whining and barking and licking her face, and she laughed and hugged him, remembered the feel of his tiny back and its wiry hair. He spun in a circle and his bark broke with joy. He picked up his red ball and dropped it at her feet. She had forgotten his red ball. It was covered with spit that smelled of him. Dorothy picked it up delicately, with two fingers only, and threw it for him. He sprang after it, rolled over the ground snarling, and caught it. Then, with a rambunctious toss of the head, he started to trot away, head and ball held high.

Dorothy followed him. She remembered the way now. She walked between the two huge chestnut trees and crossed the muddy street. She went to the front door, with the lion's-head knocker. Dorothy remembered that there was a latchkey dangling on a piece of string inside the slot for letters. She reached inside for it with fat, clumsy fingers. She had to stand on tiptoe to open the door.

She smelled their hallway. There was the wooden table with the vase of dried flowers and the umbrella rack. There were the beat-up old shoes of the woman who cleaned and lived downstairs. There was the stairway.

Dorothy climbed, past the old framed engravings of the Jews in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea, the breaking of the tablets. Coats were hung on hooks, red and green and blue, brightly colored, and she recognized them as if they had been people. Dorothy heard, from behind a closed door, the sound of a piano being played. The door creaked as she pushed it open.

"Mama," she whispered.

There she was, there she was, in a dress like a candy cane, red stripes, playing the piano, her back toward Dorothy, her hair in ringlets. There was her papa, sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, a brown-skinned man with black hair and black eyes and a moustache. I'm not Gael at all, Dorothy remembered. My name is Gutierrez. I am Dorothy Gutierrez.

Her mother saw and stopped playing. She turned and dazzled Dorothy with her smile. She was so young and pretty and she reached out to hold her. Dorothy ran.

"Dorothy. Where has my little girl been?"

Dorothy began to cry and fell into her mother's arms and was held. "Oh, Mama," she said. "I had a terrible dream! Daddy was gone and you were dead, and I had to go away, and I never saw you ever again!"

Dorothy buried her head against her mother's bosom, her mother's dress, her mother's smell of soap and perfume she could not afford, and Dorothy wept. Her mother rocked her and sang to her gently. The song was an old one, one that Dorothy had not heard since St. Louis. She let herself be rocked and comforted.

When Dorothy had stopped crying, her mother patted her back, and moved her gently away from her and looked into her eyes. Dorothy's mother was crying too.

"Everything dies, Dorothy," she said. "Everything gets taken away in the end."

Dorothy looked at the room. There was the rocking cradle in which her little brother slept. Toto peered into it, whimpering, his front paws resting on its edge. There was the divan with its lace covers. There was the black dresser with the cups with the gold edges and the dancing china pony on the piano, and the Nativity in the window, the china figures, the china manger. It was snowing outside.

Dorothy knew all of those things as if they had never gone, as if all she had to do was come here on a visit and find them there, solid, to be used. She looked at her father's face.

"Muy linda," he said, and smiled at her. It was Spanish, but Dorothy understood. He smiled at her. Her father's smile was not to be trusted. He was so young, young and handsome and not to be held by anything, even love. Everything about him was true, true to the point of cruelty.

"This is just a memory," her father said. "Here and then gone. But you have to remember, to have a heart, to have a brain. You have to remember in order to be brave. That's how you grow up."

"But all you've got," said her mother, who was pretty and quite tough, "is now."

Time left you in another world where everything was different, even you. Memory held it together. So where was home?

Her mother's face crumpled with a tolerant, forbearing smile, and she leaned forward and kissed Dorothy on the forehead and said, "Look around you, Dorothy."

And Dorothy looked and saw she was lashed to a fence post in Kansas. It was as if she had made a stupid mistake. She had been in a field in Kansas all along, and it was full of wildflowers. They were tiny, red and white and blue, scattered by the wind. And there was the sky, blue, streaked with pale white.

The world was haunted. It needed to be haunted. The Land of Was was cradled in the arms of Now like a child. Was made Now tender. Death made life precious. The wildflowers were shriveling and they shook in the dry wind. Dorothy looked down and saw the theater dress, brown and stained, still hugged to her breast.

Dorothy heaved her legs out of the mud. Thick and glossy, mud coated Aunty Em's pioneer green. Dorothy unwound the wire from around herself and stood up and looked around her, feeling the dust caked on her face, and she grinned. The world was always beautiful. With a light heart she turned and began to walk, to anywhere.

Through those same fields, Bill Davison tramped up and down. The police were there with dogs now and the sky was orange. It was going to rain. Sunlight peeked under the shelf of clouds. The bald hill was green and red.

You can't just disappear, Bill told himself. The dogs will find him somewhere. He felt humbled by the world, by Jonathan himself. This was what Jonathan wanted, Bill told the fiery light on the hillside. He wanted to stay here. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to find Oz.

Do you believe in miracles?

The rain came, cold, in huge drops that splattered over Bill's bare arms, his striped shirt. The scent of running footsteps would be washed away from the fields. Bill looked up and saw the sunlight broken by rain. He saw rainbows, a corridor of them all along the valley, parallel to the hills, lined up over the straight, flat Kansas road. On his right he saw the sun, and all the sky there had flared orange. This is the rainbow too, he thought, this is what it looks like when you stand in a rainbow. For someone else.

"Oh, Jesus," he murmured, in astonishment, in wonder. He started to pray and found he didn't need to. Kansas prayed for him.

It moved inside his eyes. The hills seemed to rear back, pull away, and swell in size. His own eyes seemed to swell, like balloons. The fields seemed to rear up, their even, man-made rows distorted. The whole land rose up like a wave, and he could see it, bearing them all along with it, the police cars like surfboards, the people balanced precariously, space and time moving as one, a never-ending wave that never broke. The hillsides gaped their mouths and furrowed their brows. The hillsides had a face.

Something huge in the land, like a shark, like a whale, moved past him. Sparing him? A living land that was also a person. After a lifetime of prayer, Bill Davison had finally had a vision. Of God?

And Dynamite Dot lay in the snow, beating her angel wings, the snow cupped in her fingers as thick as air. She was flying and singing and dying at the same time, and she was looking up at the winter stars in a sky that was clearing, but snow still fell, fell past her face as if she were moving through the midst of stars. The stars spoke to her.

"Dah do la ti sang," they said. "Ming ming ming."

They had voices like bells. They were not stars or snow, Old Dynamite realized. They were people.

And Ira Mildvan read a newspaper ringed around with handwritten words:

M'dearest Ox [it began]

You came to see me this morning. You were waiting by the Coke machine. You were 20 years old in blue jeans and you had thick hair, and wire-rim spectacles. You were the Ira who was going to become a lawyer to help Cesar Chavez and the lettuce pickers. Nowadays that sounds like the name of a band. I don't know if this will help, but we both changed. We both went neutral on each other. Whatever happened really wasn't your fault. I always made you do everything. I made you do too much.

It's dawn here. The air is beautiful and clear and I want to get out in it, so I'll try to write this quickly. I'm going to stay in Manhattan. It's small and quiet and friendly, and better than that, it's haunted for me. All this search for history was a search for home.

The old movie house here is called the Wareham and it's a theater supper club now with a semi-pro production of Dinner at Eight. I could die on stage in a dinner jacket. If things got too bad, I could just walk into the River Kaw, where the Kansa Indians used to cross.

I found Dorothy. Or at least, I know where she went to school. Today, Bill and I are going to look for her. Even if we do find her, nothing magical is going to happen, except that finally, the circle will be complete. Bill and I will stand where she stood, and I'll be able to stop humming those songs and flapping my arms for that part I will never play.

I keep seeing ghosts, Ira. In a dance. What would God see and hear, Ira, except a ghost dance, a chorus of people all at once, whole countries, outside time and place, all together, and alive?

Maybe you could come and visit me here.

Love, Jonathan

In 1916 a book was published in a secure and settled Kansas, called Sunflowers: A Book of Kansas Poems.

Bill Davison had a copy, and he often read it. The poets of Kansas did not write about banks or clapboard cities. They did not write about Wyatt Earp or cattle or railways or dry-goods stores. They wrote about freedom and John Brown and marching truth. They wrote about Arcadia and knew their ancient Greek. They wrote about African cities of the future ruled by black people. They wrote about Shri Khrishna.

On his return from Kansas, Bill Davison reread the book and came with a start upon a poet who signed herself E. A. Branscomb.

For Aunty Em, the Kansas wind was like the brush of a child's eyelash on her cheek. The teeth of the river gnawed the banks, hungry for land. She had visions of Indians rising from the dust, poppies springing from their spectral feet.

In one poem, an old woman paces the hollow, thumping floorboards of her house late at night, unable to sleep. Then she hears the laughter of a child. She opens the door and sees only darkness and calls out "Dodo?"

Outside her door is a town. An electric light shines on her porch. Somewhere in the night she hears the creak of wagon wheels, the protest of an ox under a yoke. Creeping out of the darkness toward her and into the electric light come the tired faces of those long gone, men and women in plain dress, standing amid the new, not surprised, not confused or outraged. Simply standing.

Rose Lawn Farm, near Syracuse, New York-Summer 1861

It's always best to begin at the beginning. -The Good Witch

There were chickens at Rose Lawn and china soldiers. The hens were brown and white with feathers cleaner than sheets. They were alive. The soldiers were tiny and perfect, and for Frank they were alive as well.

Frank liked the soldiers' pink cheeks, their tiny perfect eyes and the feel of their china faces under his fingers, smooth but slightly rough at the same time. The soldiers were French because their arms moved loosely under their uniforms. Their arms were held by threads. Frank lay one of them down very carefully next to him on the stone steps. Things got lost. Things got broken.

Was that snow glinting on the grass? Was it water? Did grass cry? Eagles flew. Frank looked up. It was as though he could leap up into the sky. Clouds sighed overhead, across the face of the sun.

Frank was running away. Frank was always running away to secret places and Rose Lawn was full of them. Frank was running away now. But he knew he had been found, sitting on two stone steps between cedars.

He heard the crunch of his mother's boots behind him on the gravel walk. He did not look up. His mother began to speak. The words fell, as individual as stars.

"Where's Nanny?" she asked.

Frank shrugged. He heard the rustle of cloth as his mother knelt down beside him. He could smell soap and scent. Frank rubbed his eyes.

"I don't like her," Frank said. Nanny smelled of sweat and washed his face with her own spit daubed on a handkerchief. Frank looked at his mother's green dress with what seemed to him like thick green ropes embedded in the fabric. He wondered vaguely if they were for hanging things on. Or hanging up the dress? Hanging up his mother, from the walls?

"Nanny doesn't always understand," said his mother.

That was not Frank's problem. He felt his mother stroking his hair. He looked up at her face. The eyes were full on his.

"She doesn't remember what it is like to be a child," his mother explained.

"Why not?" Frank asked. It seemed to him to be a simple enough thing to do. Overhead, the clouds had faces, and they smiled.

"Because it was such a long time ago," said his mother. She whispered, in case the trees were listening.

Frank looked at the clipped hedges and the white fences, the water snaking its way from the fountain's mouth. He looked at the china soldiers and his wooden duck with the wheels on the stone steps. The steps glinted in the sun as if blinking. The hens, feathers billowing in the slight breeze, looked like clouds with legs. They kept kissing the ground.

"I'll remember," promised Frank.

Reality Check

I am a fantasy writer who fell in love with realism. Because I am a fantasy writer, I am particularly aware that every work of fiction, however realistic, is a fantasy. It happens in a world that is an alternative to this one.

There is a town called Manhattan, Kansas, that is very like the one in this novel. It was settled by people called Purcell and Higinbotham and Pillsbury. There was a Professor Mudge, an Etta Parkerson and her Mr. Reynolds. There even was a Dr. Lyman. To my knowledge, however, he was not related to Lyman Frank Baum, nor did Baum visit the town, though he was in Kansas in the 1880s.

To my knowledge, no Chinese people lived in Manhattan in the 1870s. There was, however, a Mr. Win Tsue who lived in Deadwood, South Dakota, and who invited local women to meet his wife on New Year's Day.

There was a Blue Earth village on the Manhattan side of the two great rivers. At one time, it consisted of 128 lodges, each sixty feet long. The marks in the ground were visible for many years afterward, still remembered by people writing in the 1920s.

There is a Zeandale; there is a Pillsbury's Crossing. The Aiken family still lives in the area. There were indeed two Sunflower Schools, one of which has disappeared, leaving only a clearing in a small hump of woodland where a lane meets the main road. That lane does lead to a smooth, ziggurat-shaped hill.

There is a farm rather like the one my Dorothy lived on, except that the people who lived there, the St. Johns, the Eakins, have been moved over by about a mile to make room for the Branscomb Estate. My Zeandale is a much bigger place.

The real one did have buffalo wallows which are remembered as having swallowed one child whole. If memory serves, the last buffalo in Zeandale was seen at Pillsbury's Crossing, by a member of the Aiken family, in 1882.

There were many other sources in reality of this fantasy.

Mr. and Mrs. Aiken spoke to me and showed me where the first Sunflower School had been. They told me the story of the buffalo wallow and another story of lilacs planted on the hills to commemorate another child who had died.

The interior of Mrs. Baker's farmhouse is rather like that of Mrs. Marjorie Sand's, who in two interviews told me much about Riley County and life in the old days. It was Mrs. Sand who managed to produce for me one of the last available copies of Pioneers of the Blue Stem Prairie, an exhaustive and invaluable work tracing the family history of all the original settlers of a huge area of Kansas.

I am indebted to Charlotte Shawver of the Registry Office in Manhattan and to Nancy Gorman and Dala Suther, who provided enthusiastic help during my brief visit there.

I could not have written the book in such detail without the days of personal help given to me by Cheryl Collins and Jeanne Mithen of the Riley County Historical Museum. They found and allowed me to photocopy unpublished memoirs, census records, historical books, photographs and plat books. These memoirs provided the basis for those of Aunty Em. In particular, the memoir of Anna Biasing was a source of much of the material. Aunty Em's description of the burning of Lawrence in 1856 was based on that of Sara T. L. Robinson in her book of 1856, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life.

The Manhattan Public Library is to be thanked for preserving their store of local newspapers from the nineteenth century. Wilbur F. Jewell got his name from them-he was a thirteen-year-old boy who committed suicide. The description of the celebration of the Congregationalist church came from those microfilms, as did the text of Aunty Em's poem. It was in fact recited at the banquet. The Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka also keeps a very large store of such material, from which information about Professor Mudge was derived.

Descriptions of life in Wichita in Dorothy's dream and elsewhere are derived in part from Wichita: The Early Years, 1865-80 by H. Craig Miner (University of Nebraska Press).

Thanks are also due to the Lancaster, California, Public Library. Special attention is reserved for the person who stole the microfilm of the Lancaster local newspaper for the year 1927. It was the only publicly available copy of the microfilm, and the newspapers from which it was made have disintegrated.

The chapters on the childhood of Frances Gumm and the life of her mother, Ethel Milne, owe a great debt to Young Judy by David Dahl and Barry Kehoe.

I must acknowledge a great debt, too, to The Making of the Wizard ofOz by Aljean Harmetz. It is extremely difficult to retrieve the amount of in-depth detail that this author managed to find.

The real film was made in a slightly different way to mine. For example, Judy Garland's makeup would have been done by a man. Millie Haugaard did not exist. At first I called her Millie Shroeder; I then found that by coincidence Millie Shroeder was the name of Bert Lahr's wife.

I couldn't find out where MGM staff parked their cars, so I have Millie take the bus. There were many things I could not find out about MGM during my short stays in Los Angeles. Most of what is available is old publicity material. A lot of the MGM archives were used as landfill under the freeway system. In one hundred years' time we will know more about Manhattan, Kansas, in the 1870s (the high-school newspaper is preserved) than we will about the working lives of MGM staff. But we will still have the films.

There was a Corndale, Ontario, Canada, under another name. There was a very similar house to Jonathan's, long ago, in Was.

The chapter set in Manhattan High School owes an enormous debt to an unpublished manuscript entitled "A Teacher Learns" by Major John Hawkins. He is in part a model for the character of Baum as portrayed in this chapter, and the particular incidents described in it are drawn from his experiences as a teacher. Dorothy's singing death is also inspired by a Hawkins family story. Thanks also to John Clute for reinforcing the idea of Jonathan's disappearance. Johanna Firbank has been a continual inspiration in long discussions on such subjects as childhood conditioning and the nature of literature.

My greatest debt is to L. Frank Baum and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Books make authors, not the other way around. Books come out of their own accord, authors just write them. Books can be written without authors. They can come, like epic poetry, out of many different mouths.

Oz was first visited upon a kindly man who wanted to set children free from fear. Oz grew out of Alice in Wonderland, and out of Kansas and the people who settled there, and Baum's own life.

It also kept on growing. It grew out of improved Technicolor cameras and out of the MGM studio system, which meant the first footage directed by Richard Thorpe could be thrown out. It grew out of Herman Mankiewicz and Ogden Nash and Noel Langley; Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, and Ben Hecht's secretary, John Lee Mahin. Can a script with this many writers be said to have an author? Oz grew out of Arlen and Harburg, who wrote the songs. It grew out of the singers, who knew how to sing them. It kept on growing, because of television; it kept on gaining meaning with each repeat. Oz came swimming to us out of history, because we needed it, because it needed to be. A book, a film, a television ritual, a thousand icons scattered through advertising, journalism, political cartoons, music, poetry. Had Oz been blocked, it would have taken another form in the world. It could have come as a cyclone.

That doesn't make it true.

I fell in love with realism because it deflates the myths, the unexamined ideas of fantasy. It confronts them with forgotten facts. It uses past truth-history.

I love fantasy because it reminds us how far short our lives fall from their full potential. Fantasy reminds us how wonderful the world is. In fantasy, we can imagine a better life, a better future. In fantasy, we can free ourselves from history and outworn realism.

Oz is, after all, only a place with flowers and birds and rivers and hills. Everything is alive there, as it is here if we care to see it. Tomorrow, we could all decide to live in a place not much different from Oz. We don't. We continue to make the world an ugly, even murderous place, for reasons we do not understand.

Those reasons lie in both fantasy and history. Where we are gripped by history-our own personal history, our country's history. Where we are deluded by fantasy-our own fantasy, our country's fantasy. It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible.

And then use them against each other.