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Volume 26, Number 1, 2002 reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum and Joyce Corrington* THE RISI’S WIFE John William Corrington I I chose the latter course and started for a bar I knew over at the top of Milam Street. It was a very dark bar in which only soft old-fashioned music was played and where, until eight-thirty or nine o’clock, I could count on it being empty or at most occupied by a scattering of men solitary as I, strolling in from the private forests of their lives for a drink of liquor or a glass of beer not shared with others but at least not taken quite alone. As I walked through the late shadows, I tried to realize the quietude, the strange unpeopled intensity of those abandoned streets rather than let my mind dwell upon what I had just left behind me. I was determined not to break down, not to embarrass myself-even if before no one but myself. And even walking alone with twilight draped around me like a shaman’s shawl, that was not easy. I had spent the day in a status conference on one of those pieces of civil litigation that spins pre-trial conferences and batches of ex rel proceedings out of the case-in-chief like lint off a cheap suit-one of those things of the law that may go on for five or six years, even longer. Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in its modern corporate version, a class action having to do with nothing more challenging on the face of it than toddlers’ nightclothes which had been manufactured by the hundreds of thousands in anonymous Asian factories, sold under the label of a Brooklyn company unhappily called Nighty-Night, and which then, to everyone’s dismay, had proved to possess what the law calls a latent defect. The defect in this case was that the nightclothes tended to catch fire with remarkable ease, to flash up in a matter of seconds and then, still flaming, to melt onto the skin so that nothing could remove them until the child within was incinerated, either dead or so awfully burned that in most cases death would have been a mercy. No one liked the substance of the case. Plaintiff attorneys had little stomach for bringing their clients to the witness stand. Defense counsel dreaded what a jury might do confronted with such facts. No one wanted to try the case, and everyone knew that no settlement was likely, that the case was almost certain to be tried. It had been our task that afternoon to try to establish some ground rules for exhibits. In their very nature, any exhibits, any evidence that one could conjure up, was, and so help me God I intend no pun, inflammatory. Conference after conference, ruling after ruling, appeal after appeal had come and gone in regard to no issue but how the case might be honestly and fairly presented without immediate and irretrievable prejudice to the defense. That day we had spent viewing in globo the evidence that the plaintiffs wished to present. I think none of the lawyers had seen more than a fraction of it before. There had been no need to pool the exhibits from the various separate cases until the Fifth Circuit ruled that, in the interest of judicial economy, the entire body of plaintiffs’ evidence must be presented to the district judge in charge of the consolidated cases for a specific and final ruling as to admissibility, subject to yet another appeal. So all of us had gone into chambers to see in its totality just what had happened with Nighty-Night Sleepers, and for what we were seeking relief. There were photographs from Tulsa and Davenport, Tyler and Lake Placid, Torrance and Bangor, and a hundred other places, some I had never heard of. When we had seen all there was to see, we parted in silence, no decision made, hardly able to look at one another-much less ready to debate the question of what should be shown to the jury, that they might decide. The sane answer was, None of it. None of it. Not the least heartbreaking true-color print that froze in ashy white and charred black, fatty yellow and blood scarlet the numbing parade of children burned alive by decisions teetering between innocent misjudgment and insouciant greed. Most of the photos had been shot in morgues or funeral parlors in various towns, and after the first dozen or so, the small bodies twisted in final anguish, bits of blanket or rug stuck to ashes and seared flesh by someone who must in desperation have tried to save what was manifestly beyond saving, even the horror, that nameless shameful curiosity which makes us in some secret cesspool of our soul’s yearn to see what should not be seen, even that fell away and one picture differentiated itself from another not by transfixed and static poses of one child or infant reaching out for help that could not come, or by those who instead had turned inward fetus-like as if even their brief acquaintance with the world had been enough for them to learn that nothing from outside would aid them, or even by appended names, Baby Ferguson, Sally Turner, Stuart Child–but by the shapes and sizes of the porcelain or marble trays and slabs upon which the children were exposed so that a record might be made. So that evidence might exist. When we had seen it all and gone our ways back into the world, it was fitting that night was almost upon us. Thus we could step, each one of us, back into his own illusion, his own private vision of things, in which children lived and grew, healthy and protected. Every one of us had spent his working life seeking evidence. Because, most of us believed, there is no earthly difference between evidence and truth. What befalls such men when the evidence is so overwhelming, so appalling, that the enduring fabric of the world itself seems to melt and run like the cheap synthetic cloth of Nighty-Night which had claimed so many? I think most such men walk as I did that evening, toward some certain place where there is darkness and quiet and whiskey. It is possible with whiskey and good memories to put aside even evidence. With such implements, we can, after a day at the lawyer’s craft, wind back within ourselves, reverse the process of discriminating, deter-mining, selecting, and pretend that our own best imaginings, our most cherished illusions, are the gravel bottom and bedrock of the universe– that all else is fable or delusion, mere opinion or bad faith. The place was called Fort Knox. It seemed darker than usual inside that evening, and I stumbled against one chair after another on the way back to my favorite table in a far corner where only the bartender, Lester, and the Lord himself could spot me. That evening, finding the table, a sturdy chair under my hand, was like grasping a life raft after flailing for hours in dark water. I had slipped down into the seat before I realized that the table was already occupied. I started to rise again. –I’m sorry, I said. –My eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark . . . –Stay where you are, a voice I recognized but could not place said from across the table, out of a spaceless dark I still could not penetrate. –You walked all the way here from the courthouse looking for more than a drink. Stay put. Never before that moment, as I recall, had I the feeling that something Other had chosen to communicate with me. Because I am a rational man, read not only in the law, but in all the artifacts and accidents of man as well. I am one of those devoted, given over, to evidence and glad of it. I do not judge my most distant savage fathers harshly, those who found in the world a Mysterium Tremendum, a dark and distant Other. I simply do not share and want no part of the malady that passed for faith and truth among them. I do not know that we are better off than they. I only know what I can bear and what I cannot. I can bear a world ruled by the law of physics–even by relativity and quantum mechanics, if I put my mind on it and my own interpretation to it. I can bear a world that forgives little and rewards nothing. I can even bear the certainty that at the moment of death my soul, whatever that may be, will wink out like a defective light bulb. What I cannot bear is a world in which plain evidence is a farce, proof a chimera, substance smoke, and the very frame of reality itself nothing more than a dream, a passing improbable tremor across the face of an abyss of mystery deeper than that evoked in the wildest ravings of those we name mad and then immure. I am not unaware that the structure of modern thinking has curved away from the dream of reason. All I know is that the single illusion I hold with all my strength is that the world that lies to hand is not illusion. As that momentary shock evanesced, the darkness of the bar began to clarify. I remembered that something Other is an empty category, and everything that is, exists. I found Lester, the barkeep, at my elbow and realized that the something Other across the table in this instance was Brooks Buchanan, chairman of the defense committee–my opposite number–who had spent the afternoon in the same stuffy conference room going through the same apocalyptic photographs with me, and the last man–literally–on the planet whom I would have sought out just then to share a table with. Still, and despite that, an old and trusted friend. A classmate from LSU Law, a fine and decent lawyer, a frequent lunch companion and charter member of that best of fragile modern cults, the fraternity of the bar. Considering all that, I could not possibly get up and seek out another table to carry out my rites–any more than he could have asked me to. We went back too far. We had shared too much. –What’ll it be, Mr. Finch? Lester asked me. –What he wants is a water glass, Brooks told him slyly, –No, make that two. One for water. Lester vanished in the darkness, and I began to make out Brooks’ face across the table, disembodied, pale, wearing a wry cheerless smile that floated above his invisible navy blue pin-stripe so that it seemed an oracle summoned by some extraordinary talented medium, about to speak words that were signs. Then he did just that. –I have here a bottle of Irish and a carafe of ice water. I was going to drink both of them. Lester has a dime to call a cab and ten dollars for the driver. Now that you’ve been guided here, I expect you’ll do the honorable thing . . . –I don’t believe I have a choice, I said. –I don’t think I could make it back down to the Glass Hat. –Glass Hat’s a miserable place anyhow, Brooks said as Lester brought the glasses and disappeared. –You thought you wanted to drink alone, and I thought I wanted to drink this whole damned quart. We were both wrong. Some higher power . . . I laughed. Brooks was a man of evidence, too. He spoke in jest. I was sure of it. –How the hell can you even think about a higher power after this afternoon . . . ? –We’re not going to talk about that, are we? –No. –Anyhow, I haven’t thought about it since I sat down and broke this seal. The darkness was becoming visible. I could see him clearly now. –You . . . haven’t thought of it? –No, truly. I was remembering. An old case . . . Something . . . Other. Something more . . . awful. –More awful? Then you sure as hell must have been a judge at Nuremburg. –All of us were . . . but no, I didn’t say more heartbreaking, more unmanning. Awful: inspiring awe. –Even at that . . . –Didn’t you notice that the first dozen or so exhibits were the worst? That you began to become numb, picture by picture, after that? Until at the end, showing us more pictures was like firing bullets into a corpse? I poured whiskey and pondered that for a moment. –I guess so, I said.–Something like that. –It’s that first one that breaks open, destroys, that leaves destitute. Another two weeks of days like today, and we’d be connoisseurs of burned babies. I must have looked away or shuddered. Brooks’ voice was cool and distant and analytical–the way the voice of a man of evidence should always be. But his face belied his words. The sadness and mortal distress were ineradicable. What he had uttered were not the seeds of a new defense strategy cooking in his mind. It was a simple truth. –We’d . . . adjust, Brooks went on. –If experiencing such things was to become the staple of the day-by-day, we’d have a sandwich and a bottle of beer and find those damned photographs sooner or later had no more power over us. They’d simply become part of an unending stream of . . . evidence. What you can scarcely bear in the singular becomes commonplace in the plural. I shook my head and said nothing. The Irish whiskey was fine and warm and made me think of long-ago fall evenings by wood fires when birds were flying in from the north and we slept out beside our guns so as not to miss a moment of the light next morning. Brooks sipped his whiskey, leaned back and threw a handful of cigars on the table. He brought out a kitchen match and lit one of the cigars, continuing to hold the match even after the cigar had fired. –Agni . . . the fire . . . –What? –The Vedic fire . . . the fire of sacrifice, the sun, lightning . . . fire in the water. The Aryans, our remotest ancestors . . . before we were Americans or English . . . or even Germanic, Italic, or Greek . . . or Indian. The flame reached his fingers and he dropped the match into the ashtray. –I almost never take divorce cases, Brooks said. –I never saw a righteous divorce. The pits of civil litigation. Hell, maybe the damned hippies are right. Maybe we ought to live out of wedlock, like animals . . . –And stop the pretensions? –Why not? –You don’t believe that. –No, I can’t afford to believe that. I don’t know what I might do if I believed that. I picked up one of the cigars and lit it, and for a few minutes we sat silent in the darkness there, wreathing each other in smoke like priests with censers blessing objects, smoothing away their worldiness, establishing them in eternity for a moment. –Family, Brooks said. –We’re none of us real around here except in terms of family. My damned practice depends on family. Aside from insurance work, the rest is family, isn’t it? I hadn’t thought of that before, but it was so. North Louisiana remains a web of families, of interlocking relationships founded on blood and marriage. And the practice of law, at its root, is the stabilizing and rearranging of those relationships. –She was a lovely woman, still pretty, almost young, from one of the old families. Leslie Stettin . . . You know the Stettins? I know everyone. The strata of Shreveport’s people, except for newcomers and transients, was an open book to me as it was to Brooks. I expect every community in its very collectivity knows something in a special and penetrating way. New Orleanians know food. New Yorkers know money. Washingtonians know politics. Parisians know fashion. Shreveporters know each other. The Stettins had once owned large tracts of land south of the town. There had come to be several branches of them, children of brothers taking, in each generation, smaller and smaller portions of the land until at last the family itself had fallen into eclipse, into shadow, simply because the land each cousin had insisted upon having as his right had become too small a plot to turn a profit on. That was what I knew. I could not recall ever hearing of Leslie Stettin. –The whole lot had gone downhill by then, Brooks went on. –There hadn’t been any money for a couple of generations, and children whose fathers and mothers had gone to school up east or in Dallas or New Orleans were getting diplomas from a local business college or secretary school. I knew Leslie in grade school, in high school. Last hooraw, I guess. Her folks sent her to Southfield because it was a nice private school and you started right there coming to know the people you’d be spending the rest of your life with. But she stopped after the sixth grade. Somebody said her parents got behind with the tuition. Then we met again at Byrd High. There were a few dates, a movie or two. Brooks poured himself another slug of whiskey, looked at the ice water, but decided against it. –Once in a while after that, I’d see her out at the Big Chain supermarket on Youree Drive shopping with her mother. Or when I was home from boarding school in Virginia, we might end up at a dance together. We’d speak and dance a dance and go our ways and that was that. Later, while you and I were together at LSU, someone told me she’d married a trolley driver. –A . . . trolley driver? –A trolley driver. I didn’t think much about it–no more than musing about that little dark-eyed girl at Southfield with impeccable manners and a sweet distant smile that betokened good rearing even to a bumpkin like me whose folks had made their money selling real-estate–not land, not honest to God land, but fake land. Real estate in Broadmoor for tract houses. Anyhow, the years passed, and nothing put me in mind of Leslie, until one day she turned up in my office. –Wanting to uncouple from the trolley driver . . . –Just hold up. These things take time . . . –Sorry, Brooks. Plaintiff attorneys are always in a hurry. –And defense counsel is always moderate, prudent . . . –Baloney. You just want to run the meter, collect ten bucks for a two-bit job . . . We both laughed. It was an age-old argument bespeaking the inner tensions and interests of a profession which, God help us, we both loved. –It seems she’d married Charlie Babin in 1939 or 1940, before the war, anyhow. By the time she came to me, they’d been married ten years or so. Leslie told me it had been a great love. Charles Babin, a country boy from somewhere down in Rapides Parish. Started with the Shreveport Street Railway back around 1936 or so. Young, dependable, even had himself a semester or two of college. Management timber in those days. High hopes even in 1939 or 40 or whenever. –A great love . . . –Well, why not? Why couldn’t a girl from Shreveport with reduced prospects and a boy from Rapides Parish with only the hopes he brought with him from the country find something as fine between them as a doomed Roman politician and the last queen of a rotting and terminal Egyptian dynasty? Or a couple of Italian kids named Capulet and Montague? –All right. Why not? –No reason at all. Considering what Charlie Babin was going to become by the end of this particular passage in the world, great love is small potatoes . . . All right, Leslie wanted a divorce. No, hell, I’m not started and I’ve already got it wrong. She didn’t want a divorce. A divorce was the last thing on earth she wanted. The great love was still intact. It was that she had to have a divorce . . . –Women? Whiskey . . . ? –Nothing like that. He never left home in the evenings unless he was driving the Line Avenue trolley, never touched a drop of anything. No, the trouble was something . . . more exotic. –That doesn’t sound like a Shreveport trolley driver. –Don’t go off thinking you know anything about Charlie Babin, Albert. I’m not sure anyone on this damned shrinking planet knew anything about him . . . –All right. You tell me. What did he do that made a woman who loved him have to have a divorce? –It seems he had taken to meditating. –Meditating, I laughed. –Well yes, I guess that might drive a woman up the wall. Brooks shook his head. –I don’t think you’re in the right frame of mind to hear this story. Maybe it’s the whiskey–or how we spent our afternoon . . . –Maybe it’s both, I answered. –Anyhow, what kind of a frame of mind would you like? Brooks shook his head. –I don’t know. Maybe it’s a frame of mind I don’t want. Maybe just being a lawyer makes it all wrong . . . –Nothing either one of us can do about that, is there? –No . . . Anyhow, now I think about it, it’s not a story to tell anyone, really . . . You see, Charlie Babin didn’t just meditate. He . . . made things happen. He could . . . affect things. –I believe you’ve lost me. Brooks leaned back, pushed his whiskey aside. –Maybe I’m not a story-teller. You see, it’s what happened to me that’s the thing. By the time I was done with Charlie and Leslie Babin–or they were done with me–I was . . . different. All the extremes were blunted. Laughter, tears, fear, joy. What you went through at that status conference today . . . –What about it? –It wasn’t the same for me. –You want to tell me what you mean? Brooks sighed. –I guess I’m committed to try. I wish to hell I’d kept my mouth shut . . . I finished my whiskey and shook my head. It didn’t sound like Brooks. Ordinarily, he could find the tiniest flaw in a chain of legal reasoning. This evening he seemed to be maundering. But before I could say anything, he started talking again. –You saw pictures of a hundred terrible endings this afternoon. Not just the residue of pain, but the termination of those life-lines, scorched, melted, burned away . . . –That’s what I saw. At least. –I saw . . . sansara, arrival and departure, the burning center of the universe, of the soul, of sacrifice . . . No, don’t start in on me. I’m going to try to do this right–if it can be done right, here and now. So let me get back to when Leslie came in to see me. She was upset, almost incoherent–or so I thought. Nothing she said seemed to make any sense. I got her calmed down, reckoning to send her off to some friend of mine who handled divorces. –I was wondering about that. Why you’d handle a . . . –Damn it, Albert, we’d been in school together . . . –Ah . . . and you’d been in love with her. Brooks blushed, and I expect I grinned. –Kids, he said Stonily, –don’t fall in love. –The hell they don’t Maybe only kids do fall in love . . . He paused then, and nodded. –I’ll make you a compromise. My manhood and her breasts started blooming at the same time. One evening, in an orgiastic frenzy over on Thora Boulevard, under an old cedar tree, I touched those budding breasts of Leslie’s for just a moment . . . I’ve never forgotten, not ever . . . Then he came to a full stop, looking down into his glass as if, on the lambent surface of the whiskey, he could see that evening so long ago reflected–some spring evening, I supposed, when the heat of summer was beginning to come upon us, before school was out. –She started to tell how it was with Charlie Babin a couple of times, but each time she’d stop and say, No, it didn’t start then. It was before that. Finally, she got down to it. It had been the war. Whatever happened had started when Charlie was overseas. You see, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor, and they trained him as a flight engineer, and then . . . They had the whole damned stewing exploding world to send him to, and they picked the CBI. –China-Burma-India . . . –Right. And even at that, China or Burma would probably have worked out all right. –What was wrong with India? –What was wrong? They took a boy named Charlie Babin from Rapides Parish, Louisiana, and dropped him right in the center of a civilization that had been open for business and going non-stop since the fourth millennium, B.C. or thereabouts, and when he wasn’t flying, they let him go off on his own to see what a place and a people are like when their antecedents run back to the beginnings. –Well, I said, –as I recall, something like that happened to a lot of us. They gave me a free tour of France and a pound of German steel in my back. But Brooks wasn’t paying any mind. Somehow he seemed to resent the military for sending Charlie Babin to that strange and distant place. –It must have been like opening the cover of the weirdest story-book you’ve ever come across and suddenly finding that you’re fixing to be one of the characters. Charlie couldn’t stay off the streets, out of the markets. When he wasn’t in the air, he was out walking. It didn’t matter where. Leslie showed me some of his letters. I believe there’s a phrase . . . culture shock. Whatever it is, Charlie had it. When he was off duty and he could pick up a flight to some other part of the country, he jumped at it. Bombay, Calcutta, The Vale of Kashmir, Lahore. Hell, he even took to buying books. Ugly poorly printed, badly bound books on paper that tended to run and melt if water fell on it. Vile translations from Hindi or Bengali or Tamil–or even Sanskrit–done by some failed poet or lapsed devotee or westernized pandit. Stories about the gods and creation drawn from the Puranas, or disembodied pieces carved out of the epics–there’s no end to it, you know. India is a Tale begun by some Risi, seer, four thousand years ago, picked up and continued by his successors generation after generation, yuga after yuga. If they ever stop telling the Tale, the whole damned subcontinent will vanish and Afghanistan will have a seacoast. No, that’s not right. More likely everything will vanish, and the universe itself will be nothing more than a tiny glimmer in the hem of the robe of Brahman. –Never mind. Don’t bother asking how a boy from the country got caught up in all that heathen nonsense. Leslie didn’t know, and even after he was home from the war, Charlie couldn’t say. –There he was, a boy from North Louisiana raised properly in a rabid narrow mean healthy Baptist home finding himself not only in the midst of a war where he never saw the enemy, and his bounden allies are the wildest possible lot of infidels who ever wore breechclouts and turbans, cavorting about in the name of a thousand gods in that lunatic asylum they call a nation, but where his task is too much for men to take on cold sober and too dangerous to try drunk. It was a rich brew. Too rich for Charlie Babin. –He never did tell Leslie all about it. Only a bit now and again. He wrote a few pages about how it was to start out on a flight over the Himalayas as a crew chief and end up helping to fly the plane because the co-pilot was lying frothing and twitching from malaria on a half-frozen tarp in the cargo space behind. He told about flying out of Sookerating (can you believe they built an Air Transport Command base next to a miserable starving Assamese village named Doom Dooma?) through storms that never ended, with a bad oxygen system and a worn-out aircraft that wheezed and coughed and shuddered amidst those vast gales that could toss you up or down a thousand feet in a second. You see, the damned planes had a service ceiling of maybe sixteen thousand feet, and the Himalayas go as high as twenty-nine. Even there, at the top of the world, they had to fly through valleys. They never got enough altitude to look down on the sum of things. Peaks almost as high as Everest, Annapurna, K-2, Tali–they flew between them, those young American perfect masters of the mechanized, because nature itself wasn’t ready to yield just yet, to become simply scenery spotted from a jetliner, mentioned casually by a pilot as he tips his wing so the paying passengers in cozy seats with their cool drinks can take a look. Fliers died falling into those deep crevasses where men had never set foot. Lose your compass, miss your way, vary your route, and you might find yourself in a 200-mile-long canyon with a great blank wall of ice and granite at the end, no room to turn and no fuel to go back anyhow. And the mists, the winds. Hyperborean blizzards of snow and ice and fog that slapped a C-47 aside as if they were hurrying downward toward subcontinental rains and warmth and didn’t even notice a tiny poised fleck of what we like to call solid matter being buffeted across the dim blunt trails between peaks. –He told her by the time he got over there, they had stopped even bothering to mount searches when a cargo plane went down. Early on, they had tried it, but nothing was ever found and those who went seeking were often lost themselves. So you made it down into China or you didn’t For all we know, there are tribes of American sherpas in those mountains, hunting goat, chipping flint and even multiplying themselves on the dusky daughters of the primordial dwellers up in that endless cold, passing the fragments of flight jackets down from generation to generation, armed with weapons chopped and crafted from titanium, men who have come full circle and live as their Indo-Aryan ancestors did four thousand years ago. –Charlie said they all knew this, so they drank a lot and horsed around a lot. Among other things, those solid American boys with their 1940s smiles and their memories of Dayton and Tucson and Gulfport discovered bhang-hash. Lord, he wrote Leslie, we do now and then use hashish, which none of us ever heard of till we came here and which everybody uses when things get tough or the monsoon comes or just for no reason at all except to go soaring out toward the mountains without that damned C-47 under you, knowing that you’re safe, that you can travel right through those four mile high slabs of cold black stone or sail over Everest with no need of oxygen and ten thousand feet to spare. –Sure enough, before long they started using it when they flew. After the first few months of flights made cold sober and at the peak of efficiency, nobody could stand it. Not just the physical danger–danger isn’t much to a young man, even sober. It was the isolation, the loneliness, those awful jagged unalterable peaks in their permanence, their duration. They demoralized. Literally. To fly among those mountains made causes and affection and honor and decency seem silly and unreal. They drove the durance of geology and the ephemerality of truth right into the bullseye of the heart. After a few such trips, staring out at dawn or dusk on the eddying storms below, the blinding sunlight above, the stark adamantine weathered rock on every side, something would melt and run in those flying men. They would find themselves sobbing when at last they put the Himalayas behind them and drifted down into the ordinary chill and bleak prairies of China. The Chinese somehow understood. They would comfort them. They said it was no good to be at odds with the mountains and had given them their first hashish. Go ahead, the Chinese said. You might as well. It makes everything bright. If the mountains want you, they are going to have you. If they reject you, you may as well get along with them. Here. Smoke this. Eat this. No, it’s not Chinese Lucky Strikes or Days Work. Or maybe it is. –By then, Leslie said, he told her he was stoned all the time. Now when he would go down into the cities, he was no longer a boy from North Louisiana looking at the aliens. He was part of the Tale. It was nothing new. it had happened to the Aryans when they had come down from the cold and barren steppes over the northwest frontier and tripped across the Harappa civilization, even then over a thousand years old. It had happened to the Moghuls, the Moslems, and to the English after them. The Hindus would not stop telling the Tale in all its infinite variations, and it drew in strangers like the spiral of a whirlpool that stood in dynamic stasis outside any understandable kind of time at all. In the Tale there were gods with the heads of elephants, fire gods and storm gods, gods as old as the mountains and gods just getting started. They’re still making–or discovering–gods. Yahweh is all right, Allah is fine, Jesus will fit in. Just don’t go asking them to let the others go. Because they won’t let anything go. Not Agni or Varuna or Indra, not Vishnu or Shiva. Because they’re not like us. They still live in that climate we left by way of the Greeks two and a half millenia ago. They still have their myth, their Tale–while the loss of our own is reducing us to quaking paranoia and self-loathing, to demented ideologies and half-witted materialism. Because we don’t mean anything. Not to one another–not even to ourselves. –But there was Charlie Babin, late of Rapides Parish, not simply finding out about the Tale, but getting into it. Not just a passive watcher, one of the crowd you always see no matter what picture of India you happen to come across, but one of those living among the animal-headed gods and their insane nigger goddess with four arms holding decapitated heads and swords, garlanded with skulls, and dancing on some poor misshapen dwarf or man as if she were the living pulsating fantasy of every mean black in the deep South. Charlie had come, amidst the great heights and fears of his daily military occupation, to need that Tale, to make some insignificant corner or perch on a rafter within it his own. –Don’t ask why. Because Charlie never gave Leslie a reason, so she couldn’t give one to me. How about fear of falling? How about a terror you and I never felt even in combat, because we never found ourselves amidst those stark mountains that by their mere presence render the human scale ludicrous, absurd, something less than insignificant. Reckon that maybe Charlie came to feel in his guts the incredible tenuousness of existence, the bare toe-hold every one of us has in the light? Being long in an alien place will do peculiar things to a man–and Charlie was sure enough in an alien place. –Listen, Brooks went on, –He told Leslie about one late afternoon in Delhi. Two days before, he’d been flying and freezing out of Assam over into Kunming. Now he was sweating as he walked along soaking up sights he’d never seen before in a constant absolute crush of human beings mostly four-fifths his size, and not a one who’d ever heard of Shreveport, Louisiana. He walked through the markets and picked up some fine bhang and some Ritz–la papers from a man with one eye and one visible tooth sitting on a black antelope skin. He stoked up and paused to look at some brass Ganeshas and Shivas, some wrought-iron Kalis and Durgas and even a porcelain Sarasvati. He bought himself a Shiva. But he decided against buying one of each and sending them home to his folks out in the parish. Even stoned to the great bronze burning heavens, Charlie knew where heathen idols stood in North Louisiana. So he had his bronze god wrapped up in burlap, and bought twelve yards of scarlet silk shot through with gold thread and paid to have it shipped back to Leslie half-suspecting it would never leave the shop of the fat sorrowful oily-faced little woman who spoke English with a broad West Country accent picked up God only knows where. Brooks stopped, stared at his glass as he turned it this way and that in his large hands. –The silk did make it. I know that for sure, because I saw it . . . His voice trailed off and I waited, sipping my own liquor and only beginning to realize that I hadn’t had anything to eat since morning. If I was starting to get hungry, I must be pulling out of my depression. Sometimes human adaptability, resilience, is a downright embarrassment. But then we’d talked about that, hadn’t we? –By then, Charlie told her, he was stoned out of his mind. Not troublesome, not belligerent. just horse-happy, turning and turning with his dancing god under his arm, on the streets of that ancient city, slapped down in the middle of a crowd that calls itself a nation. He heard a parrot squawk, and followed two men on crutches who came by singing something that sounded to Charlie like “The White Cliffs of Dover” in a foreign tongue. They led him down toward the river, and that was fine. Being hashed up, he seemed warm at last. The mountains were far away, and he would not have to contend with them for almost two days. You see, by then, that mountain cold was no exterior thing to him. It had moved inside. Perhaps it would never really leave him again. –But at that moment, he only felt the warmth of the hashish, everything moving around him in slow motion, in a sweet untoward haze. Now the sense of mystery, like the cold, was as much within him as in the streets. The bazaars, the dark-skinned people shuffling about on the rounds of their dharma, some mullah in a distant tower moaning for the mercy of Allah, a god among gods here, nothing special–certainly nothing absolute or unique. –It was the full blazing height of the afternoon when he found himself down by the river. Down where they burn their dead. There were heaps of small kindling everywhere presided over by wood-sellers who promised quick lighting and clean burning in tones that suggested such things had spiritual value. Charlie watched corpses laid out covered with blossoms, blessed by old priests according to a ritual which had not changed since half a millennium before Moses came to himself in the bulrushes of the Nile. People in loinclothes or great swaths of linen or cotton fabric poured ghee down on the fires, sat patiently until they had burned down, then swept ashes into brass containers and carried them to the broad river that looked like an immense motionless bronze mirror reflecting the lax and brazen sky, where pilgrims swam and dunked and recited prayers and offered praise to the gods amongst the floating ashes of their lost contemporaries, looking themselves as if they stood in the sky reflected in the river or in some median neither sky nor water but the anxious turbulent gap between. –The sight of it all daunted him. Thin smoke rich with the oils of flesh rising over the two score or more pyres, the river like a highway moving, inching along from vanishing-point in the north to vanishing- point in the south, the great sky spotted with clouds like herded cattle ambling off toward mountains that seemed too far away for a man to reach in a single lifetime, the chanting, the sound of sitars and wooden flutes of the kind Krishna used to charm the gopis into his thousand beds–the singular lack of tears as families sent their loved ones into the fire and watched their spirits spiral upward on the way of the fathers or the way of the gods. –That was the longest letter she ever got from him. She showed me that one, let me read it because everything that happened afterward depended, swung from that afternoon. –He knew no one there, and yet he found there were tears in his eyes. He had not thought death had undone so many. All the immitigable dying and leave-taking and burning, the dry mourning repeating itself on this certain single day in 1943 with an alien airman watching, but no different from any other day back to the beginning of rememberable days when other Aryans like Charles Babin watched in equal amazement the people of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro living their own civilized lives and dying their deaths in the thick web of slow time they had inhabited, had constructed for themselves and out of themselves over a thousand and God only knows how many more years before. –Then, amidst all that, he wrote to Leslie, the cold suddenly came back. Cold to the bone, as if he were aloft again in that damned C-47 with what he suspected was a cracked piston in No. 2 engine, up amongst the mountains with their black struts of basalt and granite and their canopies of cloud, their robes of primordial frost and ice that had not melted since the first snowfall had come down upon them on the morning of the creation. He felt deadly cold in the midst of heat that could kill a European or a yankee, the sun still up the sky and those dozens upon dozens of burning pyres adding to it until the flesh of a normal living man might seem about to melt and run. –He squatted down by a broken wall, shivering, thinking that he should have paid attention to the medical officer and kept that damned netting tucked around his cot, about to light up another rod of keif. But it fell from his mouth and he stared into the flame of his lighter till his hands’ shaking made the Zippo’s lid pop shut and the afterglow darkened his eyes. Dear God, he thought, mantled by that sense of freezing that was no mere memory, but the stuff of his own flesh. Dear God, I want the heat . . . “What did you come here for?” someone asked him in exceedingly good English. “Nothing,” Charlie mumbled, not even looking at the speaker. “Nothing.” “Ah, that’s hard,” the voice answered. “I don’t think you can find that. Men spend a thousand lifetimes looking for Nothing. Don’t be arrogant. You want to try something else.” –Charlie managed to get his hands under some kind of control and looked around. Squatted there beside him was an old man in nothing but a wisp of a loincloth, steely gray hair matted, tumbling down his back and shoulders, charcoal and white ash and yellow and red clay marking his face. The old man was staring out at the river, too, not even looking at Charlie. “There are powers,” the old man was saying, “discrimination, levitation, conservation of seed, prodigious feats of memory, concentration. Some of the Kasatriyas know martial arts. There is an old Nepalese in King George Road who guarantees physical invulnerability for a very reasonable price. I know a Tantric priest who can teach you the secret of permanent erection and sustaining the orgasm for hours. Something like that is what you want. Something useful, practical. You don’t want Nothing.” –Charlie laughed. The old man laughed. Then Charlie said the old man turned his face from the river, leaned over and stared into Charlie’s eyes. Charlie said the old man’s eyes had in them that strange distant crystalline sheen of snow along the high peaks as he had seen it on rare days when a beam of sunlight burns its way through the eternal clouds and mists and touches a drift, a field, refracting a hundred colors, some spectrum no one sees down here below. “All right,” the old man said at last, turning his eyes back to the river. “I was wrong. No one is always right in these things. In that uniform, inside that foreign skin, behind those alien eyes, how was I to know? If that’s what you want, I’ll do what I can.” –The old man got up and gestured Charlie to follow him. They walked along the river bank to a rush hut where the old man stayed when he wasn’t wandering the length and breadth of India shoeless, unclothed, alone. He made up some kind of lentil soup with hot sharp seasoning, slapped some papadam to cook on a hot griddle that passed around amongst the other huts, and made ceremony around the fire. “You still like the old ways, don’t you?” “Well, yes,” Charlie answered. Meaning of course the good Baptist ways in which he’d been raised as a boy in Rapides Parish. Of course he liked them. Why change? What was good enough for the fathers is surely good enough for the sons. But Charlie sensed the old man meant something else. “Agnim ile purohitam yajnasya divam ritvijam . . .” –It seemed the old man–his name was Agnanda–saw in Charlie certain signs. He was very good at that, the old man. He was nearly ninety and had come to grasp what things mean and do not say. One time or another, he had been good at damned near everything. He was of a Brahmin family, had graduated from Cambridge and Gray’s Inn, had been a Q.C. in London, then came home out of boredom and disgust during the Great War and had taken up Sanskrit scholarship. Then, when his sons were grown, his wife dead and buried–no, not buried; the other thing they do–he’d gone into the forest for ten years. To meditate. Now he was in his last ashrama, the final stage of his life–I mean, this life. He told Charlie that he’d been looking for Nothing himself, for the end of things, the pathway out of multiplicity, the rent in the veil of Maya. –Charlie started to say something, but Agnanda cut him off. “Don’t tell me what you meant or didn’t mean, Lord. I know better than you. I’m surprised and pained to see you in such a state, Avatara. It’s going to be a long time before you regain yourself. Best we get started.” –The strangest part was Agnanda never told Charlie which of the thirty-three thousand gods he had discovered Charlie to be. Or why in any god’s name a Vedic deity would turn up in the skin of a redneck boy in North Louisiana. You see, the Tale goes on. In most places, myths are what the gods did–back when there were gods, and when they were reckoned to do anything at all. But in India it’s different. The Tale hasn’t stopped, hasn’t even faltered. Gods rise and fall, sin and repent, tumble into matter and return to Brahman, gain strength and lose it just as they always have. They breed with the daughters of men and turn into strange animals. They create by orgasm and dance destruction. The Tale hasn’t paused–it’s simply harder to find out about the gods. They have grown circumspect. They no longer believe much in humanity. –Anyhow, Agnanda undertook to teach Charlie. No, that’s what you and I would call it. It was something else. What the old man did was help Charlie remember what he’d always known. For two years, every day or night that Charlie could shake loose from flying, the old man would be waiting for him to ask him the questions that lead to discrimination, concentration, meditation and sublation. Nothing weird. Just disciplines of the mind–the groundwork of Nothing. Agnanda told him not to expect anything outlandish or peculiar in the growth of his spirit. Only in some of the results, the side effects of an utterly concentrated mind. “Where you come from, all they know how to use is the will,” Agnanda told him. “You treat things as if they were different from you. Here you are, there they are. The Great Illusion. You act as if you were the only truly living one in the universe, and yet your own life is . . . only a side effect. It’s all alive, all one. The life of the rocks and mountains is long and slow and tedious, and they pray for release; the life of the moonflower is lived in a single night, but it must seem an eternity. Or, seen another way, the moonflower outlasts the cosmos; the mountains are leveled as quickly as they rise. You have to get rid of your fantasies, think your way out of ages of bad European habits, Lord.” –Charlie worked hard, or learned not to work at all, I don’t know which. But he learned to control his breathing, to lose himself either in himself or in a lotus, a hummingbird, a pile of dung, the disc of the rising or setting sun. He learned, as nearly as I can make out from what Leslie told me, that infinite chain of analogies that annihilates differences, distinctions between one thing and another–a truth, Agnanda said, that’s locked into the infinitesimal calculus, in Zeno’s paradoxes, if anyone bothered to look. –Charlie worshipped the Goddess and the Dancer who are, after all, simply aspects of the same reality. I expect he must have achieved samadhi, but Agnanda. wouldn’t tell him about that. Never mind what he had achieved. That only mattered to little fakirs who had in mind to make a living off the old rope trick or being immune to cobra venom or walking on water or some other vulgarism. Charlie had said he was searching for Nothing, so nothing else mattered. Did it? –Then the war was over with a big bang. They were going to ship Charlie home. He pondered whether he should stay in India, write Leslie and tell her that he was otherwise engaged–looking for Nothing. But North Louisiana and a head of hair the color of midnight and soft arms had their powers, too, and he got himself and his Shiva packed and ready to make that trip of six thousand miles and four thousand years. Then he went down to say goodbye to the old man he’d been working with for two years and more. –Agnanda was sitting down by the river in his usual place. He was in trance, smiling–just visiting, spying out along the purlieus of Nothing, not yet permitted to enter. Perhaps a dozen or a hundred or a thousand lifetimes away from Release. Beside him was a pyre built of fine sandal-wood logs and small kindling with flowers of every hue decking it and a couple of brass tureens filled with clarified butter sitting alongside. Charlie knew what it was. He even knew how Agnanda had managed to buy all the ingredients. He had saved up the small gifts Charlie had brought him as tribute over the months they had spent together, and it was his funeral pyre. “Well,” Agnanda said spryly, before Charlie could even begin to tell him anything, coming back to the heat and the wide sullen river, “They’ve stopped murdering one another for awhile. You’re leaving, going home.” “Yes,” Charlie answered, still not knowing whether he was glad or not. Not even knowing what he should be feeling. “So am I,” the old man said in a conversational tone. “ This life hasn’t worked out at all. What can a man expect from the Kali Yuga? The truth is, I haven’t liked anything about it.” “That’s hard,” Charlie told him. “You said you had a wife and three sons.” “She’s a locust now, somewhere in the Punjab. I try to keep track of those things. The boys are in government service. In their next incarnations, they’ll all be turds.” –Charlie couldn’t think of anything to say. Agnanda didn’t sound bitter. Whatever his long exceptional life had been, it was the result of a purely mechanical process. His failure to achieve Nothing in his life was simply karma exemplified. Back to the drawing board, as we might say. Agnanda had, literally, all the time in the world. “One thing, Lord,” he said to Charlie, reaching out and catching the sleeve of his freshly pressed khaki shirt. “One last favor for your unworthy servant.” “Huh,” Charlie said, fearing what that one thing might be. “Lord,” Agnanda said, climbing up onto his elegant pyre, taking Charlie’s hand, smiling at him lovingly, “If it isn’t too much trouble, would you see to my fire before you go?” “But . . .” “You’ll be fine now,” the old man told him. “Even in America. This will be the end of it for you. Thank you, Lord, for spending so much time with me, for allowing me to win merit by my pathetic services to you.” “But you’re not dead,” Charlie told him. “And the Brits have got a law against . . .” “Oh,” the old man said with a grin Charlie would never forget, “As to that . . .” –Then he lay back on the sandalwood and he died. Charlie could tell when he died, because that cool iridescent sheen in his eyes froze over. As if a cloud had simply drifted in and cut off the single sunbeam that had enlivened them. –Charlie looked around for someone, anyone, to confirm what he already knew. Because that’s what we do. We’re supposed to have a death certificate or something. Aren’t we? But that was no use because none of the people there along the river could understand English, and the old man had only taught him Vedic Sanskrit, not Hindi or Bengali. So he reached over the pile of wood and flowers to touch the old man one last time, to say with his touch how much he loved him, how much he appreciated the kindnesses even though all the teaching hadn’t seemed to change him very much. And as he did so, the pyre burst into flames. –He couldn’t remember much after that. He reckoned that he must have stayed, fed the flames with the ghee, surely mumbled the prayers for departed souls the old man had taught him. Maybe he was still smoking hash because it seemed to him he saw the old man’s soul, his subtle body, whirling upward wraithlike into the blaze of the sun–which was a very good sign, since those whose smoke goes into the sun take the way of the gods and return here no more. Charlie wanted to believe that the old man had been wrong about this life, that he had accomplished all things without realizing it, that he had found Nothing and would have no truck with things again forever. –When his memory took up once more, he told Leslie later, he was aboard a ship out of Hong Kong that would take three weeks to make port in San Francisco. It was time enough to consider, to meditate, draw himself together. Late at night he would come up from below and squat at the bow of the ship and contemplate the vastness of the waters, meditate on the fire down there below. He would see continents that had sunk with all their treasures millenia ago. He would turn his eyes toward the stars and see gods and men beckoning to him from out of the past–or the future, no way to tell one from the other since they curve back upon one another and meet at last. –As they neared the California coast, Charlie made a supreme effort of renunciation and let the Indian weather flow out of his soul, prepared himself to return to North Louisiana. And after the boat trip, after the long train ride across the land from San Francisco to Shreveport, at last he was back home. You’d think so, wouldn’t you? –At least that’s what Leslie thought. She considered that she was in the same position as thousands, hundreds of thousands of other American women, welcoming back her man who had traveled far and seen the ways of men, won a great victory and at last come home. Now Charlie would drive the trolleys again and they could start a family. All the loneliness, the tears, the fear of him being lost in those tall forbidding mountains with names she had never heard before and could not begin to pronounce–all that was behind them. Now the good life, their new American life, could begin. –And it did. Leslie told me that the first year Charlie was home was the happiest of her life. It was as if you could fall in love all over again with the person you had loved before. Even better than that. Because Charlie had changed. Nothing extraordinary. None of that paranoid or psychotic business that dogged some men as if the slaughter of Europe and the lethal beauty of the Pacific had come home with them in their knapsacks. Only that Charlie had left Shreveport a boisterous youngster who tended to talk a little louder than Leslie’s upbringing found seemly, who liked to drink and play cards and go fishing with the boys on a weekend and get up softball games with the men in the neighborhood– out in Cedar Grove where they had lived then. He came back quieter, more thoughtful. He liked to stay home, and over that first year, he turned down so many invitations that his oldest friends at last stopped asking them out at all. Which was fine with Leslie. She had never liked to socialize, and the bowling-alley and bass-fishing folks were not her style. She wanted to belong to herself and to Charlie. Now, when he wasn’t at work driving a trolley, they were alone together. just the way she’d always wanted it to be. –They bought a little frame house on an acre or two of land out in Dixie Gardens, and Leslie started spending her time improving that big yard of hers. In the early morning when Charlie was working, she’d be planting flowers around the house and some vegetables out at the very back near the fence. She even put in trees by herself and scooped out a little pond and lined it with concrete and set hyacinths and goldfish in it. It was 1946 then. Charlie had a G. I. loan and a good job. It was all going to be just fine. She could tell it was. She knew. She just knew. Brooks stopped and lit himself another cigar. But instead of starting in again, I could see he was staring into the wavering candle flame that illuminated the table faintly from the browntinted smoky glass. –Lord, I remember those days, Albert, he said slowly, almost mourn-fully. –So do you. For a little while after we came out of the fire, it seemed as if, of all the generations of men, we had been the ones who at last killed the dragon. As if nothing terrible was ever going to happen again. We’d lost some part of our youth, friends in combat, but we’d come through. We’d won. There was going to be a lifetime of long quiet evenings sitting out on the glider with Millicent, listening to the United States Steel Hour on the radio. We had got it done and come home from strange places, and now all we wanted to do was fall into a sweet routine and smile and rest. As Brooks went on, I was doing my own remembering. I had come home earlier, less certain of the end of evil, my back full of German shrapnel, mortar fragments picked up in a hedgerow near a village I am fond of forgetting the name of. By 1946, the pain was no longer exquisite, only numbing, and I could walk again and even make a pretense of practicing law once more. Still, I knew what Brooks meant, at least in a muted way. I think we felt as if we–his generation and mine– had dared and passed through and suffered all we would ever be called upon to bear. Don’t ask where we came by that notion. God knows we learned better soon enough. Brooks blew a smoke ring and threw back some more Irish. –You’re a good listener, he said. –Look, we can break it off here and call it a shaggy divorce story. What do you say? –When I’ve heard all I can stand, I’ll let you know, I told him. –I thought the funeral pyre self-igniting would send you home to drink alone. –I knew a man, a client of mine, who could fart the first three bars of “Amazing Grace” in perfect tune, I said. –Miraculous happenings don’t put me off. Brooks laughed and settled back. –All right. So we’ve got them back together and happy. In a love-nest out in Dixie Gardens surrounded by trees and flowers, the war behind them. It was my turn to laugh. –So as soon as she saw how things were, saw the rest of her life spread out like a badly sewn tapestry, she came in and asked for a divorce, I said sardonically. –The new American way. Maybe the whiskey was getting to me. Maybe I am no longer much good at hearing a story told the way we’ve always tended to tell them down here. I’d claim TV was wrecking my taste, except Terry and I don’t have a TV. Brooks smiled back, no trace of acrimony in his eyes. –Oh no, she just melted into that life. Quiet evenings, and for all I know The United States Steel Hour. There was positively nothing wrong. Match made in heaven and all that fine homely business . . . No, wait. There was something. Not what you’d put under the heading of a marital problem–surely not one you’d carry before a judge and ask a bill of divorce for. But something. Leslie didn’t bring it up that first time we talked. She didn’t want to talk about it at all, but when she’d been in half a dozen times and I’d taken her to long lunches three or four other times and Milly was dead certain I was shacking up down at the Caddo Hotel and had Luther Harrison, the manager, covering for me, Leslie managed to choke it out. –Because by then we both of us knew that whatever I was doing was as much the proper work of a father or a priest or even a psychiatrist–if a psychiatrist can be said to have proper work–as it was the rightful task of an advocate. I told myself that I was, if you will, sitting up with a little girl I had cared for once long ago in school, who had come to find life confusing and not at all the way she had hoped or even believed it would be. –But you have to see that I was already beyond simple human nostalgia, reclaiming an old love by way of practicing my skills in her favor. Hell, I wanted to know what it was that Charlie Babin had done or was doing or had threatened to do that had my childhood love at the edge of either leaving him or doing harm to herself because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him–or of staying with him, either. I wanted to know what heathen abomination he had dragged back across the Pacific with him and was practicing–if indeed he hadn’t perfected it–right out there in Dixie Gardens. –Finally, the truth of it began to come out. It had to do with their most private life, with the fact that married and together now for almost five years since the war, they still had no children. Leslie had had tests. So had Charlie–not willingly, but not resentfully, either. Almost indifferently. Nothing was wrong with either of them. They were in good physical condition, in the prime bearing years of their lives. –And something else. Leslie blushed and told me that Charlie’s sexual capacity was . . . unbelievable. Not that she was a battle-scarred veteran of the genital wars. Hardly that. Remember, we’re talking about the late 40s and early 50s now, about people brought up to see themselves in some other perspective than as Big Studs and Good Lays. Still, she told me, he was capable of making love for hours at a stretch. The night he had come home from Asia, they made love all night. I don’t mean a whack at it, a little rest, and start in again. She meant all night. Non-stop. She was almost comatose by morning, and even then she had to tell him to stop. And he did. Immediately. He kissed her one final time, rose from the bed, and walked outside quietly into the gray light before the sun’s rising, sat down naked by the little pool, eyes on the east where Ushas, the Dawn, fled westward away from the teeming passion of her father-lover, the sun. –Leslie didn’t know much about Agnanda. She had no reason to connect Charlie’s perfect mastery of the marital bed with India. They have never spoken much of India or the war. It was the fashion then to avoid such talk. Better for the boys coming home to put that foreign experience behind them. Much better. –Never mind. She would come to know what there was to know–and not just by Charlie Babin’s telling, but through knowledge carried to the heart. Oh, and there was something else: after that first night, this demon-lover of hers, this iron man, never again approached her for love. Not ever. I stared up from the table-top at Brooks. He nodded. –You heard right. When Leslie hinted that she was interested in making love, he always complied–more than complied, carried her to heights of ecstasy she was too embarrassed to acknowledge even to him. It was there for her, as much as she wanted, any time she wanted it. All she had to do, in a manner of speaking, was ask for it. But she did have to ask, to indicate. It was never denied her, never withheld–but never spontaneously offered. Not once. –Which, if you have much of a sense of women, was a strange and unnatural situation, a burden on the sensibilities very few Southern women have ever been called upon to bear. But it seemed to be a permanent condition of their life together, and so she bore it. Even became used to it. Perhaps even grew to find it pleasant since, after all, however strange, the option was hers–her desire, her affection, even her whim. She was bedded and damned well bedded whenever she chose, and no other time. A woman could grow accustomed to that. Even fond of the arrangement. –Because the other fixtures of her life were very close to the best she could imagine. Everything they possessed seemed to prosper. Her trees, her flowers, even the fish in the little pool outside. Within a few years, the white frame house was almost lost in a forest of oaks and magnolias, pines and sycamores that had the neighbors gasping and scratching their heads. You do not as a rule have forty-foot magnolias in five or six years. The house itself was light and airy, with galleries all around out back where they could sit at dawn looking east and watch night fading, the sun rising up among the trees to claim the world for another day. So they lived almost a ruminant life out there. Quiet, unperturbed, moving not from event to event charged always with the hope of something better or the fear of something worse. Flowing instead to the rhythm of reality–day and night, spring and summer, heat and cold. What else have we any wisdom in desiring? What else could she want? Oh . . . except for children. To keep the rhythm flowing, to continue it through the generations. But those were denied her, and the doctors couldn’t tell her why, and there was an end on it. –Still, Leslie seemed to be saying, there was always the least hint of distance between them. No, even that’s too strong. I took it that way because of her having to reach out to him for what any other man– myself included–would have wanted to give her every night of their life together. Without her having to ask. What she actually said was that any way she expressed it would likely be too strong. Charlie was kind and close and loving. Surely less spontaneous than when she had married him. But then only God knew what he had seen, experienced, in those distant alien places. –How could she describe his new situation, mood, posture? How tell me of that tiny lack she felt, that space between them so infinitesimal that to mention it to him, to make a point of it, would likely leave Charlie puzzled, pained, wondering if he had married a neurotic who was shaken by the simple expectable minute shifts and changes that take place in every relationship between changing shifting human beings over time however constant and perduring they might wish to be to one another. –It was, she told me at last, as if, no matter how close they might be, Charlie were listening to some voice other than hers, a voice she could not hear. As if he were waiting. As if he were distracted, his mind on something else which was, in all kindness, no business of hers at all. Sometimes, no matter how she tried to hold her questions in, they would break out: “Charlie . . .” “Yes?” “What are you thinking about?” “Nothing, honey. Nothing.” –Which you and I know was no mere ploy, no easy way to fob her off while he curled inside his mind wrestling naked with some woman who had climbed aboard his trolley, paid her fare, taken his measure, and told him she wanted him, meant to have him when his shift ended. That’s what Leslie was inclined to suspect at first, but you and I know better. Charlie Babin was thinking about precisely what he said he was thinking about. For us, Nothing isn’t anything–but for Charlie, it had come to be . . . everything. –It went like that over time, Brooks went on, –much time. What do you want to call it? A loving stand-off? All right. With Leslie listening and waiting for him as he was listening and waiting for someone, something else. Because she reckoned Charlie loved her, and sooner or later what he was listening for, waiting for, would turn up and it would somehow have to do with both of them. Whatever, whoever, whenever. –So she said nothing and felt something close to mild hysteria mounting in her. If I had a child, she told herself, realizing even as the words shaped themselves in her mind how inapposite, how absurd they were, If I was pregnant or had a child, a lot of children, I could manage this. I know I could. –Then one night when he came home, instead of trying to talk to him, she gave him an indication. That’s what Leslie called it. And they made love all night. At least she thought they did. And when he was gone the next morning, she headed into town, in to see the last in that string of gynecologists or whatever who had told her they could find no reason at all for her not to have the children she wanted. Somehow she managed to get the doctor to see her, to give her an examination immediately. Then she waited in the reception room, in a mood of outsize calm, she said, until he called her back into his office frowning. You see, before the examination, she had told the doctor that she and Charlie had made love only hours before. But the doctor was frowning and what he told her was that, all right, fine, she and her husband may have been making love non-stop for the past week. But there had been no orgasm, no ejaculation. Because the vaginal area was completely free of sperm. Not a trace, not a sign. –She got home and sat on the back gallery thinking about it. She didn’t know what to say. Not only had she never faced such a thing before, she could not imagine that any woman ever had. Sterile men, impotent men, men with psychological problems. But not this. She could not even put a name on what it seemed he had done to her. She had to decide what she was going to say when he got home. Would it be, You have betrayed me? Or lied to me. Or kept from me what any woman assumes is hers by the mere fact of coupling with a man at all–hers whether she wants it or not. Even the victim of a rape carried through to its conclusion, brutal, impersonal, loveless, receives what you have denied me. –Every word of it was true and none of it sounded right to Leslie. Because no matter how she turned her mind, she could find no motive. If Charlie had betrayed her, why? Or why lied to her. Why in the name of God give her sexual satisfaction beyond anything she had ever hoped for or expected and at the same time deny the fruitfulness, the inward plenitude that, even before neural stimulation, is the very essence and meaning of sexuality? She was still mulling this through when he came home in his gray uniform, wilted, bone tired, stripping off his jacket and pants as he came into the house, clothing failing away piece by piece, room by room, until by the time he reached the back gallery and stepped out into the yard where she sat, he was naked, his body shining in the sun’s late glow, his eyes wide open as if it were the moon, not the sun that he was trying toward, staring into as he seated himself by the little pool cross-legged, the expression of a suppliant on his face. –“Why?” was all she got out before he motioned her to come and sit nearby so that he could talk to her in a soft distant reedy voice that not only didn’t sound like his, but didn’t even sound like the voice of any human being she had ever heard. It was an old voice, chopped and channeled by the ages, and it told her of the Himalayas, the dark gray granite and black basalt, of the white snow, the thin air up there, of the thick miasmal vapors pooled on the sweating plains down below. He told her in that same strange voice of the chill highlands of China, the dense impassable streets and alleys of Bombay and Calcutta so crammed and packed with an indistinguishable and inchoate humanity that the very idea of personality and individuality as we think of it is absurd, some fantasy fetched up from the isolate steppes and lonely reaches of an underpopulated West. –He told her then about Agnanda–no details of his training, no insight into Vedic measure and discipline, the search for the gods in their truth–and on beyond them. Only what she could more or less understand–or maybe only what he needed to tell her so that she would have the very best possible shot at understanding what he knew she was not going to understand since he didn’t understand it himself–that whatever had happened to him in India, whatever had befallen him there long ago was coming to life again, had roused itself from its dormancy and was beginning to draw him back into the Tale once more. –When he was done or stopped or paused, she was still looking at him with that soft lost expression she had been wearing since she uttered that single syllable, “Why?” She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, as she told me, when she had to speak just to break a silence that was beginning to acquire the consistency, the impermeable surface of porcelain, she had asked the silliest question: “Is it . . . something religious?” “I don’t know. . .” “Because if it was a visitation, something religious, you’d know, wouldn’t you?” “I don’t know that either, honey. I just know I . . . have to do it.” –Which she took to mean that what he had done, he meant to go on doing. That the child she had trusted him to give her, that he had held from her for so long, would never be hers. Not now, not ever. –She started to cry then, and he began to speak again, his face twisted in pain, pulled perhaps between the man he was–had been–and whatever it might be he was becoming. He tried to explain to her what he was listening for, awaiting. What Agnanda had shown him he was really seeking even then, even in 1943, fresh from Louisiana–what he had probably been searching for haphazardly since he was a boy in Rapides Parish and people would ask what he was doing, where he was going, what he wanted–the answers even then being Nothing, Nowhere, and Nothing. –Leslie couldn’t manage it. Between her misery and her not having seen the Himalayas or any other pile of rock or earth taller than what a man can toss up out of a ditch with a spade, she just couldn’t grasp whatever it was Charlie was trying to tell her. You see, she lacked the insights of Freud and James Joyce, both of whom knew well enough that there are no empty words, no nonsense syllables, no jokes, no mistakes, no mere phrases to fill a silence. And even if she had known all that and believed it, she would have boggled at the notion that the best of us is always looking not for something or anything–but for the end of things altogether. For Nothing. Nothing at all. Brooks’ voice faded with a dying fall. He stared into the pallid candle burning and sputtering and smoking behind brown glass as if he had managed at last to find some measure of release for himself. The whiskey was almost gone and Fort Knox was filling up with what I am told are called Young Singles nowadays–men and women with jobs that pay well, possessed of talent and intelligence, whose lives, absent the jobs, are empty and driven searches for somebody, anybody, everybody, and for the assurance of a constant patter of words and music to push back the silence, to help them forget that, welling up just beneath their fantasies founded in someone else’s flesh, there is an emptiness larger, more depthless than the iciest fjord of the far North. –You reckon we might go get something to eat? I asked Brooks and got no answer. He was still staring into the mottled flame-blackened glass in the middle of the table, telling himself in silence the Tale he was supposed to be telling me. –What are you thinking, I asked him softly, slyly, out of my share of the darkness. He looked up, registered my question, and answered after a moment. –Nothing, he said, and smiled and looked away. Put me on any street of this town and I will raise up for you the places that were there a decade, two, three, four decades ago–the streets, the houses, the business places, and the people now long dead who lived and walked and plotted and joked amidst them. I have the power to evoke from the stuff of memory an unreal city as it existed on some arbitrary summer day in 1937, 1942, 1956, or 1970. It is an awesome and terrible capability, and I use it only for my own most inward purposes, uncertain as I am of the meaning, the use–even the propriety–of a nostalgia more powerful than avarice or cupidity or the awful sweat-drenched dreams of that libido dominandi that hustles us each and every one toward the commonest of graves as if we were on the path toward an eternal salvation that we demand and ignore and plead for and dread simultaneously. We were both feeling all right as we ate. As if we were still young enough to drink the moon down to its dregs and toast the blushing dawn with one last blowsy cry. –How do you feel? Brooks asked me solicitously. –Never better, I said. –As if I’d been drinking all evening with a good friend, and had most of a decent steak in my belly. He smiled at that. I believe we astonished ourselves discovering the boys still hovering, playing within. –Fine, that’s fine. But we’re not done. Not just yet. –I have to ask you, I put in. –Yes? –Are we still talking about the –. . . children . . . ? Nighty-Night . . .? –. . . or did we lose them somewhere along the way from Southfield School, past Fort Knox, to here? Brooks put down his fork, shook his head. –No. We’ll never lose them. They . . . can’t be lost. But, hell, I’ve already told you the end of the story, haven’t I? –You could have fooled me, I answered. –Maybe it’s the damned whiskey. –No, no. You’re all right. It’s just that I whittle at the law better than I tell a tale. –It’s not a short story. Not even a novella. –Did you know, Brooks said in a suddenly off-hand tone, –that the great epic of India, the Mahabharata, is eight times longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey put together? –I don’t believe I did. Are you just saying that? –Hell no. It’s my excuse, my alibi . . . but it’s true. We laughed and finished our supper. I picked up the check, telling Brooks that the teller of the Tale is always given his sustenance by the listener. At least since Mycenae, and probably long before. –You feel up to a little drive? he asked, smiling. –I reckon. I’ve gone with you this far. –Come on, he said, and I followed him back out into the dark. We drove down Kings Highway, out old Louisiana Highway 1, which skirts the Red River and which, if you take the proper turn, will end you up in that odd old rural suburb of Shreveport they call Dixie Gardens. It was late, but the heat and humidity of the day were still upon us. It had to be eighty-five degrees as we pulled up on the levee and climbed out of the car. On one side, the Red River lay below, embraced by bluffs that I could remember sliding down as a boy, eyes shut, until I hit the cool dark slow current at the bottom. It had not changed in thirty years but for the taking by the waters of sandy loam from this place, depositing it in that other. The river lay beneath a rising red-hearted moon like molten copper on a verdant platter, its motion undetectable unless you set your eye upon some certain point and watched until an eddy shivered across it, until the wreck of a broken uprooted tree trunk from upriver, from Texas or Oklahoma, floated past, its shattered profile dark against the moon’s long smooth reflection on the water. In the West, out toward Texas some thirty miles away, I saw lightning and heard a distant growl. I reckoned it was not heat lightning but the real thing. Perhaps an evening thundershower was on the way, –That night, they walked, Brooks said, moving along the levee as it became lighter, less densely shadowed under a moon turned from red to yellow. He squinted down at the somnolent river, then across the levee toward a clump of trees. –She told me they walked here. Right here. If precision moves you, if you’re still a captive of the fantasy we call reality, here’s the very place. Exact triangulation. I know that for certain, because afterward, I came up here and walked until I was either too damned tired to go another yard, or decided that everything had reached its proper end. I can’t remember what I came to feel by then because even now, whenever I think of the two of them, I don’t know what I’ll feel. –They walked without talking, because Leslie didn’t know what to say and Charlie didn’t have anything to say at all. At least not for a while. I reckon I sympathize with him. How was he supposed to tell her about Kundalini yoga, what the old man had taught him? About the serpent that sleeps at the base of our spines, tail in mouth, a perfect circle? The Great Enfolding One listening, waiting in slumber for the call of the mind, then the call of the heart, finally the call of the Self . . . –Brooks, what the hell are you talking about? He smiled then, but there was more sadness, remorse in it than humor. –Oh, I know a hell of a lot of that damned foreign lore, Albert. You wouldn’t believe how much I know. Afterward, when it was done, I had to manage one way or another to get it straight in my mind. So I took to reading all manner of things–just like Charlie Babin had done years before. Patanjali’s yoga, the great Upanishads, the Brahmasutra . . . but it didn’t do any good. It didn’t help. I could do a doctoral dissertation on what the old man must have taught Charlie Babin, but it wouldn’t mean anything. Because you don’t choose it. It chooses you, and anyhow you don’t learn it. You become it. I almost told him he was likely the only swami with a ticket to practice law in the whole state of Louisiana, but it didn’t seem quite right. Brooks was deadly serious, the night was old, there was still whiskey he’d bought on our way out of Fort Knox–and I had come too far not to hear the rest of it even if Brooks had made me uneasy about just how the rest of it might go. He pointed down the far side of the levee away from the river. The highway we had been on a few moments before lay down there like a smaller secondary stream glimmering in the moonlight. Back away from the road, on the far side, I could see a few houses set far apart, most surrounded by trees, outbuildings where people might do carpentry or run a little machine shop or repair auto bodies. Or keep pigs and chickens, a few cows, a horse or two. There were chain-link fences here and there, and the white frame houses had mostly been built in the twenties and thirties on the same serviceable monotonous floor plan and not painted since they were built. I wondered which one belonged to Charlie and Leslie. –What he was wanting to tell her that she couldn’t have understood even if he’d found the words, was that old Agnanda had taught him the necessity of preserving his seed–and how to do it. How to engage in sex as long as he wanted, till he and his partner went blind if that’s what they were determined to do. And even to experience the pulsing ecstasy of orgasm without it coming to anything. I stared at Brooks. –You mean, in all the time after he came home from over there . . . He nodded. –That’s right. I reckoned you’d already figured that out. Maybe a more flexible mind or a wilder imagination than Leslie had, or me either for that matter, would have figured it out early on. Anyhow, you’re right. They had no children because that stud beyond studdery of hers had never concluded the business of loving the way we ordinary mortals do. Not once. He admitted that to her. –Shit, I said, still astonished. –That’s got to be grounds for divorce. Brooks smiled. –I never found out, but I wouldn’t bet on it. How would you like to put that case before a Shreveport judge? I didn’t answer. There wasn’t likely a judge in the First Judicial District who’d believe it even with Charlie’s affidavit on it. Any of the old boys I knew would call it an attempted fraud on the court, and some of them would likely smell contempt in it. Judges in Caddo Parish are not to be toyed with. I know. I was once one of them. –It was the day after that when Leslie came to see me for the first time, Brooks went on. –It took a couple more weeks and a supper or two or three at the Mirror Steak House to pry it all out of her. Charlie had told her that he had to do what he was doing–or not doing. A man’s sperm and his spiritual power are linked. To preserve the seed preserved the strength. That was how you found release. That was how he had to go on with his search. –For . . . Nothing? –All right, fine. Or Atman. Or Brahman. Or the One, the substrate and essence of all this–which is, as even a damned occidental civilian lawyer must have come to realize, Maya, an illusion that is as real as we are–which is to say, something other than it seems. Charlie hadn’t made the rules. Neither had old Agnanda or his four thousand and more years of predecessors. Charlie’s formula for penetrating the Question wasn’t some crackpot invention cooked up in the deep Woods of Rapides Parish a year or so before. –Anyhow, Leslie told him she didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t even want to know. It sounded filthy and heathen and unnatural. So she left him. Not because she wanted to, but because by her lights, nastiness and weirdness aside, Charlie had deceived her, and in a worse way than if he had been broadcasting that precious seed of his in every bar and roadhouse and blind tiger all over Caddo and Bossier parishes. That’s how it seemed to Leslie. What? Unnatural conduct? Demonic selfishness? All right, if that helps you, even though what he had done–been doing–seems a little arcane for that kind of label, and had not a thing to do with egoism. –I’ve got a better label, I said, not even feeling peculiar that I was angry for Leslie’s sake when I had never known her. –How about sorry sonofabitch? –That’s simpler, Brooks said. –But it won’t do. It fits our culture and our expectations, but it misses the mark. Never mind, let it lay. So long as you realize that in another place, they’d call Charlie sunnyasin, a great saint, a spiritual virtuoso. –I like crazy horse’s ass better. –I believe something like that was my first response, too. In words or substance. But Leslie wouldn’t have it. She told me Charlie was a good man. That seemed to be stretching hell out of the definitions either one of us could accept for good or man, but I said, All right, fine. Maybe he was a prince of a fellow, but he had surely gotten bent out of any recognizable American shape over there in Asia, and she ought to let me take her to the parish coroner to tell her story. They’d put Charlie in the V.A. hospital for observation, which would be best for everyone. Charlie had gotten purely jerked around in India for his country’s sake, and the country owed him whatever it took to get him hammered back into something approaching normalcy. How does that sit with you? –Fine. If I’d thought of it, that’s what I’d have done. –I’m relieved to hear you say it. Because if you had, you’d have been as big a damned fool as I was. –How’s that? –I worked with the woman till my own wife was ready to pack up and move back to Plain Dealing and work in her momma’s dry goods store again. I finally managed to get Leslie down to the coroner. You remember Dr. Henry Larabee, don’t you? –Sure, he’s been dead for . . . –No matter. That was then. He listened, stared at me over his steel-rimmed glasses while Leslie talked, swallowed hard, and said he’d do it–at least he’d have Charlie in just for a look and a talk, but for us not to reckon on building a divorce case on the simple fact of a look and a talk. And he said he wouldn’t even be doing that if he didn’t know for a fact that I was no common ambulance-chaser out to make his fortune from the ruination of the Southern Family. Brooks drank from the bottle and looked down at the separate small houses set in the moonlit distance. Here and there a light shone through a window, or a cold bluish bulb burned naked out in the back yard illuminating a patch of dusty land. A dog barked somewhere down there, and another answered. –They didn’t have any trouble with Charlie. He acted like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to go into the VA. psy-ward to get checked over. Doc Larabee looked and talked–and got him a room by himself and told him they’d be giving him some tests the next day. It all seemed more or less perfunctory, nothing much to it. I got the notion that the shrinks at the V.A. had already satisfied themselves that Charlie was all right. They were giving Leslie and me some hard eyes. I reached over and took the whiskey. The moon was high then, and the clouds were as translucent as chiffon–moving rapidly enough through the sky so that if I simply stared upward without reference to the dark earth below, I found myself with the giddy sensation of motion, as if moon and clouds were fixed, and it was us, Brooks and me, on our spit of levee poised over a river much larger than the Red, passing across the face of the distant deep blue universe. But the sensation passed, and that thirst for facts that has always been my blessing and my curse pulled my eyes back down to the substantial ground. My wife has claimed that I do not have a romantic bone in my body. Wrong, I leered at her on that occasion. I have one. See, she replied. That proves it. –So far, I said slowly. –All I’ve heard is what Leslie Babin told you. What she claimed. Are you dead sure . . . Brooks shook his head. –No, you’ll see. Not only was she sane and not even neurotic, but she managed to stay that way. Right to the end. To the very end. He fell silent again, staring down toward those little houses in which, now and again, I would see a light going out, vanishing, as even the late readers or watchers found themselves ready for bed. The lightning in the West was closer now, and the sound of thunder clear. Brooks was wordlessly telling himself the Tale once more and, I reckoned by his expression, harking forward to some portion painful beyond the telling. As I sat watching the river flow, I found myself confecting my own version in which Charlie Babin had broken out of the V.A., gone stone crazy, killed in the name of some heathen god with the head of a serpent and a bull’s whang. I reckoned such things could happen. After all, our age and place murders in the name of no god at all. But it hadn’t happened. At least not in Shreveport in the last half-century. I would have heard and remembered. –When they checked Charlie into the V.A. out at Fort Humbug, Leslie had packed a few things and gone into town to stay with an old school friend of hers. Not that she was afraid in Dixie Gardens, not that she had made up her mind that, however Charlie checked out, she was bound and determined on a divorce. She just wanted to be some place not saturated with him, where she could think and try to decide what she wanted to do. –So she moved into the guest room at Prissy and Arthur MacKey’s place over on Fairfield Avenue. Prissy and her husband had skipped having children, so the spare room was always empty except when they had guests, or some sort of domestic crisis came up among their friends. The truth is, Prissy and Arthur enjoyed such visitations. Arthur was an accountant and Prissy managed some insurance man’s office. Neither one of them possessing passion or imagination enough to break with one another, they found some kind of vicarious pleasure feeding on the anguish of others. I shared some friends and acquaintances with the MacKeys, and it seemed to me that when someone with a shaky marriage stopped with the MacKeys, that was the end of it. No marriage ever emerged intact from their ministrations. Anyhow, they’d always thought Leslie married beneath her, and I expect they were delighted to see their view apparently vindicated. However that might be, they surely meant to help the process of disintegration along. –Every time we met in those days, Leslie just coming from coffee with Prissy MacKey, she was hot for divorce, a little excited about the prospect. She wanted to be free, to get on with her life, as she put it. But by the time we’d done with lunch or talked for thirty minutes, she’d be sober and thoughtful and concerned about Charlie–and decide there was no great rush to file a petition. After a couple of go-rounds like that, I realized what was happening. I didn’t like to see her emotions slapped back and forth like a volleyball, and I was damned sure it wasn’t any part of my job to argue on one side or the other. Hell, I couldn’t even give her justice. All I had at my command–assuming some judge would cooperate–was law. –So after one of those up-and-down sessions, I decided the next time was going to be the last. We’d go through the options one more time and then Leslie would make her mind up once and for all. Whether she wanted to or not. –But it didn’t quite work out that way. I wasn’t making the time-table or the decisions any more than she was. They were being made . . . elsewhere. –That evening, after Leslie and I had danced through what I took to be our last ring-around-the-rosie, Arthur and Prissy were sitting with Leslie out in the back yard of their house. It was one of those big old places on Fairfield, and the yard out back was the size of a feedlot. It was dusk by then, and the three of them were sipping gin-and-tonic and watching the fireflies out back in amongst holly laurels and magnolias over in the yard of the house behind. Prissy and Arthur were doing their routine on Leslie, telling her about all the interesting unmarried men they knew, saying as how she was still a young and desirable woman who had the absolute American right to a family of her own, and a good provider who possessed at least some bare minimal position in Shreveport society. –Out beyond where they were sitting was a scuppernong arbor Arthur had put in years back. A kind of vine-covered gazebo with a swing in it, some chairs and a table. It had been painted a blinding white when it was new, Leslie told me, but now it was gray and weathered and fallen into disrepair. It seems Prissy had determined that arbors were out and patios were in, so Arthur had hired a man, bought the concrete and bricks, and that evening they were sitting on the new patio looking out toward the abandoned arbor which almost merged into the distant bulky shadow of the trees at twilight. Leslie liked the arbor. It had, even in its forlorn condition, a certain grace, she said, and it tended to break up the wide flat treeless center of the yard. Arthur didn’t have any use for trees. They made for fallen leaves and trash. –As Prissy and Arthur were going over Leslie’s wasting life and that unfortunate marriage of hers one time more, Leslie told me she noticed a mist beginning to form out in the arbor. Now you have to realize it was late spring, not especially humid, and the temperature was moving on toward summer. You don’t get mist then, do you? But they all saw it. It thickened, and the haziness turned to a kind of blue-green glow, and the glow began to take on a form, and Leslie saw that the form out there in the empty arbor was Charlie looking as if he were wrapped, surrounded by waves of translucent silk punctuated by sparks, or water full of tiny shining tropical fishes moving upward in a continuous spiral. It was her husband all right. He was sitting in the swing, swaying back and forth smiling. He was naked, and he was on fire. –She told me the three of them sat staring at the figure in the arbor for what seemed like a long time. Then Arthur MacKey cleared his throat, turned to her, and said, “Leslie, I believe that’s Charlie out there. And I believe he’s set fire to himself What do you reckon we ought to do?” –But somehow the worst of it was Prissy’s conduct during the vision or whatever it was–and which went on for a long time even after it faded away and there appeared to be nothing out there in the dark yard but a common grape arbor again. Prissy gloried in hysteria, and she knew the chance of a lifetime when it manifested itself right there in front of her on her own property. She called on Jesus to put away the demon or spectre or evil visitation, but Leslie and Arthur just sat still staring out into the dark yard like two concert-goers shocked by the quality, the penetration of some luminous music still echoing around them, until Prissy saw nobody gave a damn for her weeping and praying and went into the house to sulk. Later, when Leslie felt up to it, she had gotten her things together, piled them in her car, and left. She drove away without seeing Prissy, who, if she was still awake, had likely plunged into nightly prayers, invoking Jesus, along with a shopping-list of other needfuls, to save Leslie, be a lamp unto her misguided feet. She must have driven around town for the rest of that night. Then, as the sun rose, she found herself on Creswell looking at the quiet houses and tree-lined streets. Instead of simply taking a right on Kings Highway, she found herself turning this way and that on streets she’d known for years–as if she were in a labyrinth, a maze from which she could not guess the exit. I think she was saying goodbye to her place, her world, her life. Because nothing she was going to experience from that day until her last was going to be anything like what she had known before. –When she got home, he was there, of course. He seemed to be asleep, sitting cross-legged on the back porch naked, his skin darkened by those long daily exposures to the hot Louisiana sun. She told me that she had walked very quietly around in front of him and, making sure not to block off the sun, had studied the man she’d married, lived with, for almost ten years by then. Charlie had always been the most ordinary of men, she said. Heavy-set, running a little to fat in his youth, scarlet-pale redneck complexion, face something like a fresh side of beef hung to age. –But not now. He was changed, changed utterly. His hair was almost gone, and his skin was the color of bronze. Where his jawline had always been thick, now it was etched sharp and clear, and it seemed to Leslie his cheekbones had begun to appear for the first time. Then she noticed his hands, and a chill went through her. His hands had always been large, with thick short fingers, wrists as big around as some men’s biceps. Now the fingers were long and tapering, nails the color of golden flame. His hands and arms–indeed, his whole body–had lost its hair, was covered now with the lightest copper down that shivered in waves as a breeze touched it and moved on. It isn’t him anymore, she thought. It isn’t Charlie Babin. It’s some changeling or incubus or whatever takes over, replaces a living person. Jesus, this isn’t my husband at all. –You and I, faced with that, would likely have cut and run, just hit for the hills or the phone to call the police or whoever you call when they break out of the V.A. cracker box. But Leslie didn’t She said not only that she couldn’t She didn’t even want to. She felt come over her, replacing the chill, a shock of recognition, an immense desire to take care of him, see him to wherever he had to go. She told me she realized just then that somehow she was his power–not in his power–that he needed her in a way that men in our society, our slice of the world, never need women at all. She felt tears in her eyes. Not for herself, not for what he had already or might yet put her through, but for his sojourning here, for days and nights caught in this alien home-place where he didn’t– couldn’t–belong at all. She loved him. Just loved him. She could sense even in his sleep or trance, a weariness beyond exhaustion, and she wanted to return him to a place or time or whatever it might be of utter and enduring bliss. –Just then, as all this passed through her mind, his eyes snapped open and he smiled at her joyously. The eyes were blue as chips of turquoise–Charlie Babin’s very eyes, and they fixed on her not as some stranger, some alien nearer, less threatening than others, but as a living inseparable and indivisible part of himself, his very power to be, so far as this world was concerned. –“Mother,” he said to her gently, lovingly, and then his eyes closed once more. anywhere other than the hospital. its thick walls and barred windows constituted no barriers to him, because what he was seeking was everywhere and nowhere, timeless, dimensionless, smaller than a subatomic particle, larger than the cosmos. But something had happened as he entered samahdi, intending to range once more the corridors of his spirit, searching for the door. He had thought of her. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he told her. There was no need to do it since any singularity–like Leslie–and the cosmos are substantially non-different. One need only choose a neutral point of focus amidst the whirl of maya, concentrate there, and the reality of that One which is Nothing at all, containing each of the nothings it emanates, must sooner or later be evoked. –But, he told her, sitting naked on the back porch, looking out toward the fish-pond, he had lost the thread. “I lost it, “ he said, “and thought of you.” –That, you see, passed for an explanation of his apparition at the MacKeys. For a Risi, to think is to be. To have conjured up on the bourn of mystic passage the image of one he loved, one from whom he had not yet managed to detach himself, inevitably placed him there at the MacKeys even as within himself he bathed in the elemental fire–the last waystation before negation and enlightenment. –He said that he had seen her there, luminous between the dark shadows of the MacKeys. And her presence had called him back from a final spiritual assault on the facade of created things, a piercing through to the undifferentiated eternal from which we all spring and to which we must return. He had discarded everything. Everything but her. –Leslie told me that in all the years they had lived together in their common uneventful lives, she had never felt so loved. He had come back for her. She said it had seemed for that moment between them that nothing else mattered at all–except that he had paused, had turned back to the teeming multiplicity of the universe. For her. –When she finished, I just shook my head. Then why the hell do you want a divorce, I asked her. If Charlie’s coming back from wherever or whatever was enough to make up for the loss of children and the rest of the weird fiddle-faddle. “Because I’m terrified,” she said. “Because I’m not ready to leave the circuit of living, of departure and return. If I were, I wouldn’t be here, would I?” –You see? He had her thinking that way, talking that way. God knows, I thought, what will come next. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s crazy or not. If this keeps up, somebody is going to get hurt. I told her that, and she nodded, said something I couldn’t quite make out, and left. –Left me to simmer the rest of the day as I tried to go on with something resembling the practice of law. I made a court appearance, took a deposition or two, met with some clients who thought they had a sure-fire million-dollar invention and wanted to know if they couldn’t get it patented cheap. And all the while I was thinking, trying to think, just what I could do that might break the train of nonsense that was carrying Leslie and poor Charlie toward a destiny I couldn’t even guess at. –I checked with the hospital. Yes, Charlie had, as it were, released himself. An orderly had gone for cigarettes, apparently leaving the ward door ajar. The orderly had been disciplined. No, there was no reason for them to go pick up Charlie. He had voluntarily committed himself, after all. Then they had patched me in to some psychiatrist who said Charlie was eccentric, certainly, but clearly within the range of normal and appropriate mental and emotional functioning. They could tell me no more. After all, I wasn’t even pretending to be his lawyer. I hung up and went to thinking about it again. –It was close to evening when I left the office. I thought I would go home, pour down a shaker of martinis, and see if I yet had it in me to resolve that Leslie’s next visit would be her last. It wasn’t hard to compose the speech: If you want a divorce, I can get it for you. Even if the VA says Charlie is sound as a dollar, any fool judge would own that his habits make living together unsupportable. If you don’t want a divorce, would you please just go back and sit with him and contemplate and take up whatever kind of craziness two people can practice together when one is out of his mind because of something that happened during the war and the other silly enough to put up with it? –Driving home that evening, it came to me that the fault was no one’s but mine. I had chosen to take up residence in a fiction created by a troubled woman whose husband had perhaps ceased paying as much attention to her as she might like. This happens. It’s common, isn’t it? Show me a married woman of thirty-five or forty, and I’ll ring her bell and make her tell you the secret miseries and longings of her life. No woman reaches that age without a host of sorrows and regrets. Why had I resonated to all this nonsense? That was a little more difficult to calculate, but then I smiled and felt at ease: show me a man of forty-five or fifty who does not feel that life has passed him by, that he has been ignored, refused his due. I didn’t sense that in myself, but it seemed a reasonable explanation: two middle-aged people, who had known one another when they were both young and hopeful, now engaged in play much stronger than they had known as children caught up in ordinary adolescent make-believe. –My feeling of ease lasted till I turned onto Fairfield Avenue off Jordan Street. Then I heard myself querying myself: What if your logic and your reason are no more substantial than the ephemeral tinker-toys of this moment’s world? What if your ordered seeing is nothing but an instant’s anomaly amidst a universe framed in quite another way? Well, I answered myself, so long as my arithmetic and logic last as long as I, what do I care about that other universe, those other laws and schemes? –But it was no good, and I knew it was no good even as I listened to the answer I was giving myself. By being lawyers, we are investigators. We seek truth even when, in deference to our case and our own pocket-books, we choose to look away on the finding of it as if the gorgon, truth, would freeze us hard as stone, Even to ignore the truth, we must know it. And I found myself stopping, pulling the car over in front of the house Leslie had told me belonged to the MacKeys. This would be the end of it. I would quietly walk back to the rear of the house through the fading spring sunlight, introduce myself to the MacKeys if they happened to be home, and ask about that remarkable gazebo of theirs. If my luck was better, I’d simply go and look and walk away–armed for Leslie’s next visit with the cold hard reality of what I had sought and had not found. –I should have known better. For all my bumptious self-assurance, I should have realized that it was not going to be that way. When I pulled up and parked, I saw a pickup truck in front of the house. As I walked toward the back yard, I heard voices, the sound of men working. Trimming trees, building an addition to the house, sanding and washing the weatherboards for painting? No. I saw white smoke rising as I reached the back, and when I turned into the wide expanse of yard described by Leslie, my eyes went directly to where the gazebo was. Had been. –Nothing was there now but a large round dusty blank, grassless and forlorn, while thirty or forty yards away, men stood around as a heap of something burned down to ashes. –Prissy was standing near the back steps, hands on hips, staring out at the men, at the pile of shimmering ashes. “You,” she called out to one of the men who held a hose in his hand in case the dying flames should spread to the grass nearby, “Don’t beat it out. Don’t put any water on it. Let it burn as long as there’s something to burn. I don’t care if youall have to stay all night. Every splinter. I’ll pay you.” –Then she saw me, turned toward me so that I could see the frenzy, the outrage in her eyes. I told her who I was, and she seemed to reel at the sound of my name. Then, as she steadied herself, she stepped toward me, outrage turning to fury. “Get out of here,” she screamed at me so loudly that the workmen paused in their task. Her face was some shade between scarlet and purple, her hands waving and shaking out in front of her as if she had not only lost control of them, but as if they were managed by some force that was no part of her at all. “Go to her and tell her never to come back here again. Tell her to stay with that devil till hell opens and they’re called back to where they belong. Go, get out.” –I walked back to the car and drove home. Millie tried to pump me, figuring with some justice that she had a right to know what the hell it was that had come to occupy my mind so that, as she put it, even when I was home I was somewhere else. After enough of it, I left the supper table and went to my study. –Millie followed me in. It started badly and got worse. She said she knew I was sleeping with that crazed bitch who couldn’t decide whether or not to leave her crazy husband. If I wanted a tacky affair with a woman who was deranged, that was my affair. It was certain to wreck my practice once word got around–as it necessarily would in Shreveport–and the trolley-driver would likely catch Leslie and me at whatever shoddy Bossier City motel the two of us favored for its cheap whiskey and hot sheets. He would kill me amidst a spasm of drooling lunacy, and that was all right, too. But she was damned if she was going to have me living at home, going from her bed to Leslie’s. –If I remember, I asked her if she’d like to hear what was actually happening. Millie told me no, she wanted me out of the house. What was happening she already knew. What she did not want to happen was that I should give her a disease. –Well, shit, I said at last, studying Brooks, seeing that he wore no expression at all. –I said worse than that. While I was packing my kit, he replied. We had been walking along the levee, river on our left, Dixie Gardens on our right. The moon was high, but by then only an isolated house or two showed any lights over there. Just ahead, there lay a path that pointed down to the river, down the grassy incline of the levee to a wide uneven stretch of sand studded with patches of weeds. Here and there I saw still pools cut off from the drowsy river current, each one holding its own small reflection of the moon. –I didn’t know about youall, you and Milly, I told Brooks as we found ourselves walking on the path toward the sand and the water below. –It was a long time ago, Brooks said. –We were still young enough to be slapped around by passion. Young enough not to understand one another. –Ah, I said sardonically. –It couldn’t happen now? –No, Brooks smiled. –Not now. Down there, we must have made a strange spectacle had anyone seen us at that hour. Two men past middle-age, dressed in good suits, sitting on the sand near a tidal pool sharing a nearly empty bottle of whiskey. I think we watched the moon in that pool of ours as it rode across the sky like a great masted ship, clouds like waves crashing silently past. In the distance over Texas, I thought I could see the clouds beginning to form up amidst more frequent pulses of lightning. That storm might find us yet, tall smouldering clouds coming to try themselves against the shimmering constant moon. –I don’t know what I intended, Brooks began again. –I only knew that Millie’s silliness fit my mood. I wanted to be gone, out of there, out of what I had always supposed was my proper place for life. I had nowhere else to go, nothing in my heart and mind to take up the slack, to substitute for my ordinary life. But I was still glad to be gone. I think I must have driven for an hour or two trying to decide between a motel on Highway 80, a room at the Washington-Youree, or a night on my office couch. But, you see, even breaking with the ordinary, the ordinary won out. I drove to my office, sat down behind my desk, and began fumbling through files as if I was preparing some large and complex case for trial the next morning. But I wasn’t. –No, I was, the essence of me, back thirty years before, sitting in darkness under a cedar tree behind a hedge on Thora Boulevard, and Leslie Stettin was in my arms. We touched and kissed and even as I saw my own veined wrinkled hands in a pool of light there on the desk before me, I was with Leslie in that old time, turning and turning each of us in the other’s arms, at the threshold between passion and love. Her blouse was open, her brassiere unfastened, her breasts in my hands, under my lips–and at that moment we heard a car approaching, turning into the drive of the house whose yard we had chosen for our pause on the long walk home from the Glenwood Theatre. –I came to myself then, a man past his prime, two wars and three decades of law between him and the moment upon which his inner life had turned. And I knew as certainly as a man can possess knowledge that Leslie and I should have stayed, should have waited for that anonymous family to pull into their garage and make their way into the house. It had been my fault, my surrender to convention. I had had the burden of going forward. Had I stopped her mouth with a long kiss, and then gone on, we would have been welded together, never parted after that night. I would have come back to her after the war. We would have had the children she wanted that Charlie Babin denied her, that Milly couldn’t give me. I would be home with her tonight instead of sitting in my office wondering where to turn next, what to do. Or if there was anywhere to turn, anything to do at all. I think the sheer irrationality of Brooks’ words convinced me of their truth. My own life had turned once on a single moment, a single knock at a door. I had been more fortunate than he. I had gone forward with Terry, and found my life once more. –I’d as soon skip over the next part, Brooks was saying. –I’ve pressed your credibility far enough. But I can’t skip, because it’s all one seamless piece. –It’s your tale, I said. –That’s so, Brooks smiled. –It is the Tale, isn’t it? And Lord knows it’s mine. I think that evening, that moment in my office when I revisited the past, was the low point in my life. Not the most terrifying, not the most devastating. But the lowest. I found myself with tears in my eyes for a life I might have lived with the woman I knew I wanted to live it with. Can you imagine discovering that you have lost your life thirty years after the event? I realized in that moment what the Greeks meant by pathos. Not suffering, not misery and anguish as such: simply the situation you discover yourself in when it occurs to you to look, the bounded inescapable way in which you choose or do not choose to go. Think that the word comes from Sanskrit, patha, the way, the path. Destiny, fate, portion. –Feeling as I did, I reckoned I should stay away from home, from Millicent. I didn’t want to have to accuse myself of breaking and entering a home that might not be mine any longer. I had enough to remember sadly already. I stayed in the office for about a week. Amazing how much work you can get done when you live at the office, when there’s nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. –Then one evening, just as I was getting my second wind and about to calendar some more files, I heard a knock and went to the door expecting nothing, nothing at all. –It was Leslie. Taking the chance I might be working late. Or so she said. I got myself in order, and after a few minutes we decided to have supper while we talked. We drove out to The Chef on Kings Highway. She said there were things she had to tell me, but we both managed to avoid serious talk till we’d had ourselves a good meal. Then, as if she’d held it in as long as she could, Leslie told me what had been happening out at the house in Dixie Gardens. –Things had been quiet at first since Charlie came home from the VA. He was working night shift steadily now, and during the day he spent most of his time outside. They hardly talked at all any longer. But it seems they were in full communication anyhow. –He’d come up with telepathy? –No. Not according to Leslie. Something about the weird error of subject-object thinking. She didn’t call it that, but it came to the same thing. She said we hear other people when we stop talking to ourselves all the time, when we fall silent and find out that there really are no other people. Only the One. She’d been at the Piggly-Wiggly one day while Charlie was on shift–maybe a charter–anyhow miles away, and he indicated, told, said, whispered across space and time–neither of which exist but are illusion–that he would like radishes in a salad that evening. So Leslie, sensing it was her own thought as well as his, bought some and prepared them, and they ate and he thanked her without words for her wordless response to his unspoken request that had been hers, too. After that, almost all the commerce between them was carried on that way. Try to imagine it: the little house on a plot of tree-filled land out in Dixie Gardens silent day after day, night after night, as if it were empty. –But it wasn’t, Leslie told me. From the time she returned from the MacKeys, the place was teeming, overflowing with life–or something like life. An invasion of people and things from the far side of the world, or the three worlds, or no sort of world at all. I didn’t follow what Brooks was saying then. –Sorry, I said. –What are you . . . –He was becoming stronger all the time now, finding his way. It seems he was a natural. –A . . . natural meditator? Brooks shrugged and handed me the bottle. –What can I say, Albert? I tell the tale that I was told. She told me the damned place turned into a madhouse. She would wake up in the morning afraid to open her eyes. No telling what she’d see. Demons stalking the hallway destroying, eating lesser demons. Snakes and animals, naked women and men with phalluses a yard long chasing them, penetrating them on Leslie’s modest couch. The women transmuting into jungle pools on the floor of her parlor–where the floor of her parlor had been, the men into waterfalls gushing out of the walls of her house–what had been the walls of the house the night before. She’d start down the hall to her kitchen and lose her way, take a wrong turn and find herself in an Asian marketplace or an empty savannah, giraffes and antelope browsing in the hot middle distance, or in a chill forest clearing where men on horseback were struggling, fighting to the death. She’d call out without opening her mouth, and he’d hear and draw her back and she’d find herself shaking like a leaf in front of her stove or sink, or in her pantry staring at an ancient man with matted hair balanced on one leg, arms outstretched in the midst of the most terrible austerities, his lidless eyes bleached pure white by the sun, his tapas turning Leslie’s pantry into a cauldron of fire, tin soup-cans melting and running as their labels turned to ash, loaves of bread bursting into flame, a bag of popping corn going off like a charge of grapeshot. –He couldn’t help it. The deeper he dove, the stronger his concentration became, the more he was drawing toward himself all the elements of the Tale. His illusions were becoming real, imploding out of all space and time to surround him like rubbish drawn into a cyclone. And it had to be done. He had to play through all the variations of the Illusion, actual and possible, before he was done with the universe once and for all, before he could go on home. –Home, I blurted. –Good Christ, where was home? –Out there, in there. Wherever you like, whatever helps you make it through the night, I reckon. Home is where you stop, rest. Where the variations cease. It isn’t a place. It’s a circumstance, a situation, a pathos. That’s why the house was filled to overflowing with all the creatures that could be, the killing and screwing, the building and birthing, destruction and death. It all had to be done once within meditation. Once a thing was evoked, played out its cycle, and was destroyed, it would come no more. And Charlie Babin–or whatever you wanted to call him by then–would be that much closer to being done with everything. –But there are billions, trillions of . . . –No. Think of the Platonic ideas, forms. Lots of them, but not an infinity. Only the One is infinite, and the One is no number at all. What he was struggling against, coming to terms with, were the genera of the Ten Thousand Things–the kinds, the possibilities, not each example in its attenuated contingent reality. Anyhow, Leslie told me, he was getting through things quickly. The pace kept picking up. He spent hours in samadhi on the screen porch, a menagerie of weirdness playing around him, streams of colored light either flooding in on him or emanating out of him as if her husband–if you could still refer to him that way–were the ultimate vacuum tube in all the universe, sending and secreting signals from all space and all time. She said it was like standing in the middle of a railroad station-cum-insane asylum, things and notions and entities of every kind coming and going, constant racket. Not three rings like a circus–a wilderness of rings, like the galaxies themselves. –No end to this unless he was sleeping or was off driving his trolley or she’d left the house. And as time passed, or whatever time did out there in Dixie Gardens, she took to spending more and more of it away. –I can understand that, I said. –What I want to know is why she went back at all? –Counselor, we have but a single mind between us. I asked her the same thing over brandy and coffee in the little bar next to the restaurant. And I had better reason to ask, since what I’m telling you now is no more than an abbreviation of what went on at that house. My God, she saw the pathos of us all, age after age, war after war, the anguish of tribes raised up and gone down before men knew they were men. –She’d look out her bedroom window into the side yard and see Cossacks riding down villagers, burning synagogues. She’d open a closet and find it stuffed with corpses hoicked from the ovens of Belsen or Dachau. Imagine what she discovered her lampshades to be made of, what stuffed the cushions of her chairs? No branch of the trees outside was without its burden. Her magnolias and oaks and sycamores stood windless, festooned with bodies still twitching, whose illusory lives had been separated by millenia. She might open a cupboard and find a severed head. In her laundry basket was the impaled body of a child, its bleeding entrails set afire in the name of Allah or Baal or Odin–or Christ. –Why didn’t she leave? The simplest reason of all. She loved him. And, she said, he couldn’t help it. His pathos was to return by the Way of the Fathers. Which, it seems, is a terrible punishment visited by the gods on one who has utterly missed the mark. He must relive all of history on his way home. From the fatal automobile accident just down the road ten minutes ago back to the moment when Cain raised his hand in anger and hatred and venomous envy of his brother, and struck the downbeat to the cacophonous endless inchoate orchestration of our collective life. She couldn’t leave him alone in that. She had to see it through. He was her husband. There wouldn’t–there couldn’t be a divorce, Leslie told me. –Wait a minute, I said. –She’d married a boy from Rapides Parish, a boy with a nice job at the Shreveport Street Railways Company. What had that to do with . . . –Just what I said. And then wished I hadn’t Because she told me, and it made me wonder what I mean by love–what any of us mean. –Till death do us part? Lord, even then . . . –Oh no, not that. At least not the way you think. That would be easy. Those are our terms because ever since Saul fell off his mule on the way to Syria, we’ve reckoned, planned, hoped, believed in death. Leslie knew better, had learned better. Dying doesn’t mean a damned thing. You can’t count on dying to let you off or out. Die as often and as variously as you choose. You’ll just find yourself starting over again. It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment? Not on your increate endless life. Because Paul had the smalltime, short-term imagination of a tax-collector. The world, the flesh, and the devil he liked to go on about–and the God he preached–are One. –She loved him because she knew they were . . . what did she call it? Non-different. He was her passage to herself. Somewhere amidst the demons and the serpents, the carnage and the screwing, she had come to see that. The visions were real enough, as you and I measure reality. Still, in all their horror and bloody detail, they were contingent. They could not stand forever. Only one thing could stand forever, and she and Charlie, and all the rest of us are within it. Still, the illusion isn’t without meaning. Maya doesn’t work purposelessly. It wasn’t that things had gone to hell out in Dixie Gardens, in the vicinity of Charlie Babin. It was that for Leslie the veil was rent, and she saw the stewing bleeding horrific drama of the world for what it truly was. She saw through the Tale in its every twist and turning. You ought to understand that, the need to do that. –You mean . . . this afternoon? The conference? –Yes indeed. A table covered with the agony, the mutilation, the dying of children. The eternal fire, a hundred isolated incidents, each one enough to break your heart and send you sobbing to the forest begging for some particle of insight. But what if, instead of dry photographs, you had been present, conscious, watching every dying? All at once. At the same time? Forget the children. Reckon how it would be if your mind were open to all the death and suffering and frustration and heartbreak going on in the world at this very second? Just this second alone? –Forget it, I said hoarsely. –Go on. –That’s just what she said she had to do. Not forget it, just go on. Because you can only dodge reality when there’s some alternative to reality. You can go settle in Portland when your love in Kansas City lets you down because, wrapped in the veil, you can believe Portland is another place, that you’ll have other loves. Leslie had learned better. She knew there was no place else to go. “Why this is hell, nor are we out of it. For where the hell is, there must we ever be.” See, even a Western playwright knew that much. Of course, hell is the fiction, not the truth, but the pathos is the same so long as there are two of anything. –So she loved him, and anyhow there was no place for her to go because in his austerities he had shown her that he was everywhere. Not located in all places, mind you. She said he was place itself. We, and the cosmos, and everything that is, were happening to him. He had become the sum and total of the illusion, the essence of Maya. Leslie said he was the living process working itself toward whatever it is working–playing?–toward. If anything. –And worse for him, harder, because he was a Western man, one like the rest of us who, learned or not, have believed in history since that night when, after troubled sleep, Abraham heard himself called out to count the stars and the Lord, beginning one of the very best, most colorful, doomed and murderous of his passion plays, made of the Hebrews and their epigones a people living second by second, day after day, millenium to millenium, under His direct encompassing eye. We’re all historians, wise or stupid. That’s the price we pay for stepping outside the Tale into the grandest of myths, the most consuming of illusions, the juncture of Time and Reason. You see, that was the course of Charlie’s liberation. Those who live within History rather than the Tale have to die their way out of history, inch by inch. And meditation is the practice of dying. –I thought that was philosophy, but never mind, I said. –All right. All of that. Whatever else you want to throw in. But love . . . ? –Right. Not love, Brooks went on. Not love at all, if you want it that way. Christ, when you run through the inventory of what we call love in the Western world–a short list–you haven’t touched what Leslie was talking about. I took the word she gave me. I don’t have a better one. Call it dharma, what she had to do in this world: fate, destiny, doom . . . How about pathos? The place she occupied, the where that she was, and the when, too. It doesn’t matter what you call it, because it was . . . non-different from what had once been her husband, had once been Charlie Babin. She said he was there, in the bar of The Chef, as we drank our third or fourth brandy . . . I almost laughed. –The unseen guest at every meal. I thought that was Jesus. Brooks turned from examining the river. The moon was a little behind his head, shadowing his face. But I could see he wasn’t smiling. –Of course. Because he was becoming . . . whatever it is that lay behind Jesus, too. The cool soft sound of Brooks’ voice made me pause with the whiskey bottle halfway to my lips. –I think we’ve both had a long hard day, and the night seems to be getting harder . . . Brooks shrugged. –When I started, I guess I didn’t take into consideration the problems my tale presents. You see, Albert, I never told it before. I didn’t mean to offend you, old friend. –No, I said quickly. –It’s not that. I mean . . . it’s that the whole business is getting off the scale of things. Don’t you see? –Sure. I mean, I see now. Off the scale of . . . things. In fact, I was about to see just then, just where I stopped the telling. –What? –I must have looked more and more askance as Leslie talked, especially when she said that Charlie was there with us. Because she smiled the way a mother smiles at an errant child, and raised her hand as if she was about to give blessing, palm toward me. “This is Charlie now,” she said quietly, conversationally. –So help me God, the palm of her hand seemed to dissolve, and in its place I saw a human face surrounded by a soft faint light. You have to remember that up to that moment, I had never seen Charlie Babin before. But I recognized him. I mean, the seeing carried with it certainty. His eyes were closed and his face was a dark tan, thin, handsome, almost hairless. The image reminded me of those old pastel holy pictures they used to give in parochial school for an A paper, or at first communion, or when a child had made the nine First Fridays. And it came to me that perhaps, Protestant to the core, I was . . . making my first communion. –I must have fallen back in my chair, dropped my eyes for a moment, because when I was seeing again, Leslie was waving her hand, indicating, calling upon me to look around at the bar. When I did, I caught my breath. –Because as I looked at each person along the bar, at the bartender, at others seated at small tables just behind us–even at a waiter who had come from the restaurant side to pick up drinks for a table . . . every face I saw turned toward me was an exact duplicate of the face I had seen shimmering in her hand . . . –Jesus Christ . . . You were drunk. Or you’re drunk now. That’s . . . –You’re wrong. I was deadly sober then. Sober enough to bolt from the bar without even paying the check. When I came to myself, I was standing outside, leaning against the front window of the Peerless Cleaners next door, shivering like a dog in a sleet storm. –Then Leslie came outside. She didn’t say anything. She reached over and pulled me close to her and kissed me. She told me what I had just seen was nothing, that she was being drawn into . . . whatever was going on. And she told me one thing more. She said she wanted me. –But I thought she loved her . . . –Let that ride. Remember my situation just then. Remember what there had been or seemed to have been between the two of us so long ago. I was sober, but I was shaken clear through. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was barely thinking at all. I told her that was what I wanted too, had wanted more than anything since . . . nineteen hundred yesterday. I must have sounded like a fool, blurting out to her that it had been my fault. If only I had made her stay that night when we paused on Thora Boulevard . . . –“But you did,” she said with what sounded like surprise. “Have you forgotten?” Brooks paused then, his face half turned away from me, blazoned by the light of the full moon. I could see that he was sweating. He stood up, studied the empty whiskey bottle I had handed back to him. His hands were shaking. –Albert, I don’t think I’m going to get through the rest of it . . . –Are you ill? The whiskey . . . –No, the past . . . That other past. –Maybe if we start walking again. Brooks nodded, and we found our way up the downward path along the side of the levee that holds back the waters from the city’s outskirts when the Red River rises in the spring. As we walked, Brooks was sorting his way through what else he wanted to tell me. –When she said that, I felt dizzy. It had to be the brandy, didn’t it? When I came back to myself, that self was . . . gone. I was that other one, sitting at the base of a tall tree behind a hedge and Leslie was in my arms, her blouse, her brassiere off. A car pulled into the drive only a few yards from us, and I was pushing her down so that we wouldn’t be seen. In a moment or so, the house door closed, and the lights came on inside. But I was paying no attention to that, because I was pulling off my clothes as if they were burning my skin. Leslie was smiling, squirming out of her skirt and panties, and the path that had been closed was opened once again. –But what were you thinking, I asked him in astonishment as we reached the top of the levee. –I was thinking about Leslie, her breasts, her legs. Her fresh beauty. How I wanted to spend my life with her, even though only then had I come to realize it . . . –But the restaurant, where you’d been . . . –A dream. A weird bad dream already retreating so far into the memory that I could hardly call it up. Who knows? A little stroke or something in the brain. But I was awake now. This was real. I knew it was real. The only reality that had ever been. I was seventeen, Leslie sixteen. We were making love, each of us for the very first time. And each of us knew what we’d be doing for the rest of our lives. I shook my head. None of it made sense. How could anyone make anything of it? How can dream and reality be transposed? Brooks stopped talking then. He motioned me to follow him down the land side of the levee, past the car, out toward the road. –Come on, he said. –You may as well hear the rest in a suitable place. We crossed the ribbon of the old Highway 1, and walked a little way down the road. Then Brooks paused in front of a gate in a chain?link fence. He studied the lock and, to my surprise, drew out a set of keys, picked one and opened it with a quick twist. We walked into the yard. Far back from the highway, a small frame house was set among tall trees. On one side, I saw a carefully kept garden, a pond for fish. All around the house ran a long screened gallery. I stopped, looked at Brooks in surprise. –I bought the place . . . afterward, he said in a low voice. –I keep it up. Her garden, the pond . . . We walked up onto the porch and Brooks used another key to let us in the back door. After the tale he had told, I wondered what I might find in there. But of course we found ourselves in a plain kitchen fitted with the expected stove and icebox and sink, table and chairs. Brooks went to a cupboard, opened it, and drew down coffee and a drip pot. He looked back at me quizzically. –No severed heads, no ancient weapons or messages from Sargon I in the cupboard . . . that particular maya has been gone for a long long time . . . We waited for the coffee to brew, and Brooks’ eyes wandered over the room. As if he were following someone engaged in ordinary kitchen tasks. –How can I tell you what happened then? Leslie and I parted at her front door that night. Next morning I was waiting outside to walk her to school, and each day when my classes and hers ended, we’d meet . . . His voice faded, and I could see the mixture of pain and ecstasy the remembering evoked in him. –I lived every day, every hour of that life as surely and as fully as the life I’ve lived in your sight, Albert. We married, raised a daughter, and two sons. I fought my war and came back home to practice law. You and I both became judges . . . We . . . Brooks shook his head. –I could recount for hours what passed between Leslie and me. The glory of loving her, protecting her, the stupid quarrels, the recoveries, love gone flat, discovered once more. It was all the life I could have petitioned for, life full to the brim . . . Brooks paused as his eyes stopped their searching and settled on me. –One of our boys died in a plane crash near Akron, Ohio. On a business trip. Two years from now. He was thirty-two. Leslie and I mourned. You helped us with the arrangements. I remember the morning we buried him out of Noel Memorial Methodist Church. It was raining, and the way to the cemetery seemed to stretch out for a thousand years. I had Edwin’s two young children on my lap in the funeral parlor limousine. They were exhausted not from their own sorrow–they were too young to understand what they had not seen–but from experiencing the rest of us in our loss and anguish. We sat under a canopy in the rain. I watched all my friends gathered around us, determined to hold close, to lend us their strength. And I remembered that old dream of this other life as I had lived it up to the evening at The Chef. What a strange phantasmagoria, I remember thinking. And maybe losing Edwin is another dream. In a few moments I’ll awaken in my bed with Leslie sleeping beside me, my children safely in their beds . . . Brooks got up and moved slowly to the stove. He poured coffee for us and sat down again. He looked old, exhausted. It might have been the result of this long improvident night spent with me, but I knew better. –I don’t want to go on with this, he said slowly. –I want to get done with it. I wish to Christ and Shiva you and I had never gotten involved with . . . Nighty-Night . . . If we hadn’t, you’d have heard none of this. You’d still have your good opinion of me . . . –Stop that, I told him. –We go too far back. At least in this life. He sighed. –This life . . . We were old then. I can’t remember the year, but it was an anniversary. Not the fiftieth or some other landmark where those who know you feel obliged to gather to celebrate at least your longevity, your grit, if nothing more. The thirty-seventh or the forty-third anniversary. Some such. –We were alone. The children had their own lives, and that year they couldn’t manage to get home. So we were on our own. We were going out to Worm’s Hilltop House for supper, but something had gone wrong with the car, so we took a taxi downtown to Dehan’s instead. It was a lovely evening. I remember, we were like children. My God, we had so much to remember, so much to celebrate. Then, afterward, as we were driving back uptown, it came to me that there was a place I wanted to go, to see at least once more. For some reason, as Brooks said that, I felt a shiver pass through me. As if I had touched some hidden talisman. As if I saw a friend’s life ending. –You didn’t . . . I began. –Yes, Brooks said somberly. –Goddamnit to hell, how is it you sense now what never crossed my mind then? I shrugged. Who can account for a presentiment? Phrases flared through my mind. The sword that caused the wound must heal it. In my end is my beginning. I only knew that I would not have done what I was certain Brooks had. –The cab left us off at the corner of Thora Boulevard and Line Avenue. I can see us now in my mind’s eye. Two people almost elderly walking slowly in the darkness, hand in hand, toward the place of their birth, where they had, long ago, come to one another. I had had my fill of anniversary wine and a little more at supper, and the darkness, the trees and bushes all around, brought tears to my eyes. Sure enough, the tall old tree was there, changed not at all, and the curve of hedge. I drew Leslie behind it without a word, and we kissed. Brooks set down his coffee cup and stared into the shadows in a far corner of the room. His face was turned from me and I couldn’t make out his expression. I remember thinking that was just as well. –It wasn’t meant to be . . . an envoi. God knows there was no hubris in it. I had taken her there . . . to recollect, to . . . give thanks . . . but . . . –As we kissed and kissed again, my hand moving over her body that I knew by then as well as I did my own–no, better, because hers I loved. I cared nothing for my own except as it held my spirit and served her . . . As we kissed, a car came down the dark silent street and turned into the driveway of the house. I broke off our touching, our caresses quickly. What could two middle-aged people caught skulking in someone’s bushes late at night say? I moved no more than half a step back toward the sidewalk, feeling suddenly giddy, eyes closed against a flood of vertigo, when I heard Leslie speaking. “Have you forgotten?” she was saying. –And I was leaning once more against the plate glass window outside the Peerless Cleaners, still vertiginous, almost unable to stand. My eyes opened and stared at Leslie. She was much younger than a moment before in the darkness under the old tree. She was smiling softly, lovingly. “Are you all right, Brooks?” she asked. –No, I told her, tears running down my cheeks, utterly forlorn in the discovery of my ersatz immortality as I felt the life we had lived together draining away like a most precious dream we’d give our lives to hold and re-enter and never leave again. But morning comes, and no dream survives the light. –No, I’m not all right, I told her. But she had stepped away from me, walking out toward the street, then across it to where, on the corner of Youree and Kings Highway, there was a trolley stop. She stood there, waving back to me as if this was a parting long planned and worried through between us. As if we both understood and had agreed that it had to be this way simply because there was no other way for it to be. –I started after her. All right, we couldn’t have what I had just dreamed apparently in the fraction of a second. It couldn’t be that, because we were no longer those children behind the hedge, under the ancient tree. But it could be still. I had just lost my life with her, lost children, friends, the very round of my existence. But there were still love and tenderness and the fragments of a dream to be recovered. –Then, even as I ran across the street toward her, I realized that something–no, everything–was wrong. –There was no traffic at all. No, that’s not so. There were cars, headlights on, in the distance on Kings Highway. But they were stopped, not moving. I looked back over my shoulder into the window of The Chef. I could see people outlined there, a waiter about to serve a table. Some woman raising a drink to her lips. But they were motionless. Not simply not moving, but frozen as if they had been converted to the salts on a photographic print. Across the street, behind Leslie, a cat had been on its way to a garbage can at the side of the Youree Drive Drug Store. It paused now, one paw lifted. –The whole street seemed to be glowing under my feet. Nothing was right or sane. Christ, I thought, I’m having that stroke or going mad. I can’t even guess what life is my life. But that didn’t matter then. The only life I wanted was the one with Leslie, the one the concrete world had been telling me was the dream. –I was halfway across the street when the trolley came. I hadn’t seen it coming up Kings Highway from my right. Perhaps it hadn’t come that way at all. Perhaps it was simply there according to . . . its schedule. –I saw Leslie climb aboard. I saw her glance at the driver and walk back through the empty rows of seats to a place on the side facing me. I couldn’t get any closer. I was frozen, too. Leslie looked out at me, a smile on her lips like that every woman reserves for her lover. She kissed her fingertips and I felt her lips on mine. –Then for some reason, I looked to the front just as the driver turned and stared down at me. It was that face I had seen repeated over and over again in the bar moments–forty years?–before. Only now I realized that it was not the face of Charlie Babin or of any man who had ever lived. And before I could shout or demand or even give a sign, before I could scream out of my own depths, such as they were, the trolley had started moving, slowly at first, then faster–out Kings Highway, out toward Dixie Gardens. Which was strange, because there were no trolley power-lines going that way, out old Highway 1. The power-lines turned right at Youree Drive. Then as I watched, the velocity of the trolley increased until it vanished in a point of light somewhere in the darkness on the far horizon. –When I came to myself, I remembered everything. It was still night, and I was very tired. I retraced my steps and found my car parked just where I had left it. But Leslie wasn’t inside. I went back and looked in at the bar. She wasn’t there, and I reckoned it was no use to ask a bartender or a waiter where she might have gone, or what had passed there earlier. Dreams of love belong to us alone, whether we want it that way or not. –I need to sleep, I thought. I need a place that belongs to me. I’m going home. Tomorrow I’ll make arrangements and move out, give Millie a divorce if she wants it. By then it seemed the life I’d led with her amounted to nothing at all. There had been no children in it, no great encompassing love. No marriage of heart and mind. More nearly an arrangement, a social institution agreed upon between two people who–God help us both–had nothing better to do with their lives than to live through them together. –I stretched out on the sofa in my den, and found something very like sleep. As I remember, it was dreamless sleep. I had had my fill of dreams, dreams which had become memories as fixed and certain as if they had happened. And after all, how could I say they hadn’t when I wanted to believe they had? –As I was drifting off, I recall saying to myself, Tomorrow or this morning or whenever it’s light, I’m going to drive out to Dixie Gardens. I’m going to see Leslie and tell her to find another attorney, because a man shouldn’t represent a woman he wants to steal away and marry. I’m going to see her redneck Brahmin at long last, and if he gives me one creepy word of Eastern Wisdom, I’m going to beat the shit out of him and stomp him to death while he’s down. I think my eyebrows must have raised at that. Brooks had always been the great compromiser, the man who found violence, even harsh words, tiresome, offensive, and fruitless. I had never thought of him as a street?fighter, one who was prepared to beat an adversary senseless–or worse–for the sake of a woman. He saw my expression and laughed without humor. –Reckon I could plead diminished capacity the way they let axe-murderers do in California? Albert, my capacities have never been better. I had not simply had a preview of that other life, the one with Leslie. I had lived it. I wanted it now. I wanted it more than salvation, whatever the hell that might be. I wanted the nights Leslie and I had shared–at least the ones that were left. If killing some brain-damaged Rapides Parish trolley-driving swami was the way back to that life, the price was right. –This time when I woke up, Millie was fixing breakfast in the kitchen. There was a cup of coffee on my desk, the steam still curling up from it. I drank the coffee and went back to our room for a quick shower, a shave, and a change of clothes. It was still early. The sun wasn’t even up yet. By the time I reached the breakfast room, she had country ham, eggs, biscuits and grits set out for me. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, Millie would have been on the Interstate, and heading home. –But it wasn’t as simple as that. I’d left because she had been acting like a fool, accusing me of something that never happened. Now her accusation wasn’t simply true; it was minuscule compared with the reality. I’d lived another life in the few short hours of the night before. I had made love to Leslie ten thousand times. I’d had three children by her, walked into old age with her, and still, as I sat down to my ham and eggs and grits, hungered for her like a youngster who had seen for the first time a proper and sufficient object for his lust. I said nothing to Millie. just then, she occupied no portion of my mind at all. I ate in silence. “All right, damn it,” she said at last. “I’m sorry.” –I didn’t even look up. I shoveled down some grits and finished off the ham, balancing it on a bit of biscuit. “Brooks, I was wrong. It was . . . mean-spirited of me.” –God knows, I thought, and drained my coffee cup. Millie started to sob. I turned my head to look at her then. I think she had fixed herself up with a little more care than on an average morning, but that may be nothing more than male boorishness having its say. I stared across at her, wondering before my eyes even focused on her face, why I had married her, why I had committed the single life I had, according to all my Christian neighbors and friends and forebears, to this woman. I found no answer there. I saw an attractive middle-aged woman with delicate features, nose a little sharp, warm full lips, hair fading, hands beginning to show the wrinkles and tiny discolorations I could find on my own by only looking down. –More than that, I realized that she was unhappy and afraid. Not so much certain that she had been wrong in her accusation of me as certain that it had been imprudent, pointless, destructive of the tissue-thin fabric that we had woven with care and a decent respect for one another over the years. Unhappy because we had not been given to such arguments before. Afraid that, if she was right about Leslie and me, her words might have tipped an uncertain balance within me away from her, toward Leslie. Or perhaps that they had conjured up from nothing at all the very thing she feared, and that I had done last night what she had accused me of doing for weeks, months before. –Cocteau said artists are shameless, they exploit their emotions. I say lawyers are worse. They analyze theirs. Even as I looked at her, I knew, measured against the life I had led last night, ours was full of poverties and silences. Not simply that I had been cheated. That we had cheated one another. That we might each have done better. I had lived such a life the night before. Millie never had. Chances were, except in threadbare fantasy, she never would. –A great sadness filled me then, and I reached over and took her hand and heard the gentle reassuring lies begin to spill out of my mouth as if I were the prince of heresiarchs come to shift the axis of the world with a pocketful of words. –Never mind. She brightened then. She told me that I was, had always been, her one great love. That I always would be, that she was sorry she couldn’t be the woman I wanted her to be, deserved, needed. She did the best she could. –I stood up and took her in my arms, tears in my own eyes. There swept across me some feeling for the discontinuity of all our lives, how we come into the world indeed scarce half made up and leave it little better at the latter end. I told her she was my love, that she should never think otherwise, that ours was a splendid life, and that I would be home early for supper and take her to Worm’s Hilltop House out on Cross Lake. –She seemed reassured for a moment. We hugged and kissed. Then she looked up at me, confusion in her eyes. “But, Brooks . . . Worm’s is closed. It closed down years ago.” –I nodded, mumbled something about getting old, my memory beginning to go, and suggested the Mirror Steak House. Millie nodded, agreed, walked me to the door. But as we kissed again, I saw in her eyes something beyond confusion. If I had to give it a name, I’d call it certitude. –As I drove down Line Avenue, I was perplexed. Not by the presence of some new element of strangeness, but by the incredible everydayness of things around me. I passed the fire station at the corner of Oneonta, Betty Virginia Park on my left a little farther on. Everything was in order. Out in the park, I saw a dog gamboling, frisking like a spring lamb. Two nursemaids pushed perambulators along as they talked. A young man, perhaps a salesman between appointments, sat on a bench reading the sports section of the Shreveport Times. The world was as it had always been. Wasn’t it? And I was pulled between regret and relief as I pondered what had happened, what had seemed to happen, the night before. Had it been the drink? I’d given up heavy boozing years before. Perhaps the brandy, the cocktail or two I’d had before supper with Leslie, had evoked what seemed to be this depth of memory that plagued me even as it failed, faded within. –When I reached the intersection with Kings Highway, I turned right instead of continuing downtown. That way Dixie Gardens lay. –I slowed down as I drove the highway out of town. I didn’t know what I was going to do, what I wanted to say to Leslie. I was wishing Millie had not revealed her feelings. I wished she’d gone on with her silliness, stayed stonily in bed and let me fix my own coffee and breakfast. The night before, I had been free, ready to draw down on the credit I had built in the town over so many years. Now, caught in the morning light, some part of me was gloomily whispering that life is not a series of transactions with the world no matter how much it may seem that way, that I could not put Millie off and Leslie on and thereby recover what was lost, what had been lost thirty years and more. That life I had lived–or dreamed–in all its welter of detail and feeling last night was part of me–the best part, surely, but there was no more of it. For the rest, I might as well not have turned my car from its accustomed direction. I might as well have accepted everyday and gone downtown. –Except it wasn’t going to be that way. Reason and experience told me how it had to be when we walk in the everyday world, but I took reason and experience by their throats, throttled them, and tossed their corpses by the roadside. Along with justice, duty, temperance, and any other virtue that seemed inappropriate baggage just then. –I saw the place. This place we’re in now. Almost exactly as it is now. If something about it on that late summer morning was distinctive, it was that, absent the rural post box with a number and the name BABIN crudely painted on it, I could have driven for years and never found it out among all the others. –I parked outside the chain-link fence on the shoulder of the road and walked up the oyster-shell drive toward the house. I saw these trees and that pond, not so old as now but much the same. –Seeing that my visit wasn’t that of a family friend–far from it, rather of one who had in mind to empty that simple frame house of its one treasure, to wrest from an arguable lunatic what he could have no use for, what had come to be an obsession with me–I went to the front door. It passed through my mind that I should have brought a gun. You don’t go up to a man’s door in Caddo Parish without a weapon to tell him you mean to take his wife away. You don’t do that with a sane and sober man, much less a deranged trolleydriver who supposes himself the incarnation of some damned heathen god, do you? But my determination had gotten ahead of my prudence. It lay back alongside Highway 1 with its good and thoughtful fellows, maimed and broken. –I rang the bell and waited, no longer even considering what I should do or say, simply determined on what the outcome was going to be. The hell with everyday, with duty and law, with this damned town and its institutions and its weather of sanity. Thirty years is long enough to serve. In prison, in the service, in life itself. This time, this one time, I was going to take what I wanted, what I had to have if the rest of my life was going to mean anything at all, carry it back to the source, back to that lush green patch of ground beneath the cedar trees on Thora Boulevard, and . . . Brooks stood up and walked to the back door. He unbolted it and stepped out onto the porch. After a moment, I followed him. He was standing staring out into the back yard, into the impenetrable darkness to the East beyond the trees that only then was beginning to lighten with rifts of paler gray while the moon began to fade and fall off to the North. The clatter of insects had not ceased. The birds had not yet begun their hymns of arousal. But from behind us, the rumble of thunder was loud, and I could see lightning reflected in the shapeless bulk of trees a little distance from the house. –My God, Brooks said. –It’s almost tomorrow . . . –Never mind that, I heard myself say. –Go on. He shrugged. –All right. Why not? Maybe this whole damned night has been . . . Maybe we’ll come to ourselves walking down the steps of the courthouse yesterday afternoon, each of us caught up in his own anguish and depression. You’ll decide for Fort Knox. I’ll go home and have supper with Millie and say, It’s been a hard day, and watch something on TV . . . or perhaps the other way round . . . –You want odds on that? I asked him. Brooks shuddered. –No, I don’t think so. I had only to ring that once. She came to the door, opened it wide, smiling as if I had come there by invitation rather than by way of my own loss of discipline. She drew me into the house smiling, saying that she’d hoped I’d come, that I was the one person in all the worlds–worlds, not world–that she had hoped to see. She wasn’t wearing a dress. Rather she was wrapped in some kind of beautiful scarlet silk shot through with threads of gold. I guessed it was a sari or something of the kind. Then I saw for the first time that she didn’t look like herself at all. I mean, not Leslie Babin, middle-aged, forlorn, confused, my client, my old schoolmate. She looked years younger, buoyant, filled with happiness and a sense of herself. She looked like the girl I had married, spent a long happy life with. The night before. –I started to speak to her, tell her why I’d come, but then I realized that the small neat austere parlor I’d stepped into was beginning to fade. The walls and ceiling, the furnishings and floor were falling away as if they’d been some sort of holographic projections rather than concrete things standing in a concrete world. I remember feeling a wave of nausea as I saw a table eddying away like smoke, a framed print of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy hanging in the void where a wall had been, then it too losing its definition and shuddering into absence even as I watched. –In place of the shadow room in which we’d been standing, there was a garden. Don’t ask me to place it, to tell you where or when or what. I don’t know. It was as if the garden itself were alive and conscious and determined to maintain its anonymity at all costs. When I looked at a tree or a plant, it seemed to shift or generalize itself so that it wasn’t precisely where my eyes were fixed. My peripheral vision took in the whole shadowed luminous place, but I couldn’t quite see anything for what it was. Except Leslie who stood a little ahead of me, beckoning me on. –But for that moment, I couldn’t move. The transition had come too quickly. I shook my head and tried again to see something but it was no good. Imagine yourself standing in your office on the thirteenth floor of the Commercial National Bank Building, Albert. You’re dictating or pacing with a legal problem in your mind. Then suddenly the walls, the floor, become transparent. You can see the ground a hundred and fifty feet below, the cars passing in the streets, the pedestrians–and you’re standing on nothing–not plastic or glass. You’re standing on nothing at all. –That’s how I felt. I remember thinking, Jesus, I’ve had some kind of stroke this time for certain. We must have walked through the house and into the back yard and I missed the passage because vessels were breaking in my brain. Now my sight is going. –I knew better. Somehow I knew better. I realized even as I told those things to myself and worked on believing my own explanation that it was bullshit pure and simple. But it was easier to believe, safer. I thought, I’d rather believe that my mind is going, that I’m dying where I stand than accept . . . the alternative, –Leslie stood there ahead of me, at a turning in the garden path. She seemed to realize that I was disoriented and waited patiently for me to decide what I was going to do. I had the sense–no, the certainty–that I could turn around and walk back into everyday if that was what I wanted. I could find myself back at that front door and, like a film run reversed, take back my push on the bell, walk backward to my car, never take that turn off Line Avenue at all. The walls, the floor of my office would be solid and impenetrable, my schedule laid out for the next year . . . –It wasn’t what I wanted. So another turning-around was called for. I had to turn around inside myself, quit pretending stroke or confusion, take things as they were. I had to accept what was patently absurd as reality, or return to a reality that I knew was absurd. –I started walking then, following Leslie, feeling my life, my past eddying out behind me, fluid as those walls we had already passed through. I sensed the universe as a flowing tapestry within the fabric of which each life like ours bears along a single thread. As I walked, I could feel a thousand corridors on every side of me, ways I had walked before–or had yet to walk one day. –Leslie paused, reached out her arms to me as we came to another turning in the garden path. She held me close, and we kissed. Brooks stared out toward the East where we could see clouds defining themselves now poised above the sun about to rise. The clouds were shot through with scarlet and gold, mauve and warmest gray. Rain had begun to fall softly. I could see that his face was covered with tears. –We held one another for ten thousand millenia, cycle after cycle passing around us, the flux finding new variations on its single game, play, show, each time a thread wound down to what seemed, had to be, its mortal end. Then she said: “I love you. I always have. I always will.” –I wanted to answer, but her lips stopped mine. She drew me on, around a grizzled ancient cedar tree that seemed to pierce the sky itself, into a boundless meadow. He was there, of course. Seated in what looked like an ornate temple made of the slenderest of supports with a shining cupola above and a low wall of lattice down below. I moved closer on my own. The thing was no larger, I reckoned, than the gazebo I had been too late to see at the MacKeys before Prissy, in mindless wisdom, had had it torn down and put to the fire. –Yet it was teeming with . . . people? Elders and babies, youngsters, people working at every trade, caught in the midst of crimes, woven together in love. They were not worshipping or even conscious of the figure they moved within and around and through. It was more intimate than that. They were participating in him. He was their generic, they his concretion. It was perfectly clear. That One and those many weren’t . . . different. –Then I tried to look at him, Moses’ reminiscences playing through my mind, a fear of blindness. As if blindness were not our common condition after all. But I had nothing to worry about, because as I could not fix my eyes on the garden, so I couldn’t actually see him. –Damn it, that’s not right. But then I’m not going to get it right. Whatever was in that enclosure, its form, its bounds in space, I saw. But it–he–wouldn’t stay still. I saw a boy in faded overalls with a puzzled expression on his face, a pale anxious young man in khaki, wearing a crushed Army Air Corps hat, a bright patch on his shoulder. There was a smiling naked man in endless contemplation whose bright blue eyes were fixed beyond me, perhaps on Leslie for all I could tell–or on the distant fragile uncertain ramparts of infinity itself. There were a million, a thousand million figures moving there, appearing, vanishing, hovering and eddying away like the table, like the Blue Boy. And it seemed he–they–were on fire. But then I realized that the streams of bright peopled light were not emanating from that icon that, on average, looked like a golden statue. No, they were pouring into him. Imagine again a film run reversed: a burning man, flames flaring up away from what they are destroying. Now the flames are rushing back downward out of the air, reconstituting what they had burned. –I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. It was as if the line of sight between my eyes and that blurred figure had frozen solid. I tried to close my eyes. I couldn’t. And all the time I was trying to break free, there was streaming into me something like a hearing, a seeing, a knowing. –I saw that even this was not reality, because it could be seen. I heard that there was still one step more, like the third step that carried Vishnu beyond the stars, the final step that is formless and unknowable. I knew that to possess the truth, we have to be the truth, and that we are, all of us, at last the truth. The clouds above, the soil beneath our feet, our sweetest doomed dreams, our best unlikely thoughts, our most murderous impulses. Thick fecund mud and tortured engendering blood, famine and deceit, madness, ecstasy–all of it signatures of the divine, every atom, every void. We merge in our reality within that figure my eyes could not renounce and could not see. But not now, not as we see and hear and know in our sightlessness, our deafness, in this cloud of our unknowing. Not here in this hurricane of names and forms. –I heard Leslie then as I saw her passing through my body, along that line of sight toward the inflowing light, still surrounded by its multitudes of seraphim and cherubim or whatever you want to call the enflamed children of humanity in the aspects of its doing. She told me she was now what she had always been, no more and no less. That we would never be estranged unless I should forget her, put her aside. That every one of my best doings would draw us closer, bond us more surely. Because we could not be parted from that life we had led in all its joy and pain and richness surpassing the ignorant storm of day by day. –I held out my arms to her, but she went into the enclosure, into him then, joining the flame, sitting down not beside him or near him, but within him as the fire, the light, grew overwhelming and my eyes were bleached blind by pure white light. just as she merged with the light, I broke free and plunged into the light myself, doubting her words, suffused with a child’s fear. There was no heat, no pain. Only sudden darkness, the complement of light. And one last thing I heard and knew even as seeing failed. The strangest hearing, knowing of all. She said she would be waiting for me. At home when the day was done. Brooks fell silent then, and I think I was satisfied that he did. The clouds were parting in the East, and the world was coming to life. I heard pigeons chucking softly, and the trees in the back yard broke from undifferentiated blocks of darkness into rich deep green, their branches and leaves, wet with rain, being picked out by first light, embroidered against the sky. I didn’t even try to weigh what he had told me, what it could mean, what a sane man could make of it. Not because my love-affair with fact and substantiality is carried to the point of an affliction, though that may be true. But simply because, lacking any such experience at all, hearing such things from a friend, all I could offer was silence. –There’s a phrase we lawyers like to use, Brooks said suddenly, his voice drier, tone almost ironic. –I thought of it when I woke up sitting here, on this porch, looking out at the bland cloudless sky, at outsized trees motionless in the hot moist breathless afternoon. Piling inference upon inference. A bad way to make a case. Somewhere between one inference and another, we like to say, reality is lost. Even the gauge, the measure, is lost. That was my situation, you see. Dreams, fantasies, imaginings, all piled one upon another. I sat out here for a long time trying to piece through it all, trying to determine which of the realities was Reality. –Much later, I got up and walked back into the house. I splashed good cold well-water on my face and washed my hands–lustration, ceremonial cleansing after the fact. It was late afternoon by then. The house was utterly silent in the thick overwhelming heat. I seem to remember walking through the rooms, one by one, looking into cupboards and closets, as if somewhere in the house there might be a secret way back to that garden–worse yet, as if I were at that moment walking through the garden, unable once more to see. As if there might be some stolid mute object to serve as index to the real, to loosen my confusion. –In one of the bedrooms, I stopped. On a small table beneath a window, I found all I was going to find. It was a small conventional bronze statue of Shiva in the style that had eradicated almost every other rendering. The god stands on one foot, frozen in his incandescent dance. He is surrounded by tongues of flame, serpents irradiating from–or being drawn into–his head, his shoulders. He stands on the twisting body of a dwarf, his many arms filled with the gifts and plagues he renders to the worlds. But one hand is held out, palm up, in the very gesture Leslie used at The Chef as she drew me into the world from which she was about to depart. I know now what the gesture represents. It means, have no fear. –I picked up the statue and walked back out of the house. The Shiva belonged to me. I knew that as certainly as if she–and he–had left a card propped on its base. –The sun outside seemed to have settled itself on the earth as I walked toward my car. I thought, if you should drive into Texas now, if you were fast enough and bore that one thing solely in your mind, you could drive into its splendor, its saving heat . . . –But after all that had passed, I knew better. The garden was all around me, as real and substantial as the shimmering asphalt road I drove along, but there was no passage for me. Not in this somewhere, somewhen. Not just yet. Later, I seemed to hear weeds along the road and starlings perched above on the phone lines whispering. –There was nowhere to go but home, was there? I pulled into my driveway as if I were coming from the office after one more day by day in the long ambling course of the everyday. I considered leaving my bronze god in the car, bringing it in later. Then I laughed. What kind of man would welcome a god into his house secretly, guiltily, in the dark of night? –When I opened the door, Millie was standing there, light from the setting sun flooding in from the porch far behind her, wrapping her in its glory. As if she had not moved from that place since we parted in the morning. I set down the bronze, my inheritance, on the foyer table and wondered what to say. Millie came to me, kissed me, held me close. We stood there looking at Lord Shiva together, as many arms as his wrapped around one another. There was some difference in us. Undefined, unqualified, not to be determined then or later. We were not Brooks and Millicent any longer. We were . . . something other, something more. –What do you think of our visitor, I asked. She smiled and touched the statue with both her hands. The waning sun had filled the foyer then, and I could hardly see her face as she studied it. Some trick of the warm golden light seemed to isolate us in that small space for just a passing moment. “Nothing,” she said at last in a low voice. Brooks said nothing more until, in the midst of early morning traffic, I stopped to let him out in front of the tall modern building where his office was located. Then he looked around at the people moving through the streets in the stirrings and quickenings of their day, turned back and smiled at me as he offered his hand. –Thanks for listening, he said. –For all the years, and for last night. In broad daylight, I don’t know that it had to do with Nighty-Night after all. Somehow in the darkness . . . –Let me be the judge of that, I said. –God knows I’ve done nothing else . . . He laughed and got out of the car. Then I found a parking place and went to my own office. I had to call Terry at home and attempt an explanation for a night lost from our lives, given over to a friend. And tomorrow, in one of the courts of this world, I had another trial. New Orleans, Louisiana
1984 |
