Toward The End Of Time Part 4

"Where did you hear all this?" I asked. "It doesn't sound like you."

"A program on television the other night, when I couldn't sleep. I get jittery; it's too quiet here at night. You were dead to the world. It talked about the Roman Empire. You know how, before it broke up, it made the spread of Christianity possible? All those roads and soldiers-Christianity would never have gotten out of Jerusalem without those roads. And it needed to get out of Jerusalem. It would have been squelched by the Jewish establishment. The Jews hated it, though it was was Jews at first." Jews at first."

I was amused; this young person under my roof was trying to grow, to learn, to orient herself in the world as it now was. She wanted to live a life. My amus.e.m.e.nt was cruel, of course. I said, "I have to tell you, Deirdre, that I don't much care what happens in the world. I've had my years in it, by and large. You've arrived as a late kicker, one last joy, and I'm grateful. But time is running out for me. What Spin and Phil and the kids from Lynn do with the world is up to them. I just want to buy a little peace, day by day."

"You can't can't just cop out," she said, getting wild. "What about just cop out," she said, getting wild. "What about me me?"

"What about you, my dear? You're comfortable, aren't you? You're fed and housed up here. You're a lot better off than when you were turning tricks three or four a night and getting ripped off by the escort agency and terrified of being slashed or strangled by some sicko who could never come to terms with his own libidinous impulses."

"Yeah," she said. "But there's not enough here for me to do do. Everything I want to do to change the place you resist, because Gloria wouldn't have done it that way. Gloria, Gloria. Ben, it's boring boring for me here. Even banging you, you seem to want it less." for me here. Even banging you, you seem to want it less."

"I'll want it more," I promised, "when it stops being spring. I just get down in the spring, I don't know what it is. We'll be fine, eventually." Some of that ancient dollhouse panic began to rise in my throat, thickening it. "Stick with me, darling. There's nothing out there but-"But what? Paganism. Imported Oriental G.o.ds, fraudulent magi and seers. The decline of Rome.

The lilac buds are two-p.r.o.nged, showing the first unsheathing of leaves. Each sharp forsythia bud reveals a gleam of yellow. The daylilies are now well up-cl.u.s.ters of scimitar shapes. The peonies are a red inch out of the ground. A lone daffodil blows its golden one-note above the sagging crocuses in the driveway circle. The dead lawn shows a green blush. It is all up with winter and its low-ceilinged safety.

Rounding the pond back from a nocturnal trip to Christy's convenience store for nibbles, milk, and orange juice, I heard the peepers-I rolled down my window to hear them better. The noise was like armor, metallic, composed of overlapping shining scales, ovals of sound beaten thin, a brainless urgent pealing chorus that filled the air solid, whether rising from the mud or descending from the trees was hard to tell in the dark. The sound hung in midair, nowhere yet everywhere, like last month's skunk smell.

The next day, a steady spring downpour drummed in the gutters and whipped against the windows with an insulting sting. Deirdre in a morose sulk did aerobics to an antique Jane Fonda tape of Gloria's while I rummaged in the encyclopedia and the seldom-consulted family Bible, nagged ever since Easter by thoughts of St. Paul. Without him, there might have been a Christ, but there would have been no Christology, and no crisis theology. From the standpoint of two thousand years later, his travels seem wormholes in petrified wood, the already rotten eastern end of the Empire, dotted lines traced from one set of ruins to another, or to empty Turkish s.p.a.ces where even the names Paul knew- Lystra, Derbe-have been wiped away by time's wind. Antioch of Pisidia, where Paul founded the first Galatian church, deteriorated over the centuries into a rubble of marble blocks and broken aqueduct arches; the site was not rediscovered until the explorations of the English clergyman Arundell in 1833. Iconium, rivalling the second Antioch as a center of Christianity in inner Asia Minor, consisted of, after Paul's visitations, a patriarchate with many lesser churches on the slopes of the surrounding mountains. A city located in a flowering oasis surrounded by desert at an alt.i.tude of three thousand feet, Iconium had been founded by the Emperor Claudius as a colony of army veterans; these, together with h.e.l.lenized Galatians and Jews and ethnic Phrygians, made up the population. Poppaea, Nero's wife, appeared on the settlement's coins as a G.o.ddess. In later days Iconium became the residence of the Seljuk sultans of Rum and the headquarters for the Mevlevi dancing dervishes of Turkey; the Armenians of the region remained loyal to Christianity but were savagely slaughtered during World War I.

It was in Iconium that Paul encountered Thecla, a pagan girl who, falling under the spell of his preachments on virginity, became a saint and, in the terms of the adoring Eastern church, "protomartyr among women and equal with the apostles." The apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla Acts of Paul and Thecla, composed by an imaginative priest in the second century, contains the only known physical description of Paul, as "a man of small stature, with his eyebrows meeting and a rather large nose, somewhat bald-headed, bandylegged, strongly built, of gracious presence, for sometimes he looked like a man and sometimes he had the face of an angel."

The ages have not found it easy to love Paul, for all his feats of marketing Christianity to the world. Marketing it, nay-inventing it, and Protestantism as well, which after fifteen centuries at last took up in earnest his desperate, antisocial principle that a man is justified by faith and not the works of the law. What an impossible item, after all, he was selling: Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness. To the Gentiles Paul appeared too Jewish-a Pharisee, a temple spieler-and to the Jews too much infatuated with the Gentiles. There was too much hair in his nostrils, too much moisture on his rapid lips; the hunched-over little tentmaker, bald and gnarled, had been twisted into something superhuman by his fit on the road to Damascus-a bragged-of burst of light that had left him hyperactive, insufferable with a selfish selflessness that laid him repeatedly open to scourgings and filthy abuse. Greek poured from him in an ungrammatical, excited tumble, and I, called John Mark, cousin of Barnabas, resented the way in which my pious and prudent older cousin on his own island, among the friends and relatives that had welcomed us on this our first mission from Syrian Antioch, was insidiously displaced as the leader of our expedition.

The turning point came in New Paphos, at the far end of the Roman road from Salamis, where we-Barnabas and Paul and I-had landed to preach among the synagogues; the governor, Sergius Paulus, like so many of his patrician cla.s.s of colonial officials a foppish dabbler in poetry and philosophy, summoned us to his court, to dispute with the crowd of learned fools he had collected about him. Prominent among them was Barjesus, one of those Jewish magicians called Elymas, who infiltrated everywhere in those sick times of sorcery and febrile Asian cults; this snake-tongued man heckled and contradicted Paul's account as the self-designated apostle strove to set before the governor the intricately bold claims of our faith. At last Paul turned with fury in his eyes and-as ragefully as, within the memories of believers, he had led the persecution of Stephen, hurling rocks and curses alike upon the fainting martyr-Paul called Barjesus a child of the devil and an enemy of righteousness and a perverter of the ways of the Lord. His lips frothing and his eyes rolling upward as they did before one of his fits, Paul told Barjesus, "The hand of the Lord is upon you; you will not see the sun for a season." What happened then was incredible: the mist of darkness enveloped the man and he fell silent, but for begging to be led from the hall. Naturally, Sergius Paulus was impressed, as the Romans were always impressed by a show of cruelty. The governor asked for private sessions of enlightenment as to this Messiah crucified and risen, and the new dispensation that He had brought into the world.

It disgusted me to see Paul preen upon his conquest among our occupiers, and yet I was too young to protect my good-natured cousin from the tentmaker's grandiose impulses. Paul was on fire now with the desire to spread our word westward, into the vastness of Asia Minor, with their mongrel, uncirc.u.mcised populations. He wished to sail to Ephesus, because he believed that the word of Jesus, like a Heavensent plague, would spread best from the teeming ports. He had to settle for a ship to Attalia, on the same swampy coast as his native Tarsus, only to the west.

The mountains called Taurus, snow-capped, slowly rose beyond the prow. It was Paul's mad dream to climb into those mountains and evangelize the high cities that had provided goat's hair to the making of his father's tents. He remembered from his childhood many amiable shepherds and traders who wandered down into Tarsus with their woolly fragrance. He a.s.sured us that the Galatians were not such barbarians as we Judaeans thought; they were inclined to religion, an appet.i.te being fed at present by fraudulent wonder-workers such as Apollonius of Tyana and Peregrinus Proteus and Alexander of Abonoteichos. The names tumbled from Paul's mouth like cheerful Imprecations; he loved language as it spilled through his lips, and often in his darting eyes was a glint I can only call merry, a gleam of sheer mischief kindled by the hyperactivity of his G.o.dstruck brain. He was beset by fits wherein demons bent him double backwards, and suffered periods of disabling feebleness; he carried in his bent form more pain than he wanted us to see.

Peter had not been like this. He often visited the house of my mother, Mary of Jerusalem. His hand would rest on my head; he would joke in his soft Galilean accent; he would praise my schoolboy Greek and mock his unmannerly own and promise me that some day we would travel together, with me his translator, as far as Rome itself. He was a tall broad man, erect, a rock, his beard turned alabaster-white even in the fullness of his manhood. He had known Jesus all day long, for three years, and had been loved by Him. Paul had never known Jesus, had only heard His voice in a cloud of thunder and sheet of light, never in the quiet human company of a roadway, a field, a fishing boat, an upstairs room at suppertime. He had never touched Him, or joked with Him, or caught wind of His bodily functions, or seen Him flirtatiously treat with the women who followed with the disciples. Paul had an unreal sense of women and of Jesus, that made his ideas of both, and his professed love of both, extravagant. Our Lord's miracles had been daylight matters for Simon Peter; he and his brothers James and John alone witnessed the raising of Jairus's daughter. He and those others who had known Jesus well were men of the Law, seeking to understand among themselves in exactly what manner the Law had been fulfilled by the Lord's preaching and healing and resurrection and His subsequent appearances to the faithful. But when I was enough grown to travel and to spread our glad news among the synagogues, the invitation came not from kindly Peter but from Barnabas, my mother's nephew, chosen by the church at Antioch, in company with Paul upon their return from Jerusalem, to journey abroad.

We walked up from the unholy seethe of malarial Attalia, along the Kestros River, past groves of lemon and orange trees, to the magnificent city of Perga. Here began the road into the mountains. We rested the night. The roguish innkeeper told us of the Isaurian robbers who beset travellers and disposed of their bodies in the icy mountain lakes. Also of wolves, mountain lions, and the bears for whom the mountains were named. Paul scoffed, saying he had G.o.d's direct mandate to preach to the Gentiles; G.o.d would protect us.

We set out in a chill morning mist. The path was bordered by wild cactus and p.r.i.c.kly pears taller than ourselves; as we ascended there were pines, firs, and giant broomcorn; and when we lifted our eyes to the heights we saw great cedars swaying in the wind. And these were but the lower ridges. The path narrowed, becoming stonier and doubling back upon itself; the river, which had accompanied us for a while, fell away beneath our feet in a final cascade of rushing water.

Without the river's prattling voice, we could hear the wind above us, bending the cedars and sharpening the edges of the rocks. A narrow pa.s.s, between a face of red rock sweating ice-melt and on the other side a plunging precipice, brought us not to a crest but to yet more steeply upward vistas. Paul scrambled ahead, Barnabas plodded after, dragged by the other man's zeal, and I paused, stunned by the sheer extent of mountain walls before us, ridge after ridge, the farthest crowned by snow though April was well advanced.

We all have our revelations, on the road to Damascus or elsewhere. I called out my refusal to go any farther.

Paul skidded back down, pebbles scrambling and spilling from beneath his sandals, which were as dusty and cracked as the h.o.r.n.y gray skin of his feet. "What's this, my son?"

"Rabbi, this is madness. There is nothing above us but barren mountains, with all their perils, and then highland cities that are merely rumors to us. Where are the synagogues, the ghettos, that will give us shelter and audience?"

A brief laugh showed Paul's ragged brown teeth in his black beard. "The Jews are there, my boy, if not in such numbers as you have been accustomed to in Judaea, Syria, and Cyprus. Wherever the emperor has established order, our brethren will already have ventured, pursuing the trades that demand patience and close vision, observing the close-woven old laws of the Torah, every jot and t.i.ttle."

There was this teasing scorn with which he spoke of the Jews, though he was a Jew. I asked, anger rising in me, "Is it to bring Christ to these spa.r.s.e colonies of the circ.u.mcised that you ask us to risk our lives in a freezing wasteland?"

"To the circ.u.mcised and the uncirc.u.mcised," he said. "In Christ neither circ.u.mcision nor uncirc.u.mcision avails anything; nothing avails but faith which works through love. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. If you are Christ's, then you are the seed of Abraham, and heirs according to the promise. You have heard me speak thus many times, John Mark; why do you now seem to dispute?"

I was a young man and had no wish to dispute with Paul at the height of his power and evangelical urgency. Yet I had taken in the tales and sayings of our Lord before I could walk, for my mother's house was the first in Jerusalem where the followers of the Way gathered. The Last Supper was held in her upper room; the apostles met in the same place after Jesus ascended, tongue-tied in their amazement. At times I felt His presence with those that were gathered there, and I knew in my heart when His message was being perverted. "Our Lord said," I told Paul and Barnabas where they had paused on the steep path, resting their packs at the base of the wall of sweating red rock, "that he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them."

Paul said quickly, in his hurried tumbling voice, no longer smiling, "If righteousness comes through the Law, then Christ died in vain. Christ died that all nations might be saved. All All the nations, not just the nation of Abraham. Until the coming of Christ, the Law was our tutor, but since the revelation of faith we are no longer under a tutor. We are free, in Christ's love." the nations, not just the nation of Abraham. Until the coming of Christ, the Law was our tutor, but since the revelation of faith we are no longer under a tutor. We are free, in Christ's love."

"But Christ came from Abraham," I said, "and his disciples came from the synagogue. If the Gentiles need not be circ.u.mcised to be converted, and may continue to eat meat that is unclean by the laws of Leviticus, then Christ need not have been a Jew."

"He chose to be a Jew," Paul said, "as the Jews were themselves chosen. But now that He is come there are Jews no more. We who are Jews by birth know that we are justified by faith in Christ and not by doing what is in the Law. If the Law could create new life, then righteousness would indeed reside in the Law. But Christ ransomed us from the curse of the Law by becoming the thing accursed, since it is written, Accursed is everyone who hangs upon the tree. Christ and Christ alone is the new life, given for all nations, even for those savage tribes beyond the boundaries of Rome, and not for just the children of the Law."

I held my ground there on the tilted path and said, in the face of Paul's increasing agitation, "Surely the Law was not given to Moses and our priests to be a curse, but to keep us clean among the unclean, to keep us distinct in our covenant. If Christ annulled the Law as thoroughly as you say, then virtue is what each man says it is, and righteousness becomes mere self-proclamation. The Gentiles will come to Christ as if walking from one room into another, without humility or ritual, without discipline or pain."

Paul's eyes surrendered all their craft to a blaze of pa.s.sion: he held out his arms as if he stood before us crucified. "I have been stoned and flogged," he said, "for proclaiming Christ's victory in love. I have forsaken in this life all shelter and safety. Yet, my doubtful young friend, I rejoice in my suffering. Those who belong to Jesus crucify their flesh. They die to this world, that they may live in the Spirit. What matters circ.u.mcision then? What matters cleanness, and the manner of meat, which, as our Lord has said, all goes out through the bowels! I say to you as I said to Peter when in Antioch he flinched from eating with the Gentiles: You hypocrite! Jew and Gentile are one in Christ! I say to you that no man who puts his hand to the plow yet turns back is fit for the kingdom of G.o.d!"

Barnabas tried to intervene, wounded to see such hard words used on his young cousin. But I felt freed from deference by Paul's fury and intemperance, and justified in my suspicion that he was twisting the Master's Word in his pa.s.sion to convert the world, to make everyone and no one a Jew. Partic.i.p.ating in Stephen's death, and hearing that martyr curse the stiff-necked people who had ever persecuted their prophets, Saul had taken into himself hatred of the Jews, though he himself was the disputatious and hot-blooded quintessence of one. When our tempers had somewhat cooled, and we had partaken together of a handful of olives and some hard bread softened in a nearby freshet, there in that shadowed pa.s.s an hour's climb north of Perga, Barnabas arranged with me to descend to Attalia and take pa.s.sage back to Caesarea and Jerusalem. He loved me, yet believed that he had been commissioned by the church at Antioch to accompany Paul and must do it even though it lead to death.

Also, I think, he scented glory in Paul's path.

Others have written of what befell them in the cities of southern Galatia. They pa.s.sed safely through unseen bandit gangs and late blizzards in the wild region around the Cilician Gate, through the canyon worn by the Kestros. They made their way along the heights to the east of the vast blue lake and the great mountain, Sultan Dagh, beyond. In Antioch, where some of the citizens were given to the worship of the Persian G.o.d Mithras and others to the lewd G.o.ddess Cybele, Paul fell prey to blinding headaches and spells of feverish debility, but made many converts among the pagans; then the priests, waxing jealous, drove him and Barnabas from the city with a scourging. In Iconium, Paul met Thecla, and his heated words seduced her to tread the path to martyrdom. Again, after much fruitful preaching to the Gentiles, he was driven from the city by the Jews, who represented to the Roman authorities that Paul urged not only heresy but subversion, claiming that a certain King Jesus was the true ruler of the eastern Empire.

In Lystra, Paul healed a cripple, and the ignorant people hailed him and Barnabas as Mercurius and Jupiter and would have even worshipped them as G.o.ds had not Paul rebuked their superst.i.tion. There were few Jews in Lystra, but elders came from Antioch and Iconium and persuaded the people to stone Paul; he who had helped stone Stephen was left for dead outside the city, but by a miracle survived. He and Barnabas went on to the village of Derbe, where they founded the last of the Galatian churches, and returned to Attalia and thence to Antioch by the same way they had come, westward through Lystra and Iconium and the Pisidian Antioch, visiting the Christian congregations they had engendered there despite the enmity and persecutions of the Jews, who could not but think their initial hospitality had been betrayed and their ancient covenant cheaply a.s.signed to a mult.i.tude of the uncirc.u.mcised-to Roman soldiers and Greek tanners, to women and slaves, to Asians and Cappadocians, Phoenicians and Scythians, to legions of barbarians. .h.i.therto mired in superst.i.tion and the pleasures of the flesh.

Though Paul's missions took him ever farther afield, to Thessalonica and Berera in Macedonia, to Athens and Corinth in Achaia, to Ephesus until driven thence by an uproar among the silversmiths whose trade in idolatrous images of Diana was threatened by his preaching, and some say even to Spain and, by my own certain witness, to Rome-in spite of all these travels the Galatian churches remained the dearest of his children, being the firstborn, and the object of the first of his epistles which have been circulated and preserved.

Myself, John Mark, known in manhood by my Latin appellation, in time I reconciled with Paul. Nearly twenty years after we parted angrily above Perga, I was with him and Peter in Rome. Our congregation there, beseiged and small, had long been promised a visit by him; he sent ahead of him a long and eloquent letter, as a spiritual gift, speaking many things of Christ. In Rome Paul was a prisoner for two years, writing and receiving all who came to him for instruction and inspiration. Cities are unholy places, but their mobs were needed for the spread of the Word. In country air Christ's message melted into birdsong. Rome was Antichrist's capital, and its capture essential to our campaign. I had been in Rome some years previous, as Peter's interpreter and secretary, before Paul was brought there. It was then that I began, in my rough Greek, to set down those things I had heard of the life of Jesus.

Paul and Peter together met martyr's deaths under Nero Claudius Caesar, who, goaded into ever greater infamies and follies by his evil wife, Poppaea, blamed the Christians for the conflagration which many whispered had been set by his own hand. Peter was crucified upside down, in mockery; Paul as a Roman citizen was cleanly beheaded, three miles outside the city wall, in the Salvian Marsh.

I was spared by G.o.d from Nero's slaughters in order that I might write an account of our Savior's life, set down simply, in the plain words I heard from Peter and others of the men and women who knew Jesus when He was alive among men, casting out demons and feeding mult.i.tudes, healing with the spit of His tongue and delivering His Word in parables, not speaking from a cloud like an Oriental magus nor conjuring away all difference, decreed from the days of Abraham, between Jew and Gentile. Challenged by the Pharisees, He answered text for text, and conferred on the mountain with Moses and Elijah, as witnessed by Peter, James, and John. This I, John Mark, set down on parchment, where it cannot be changed and will endure forever.

In the woods today I surprised a b.u.t.terfly, or, rather, he surprised me, the first of the spring-a Mourning Cloak, with dark wings rimmed in pale bands. There is a tint in the woods that exactly mimics the smoke of spring fires. The elongated red beech buds float in constellations within that gray-barked tree's laterally spreading branches. Forsythia's cutting yellow has broken through at last. Downtown, the Bradford pear trees put forth a show of cool, fluorescent white. The maple trees, Norway and sugar and swamp, produce a chartreuse froth of what seem leaves but closer inspection reveals to be up-springing greenish flowers. The view into the woods is nubbled and dimmed where in a week or two will stand a curtain of opaque verdure. There is now, in late April, a heavy sweet blurring of things, a vapor of oxygen-rich exhalation as green life begins in earnest to churn the elements in its billions of photosynthetic cells. The pond where the peepers cry at night has morning mist on its face. The dead lawn suddenly is revived and a few days short of needing its first mowing, and the daylilies hide tufts of flourishing gra.s.s in their little jungle. I saw my first dandelion at the edge of the drive. The house's rain-streaked windows reveal a runny golden-green saturation; a ruthless steeping invades nature, rotting everything it does not feed in its surge toward soggy plenitude, toward the flood of brainless, jubilant growth. People as well as plants feel it, a reckless excess of stimulants in the air; there are suddenly children wild on the streets, clogging the doorway to the convenience store, raucously sc.r.a.ping their skateboards and roller blades along the sidewalks, flaunting their pasty winter skin in shorts and baggy untucked T-shirts. Where have they been all winter, these children? They are spontaneously, repulsively hatched, like the flies that now buzz and b.u.mp on the inside of the kitchen windows, stupid in the warmth. Driving out to Route 128 along Merchants Road, I see a weeping cherry tree, no less spectacular for being familiar, making its annual splash of purple-pink against the chilly white of a star magnolia in the next-door neighbor's front yard. Violet-tinted magnolias plume everywhere, fat and pale as harem women, and even along the driveway my poor little spindly pear trees have devised a few blossoms, at one of which I saw a sleepy bee b.u.mbling, my first bee. On Route 128, for no practical reason, there was a thickening of traffic-another spring phenomenon, garaged cars released and the itch to travel awakened.

I returned from a visit to two of my grandchildren, Torrance and Tyler, sons of my older son, Matthew, and his lovely, utterly blonde, slant-eyed wife, Eeva, a Finn from Rockport, an elfin child of its granite quarries and artists' colonies. They live in Gloucester, among drug addicts and out-of-work Portuguese fishermen, in a sprawling do-it-yourself house one block back from the sparkling, underutilized harbor. Torrance is delicate, dark, and fey, with enormous girlish eyelashes, and club-footed Tyler st.u.r.dy and phlegmatic, with a Lapp streak in him somewhere. Both boys are heartbreaking if I focus on them, which is not easy to do; their fraternal tussles and sporadic forays into Grandfather's attention span compete with Eeva's explanation of the particular herbal tea she has opted to serve her aging father-in-law. And my true focus is upon my own child, Matthew. Of all my children, I feel guiltiest with him, though he is unfailingly cheerful and inscrutably benign. But in just the alacrity with which he comforts a squalling son I read my own conspicuous absence in his young life, off in Boston not only working the requisite ten-hour day but undergoing the post-hours male bonding, at the Federal Club and Brandy Pete's and the Parker House bar, that a securities business needs, to cement contacts. In his patently monogamous affection for Eeva I read another rebuke, a determined reaction against the suburban polygamy that eventually produced my divorce from his mother. Like Perdita, Eeva has an artistic side, manifesting itself in carved lumps of linden wood and rather wonderful shapes of melted and half-blown gla.s.s. Her female beauty, in its full-figured prime at age thirty-four, sweeps over me with the fragrance of steeped chamomile flowers, orange peel, rose hips, lemon gra.s.s, hibiscus flowers, chicory, stevia leaves, allspice, and honey-the well-mulled combination of them excellent, she a.s.sures me, for blood pressure, regularity, and skin tone. Her arctic eyes narrow and she becomes a Finnish witch during this incantation. She left out the beneficial effect of s.e.xual potency, I guiltily imagine, to spare my son's fastidious feelings. He is pleasantly vague when I ask how his freelance architectural career is going, and when I stand, full of no-fat, no-sugar cookies, I feel that weakness in my knees which I a.s.sociate with the extra weight of a child in my arms, though both boys are too big and wriggly to hold.

In the car, swerving around the circle that leads from Gloucester onto Route 128, I realize with a start why Torrance had so many new toys to show me and why both he and his mother glanced with a certain inquisitive alertness toward me as I sat, the perfect guest and eager consumer of health food, in the center of their oatmeal-colored sofa. It had been the boy's birthday. If not this very day, somewhere toward the end of April. I had totally forgotten it. How old would he be? I tried to remember the hospital circ.u.mstances of his birth. He had crouched in a transparent plastic basket like a little skinned rabbit, fighting to live after being born prematurely. We all felt through the plastic how hard he was trying to live. Eeva had wept, because she could not nurse him, could not help him. Now he was eight. A critical birthday, marking his entry upon the third and final quadrennium of childhood, before the onslaught, at thirteen, of p.u.b.erty's stormy weather. It had slipped my poor old empty mind. I would call Matthew and lamely apologize-one more wound inflicted on this, my most innocent child, my uncomplaining son-and rush back onto 128 and to the penitential Peabody mall for some garish and superfluous present as soon as I got home.

When I got home, my mood of guilt and self-loathing took some of the sting and surprise out of finding the house dishevelled, the great rose and blue Tabriz rug stripped from the living-room floor amid other depredations, and an ill-written ballpoint note from Deirdre on the hall table: Dear Ben-I'm sorry I just can't take it any more, life here is too boring, tho' I know you try. We are just too different. I try to please you but I know I don't a lot of the time. Also to be honest I miss dope too much. It takes me to another place which is the one way I feel good about myself. We took some nice things but left you plenty, Phil said you owed me something, it's part of women's rights.Be well always my darling, D..

Then the rusty draw-gate of my heart lifted to admit torrents of regret. As I went around the house checking on what had been stolen, I mentally inventoried instead her tight b.u.t.tocks, like two perfect bronze hemispheres but for the arcs of white her thong bikini cut into them; the taut terrain of her spine and scapulae and attendant back muscles as she relaxed into sleep beside me; her tough-talking mouth forming its dulcet and docile O around my stirred-up member, down-down with a determined gulp like a child's swallowing a dose of noxious medicine-to its tickly-haired root. She had wanted to be more than my lewd toy, my s.e.x object, but I had ignored this silent plea. I had failed to take seriously her instinctive attempt, this last month, at spring cleaning, so inflexibly had I consigned her and our life together to the category of squalor. But the hormones of nest-building were in her as in every woman. I had given her attempts at homemaking no help; I had wanted only like some horn-brained buck to f.u.c.k her and between bouts of my erratic potency to ignore her. A shaky sense of irredeemable guilt rotated in my stomach as I mentally reconstructed her face, her shining round brown eyes as vulnerable as bubbles of jelly a stray needle might p.r.i.c.k, her Sphinxy ma.s.s of ringlets, her blunt moist muzzle of a nose. I tormented myself with remembering the silken rivers of dark body hair that loving inspection discovered everywhere on her limbs, and the girlish secrets between her legs, the semi-liquid pink split pod with its magical pea and the drier other aperture like a tight-lidded reptilian wink. Her excitable quick way of moving through the house, the fits of sluggishness that buried her all afternoon in the bed, only a cushion of dark hair and a single shut eye visible in the tumble of covers. Lost, gone, all lost, and I had no appet.i.te for another wh.o.r.e, even if I could find the thread to one in the anarchic tangle that stretched below my hill.

The house had been ransacked as if by a pair or trio of morons-some items of little value taken, some precious pieces left. Perhaps there was some bizarre code of fencibility operating, leaving Gloria's grandmother's finest Staffordshire china untouched in its mahogany cabinet and taking a plastic-and-aluminum coffee-maker that I never used, having sacrificed coffee decades ago to the obscure deities who control blood pressure. The living-room rug-what a weight for them to wrestle with!-was the greatest loss, but its absence exposed a maple parquet whose beauty had been long obscured. Each piece of surviving furniture was now doubled by a dim mirror-image in the floor's waxy surface. Deirdre's thefts seemed as random as a lover's heart, which chooses to cherish this or that inconsequential detail of the beloved, and ignores features that could be universally agreed to be worthier. I always liked, for example, the way Perdita could never give up smoking or drinking, and went around all summer in bare feet so dirty the soles became black, and disliked the way she was always trying to help less fortunate others-sending money to Ethiopian charities, putting in a day a week at a Dorchester settlement house. I want women to be dirty, and focused solely on me.

Deirdre and I had together proved helpless before the gathering needs of the grounds and garden. The plants and weeds were coming along in a rush. The daylily leaves in the bed beside the driveway were as high as my knees; a few tulips had popped open in the far garden. The peonies needed to be propped: even I could see that. Gloria had always done everything, and supervised what she could not do. She had ever been on the telephone to lawn services, tree services, sprinkler-system maintainers, greenhouses, nurseries, and spent muddy-kneed hours out in the garden beds, digging, planting, transplanting, mixing manure and peat moss, mulch and loam, wearing a big battered straw hat we had once bought in St. Croix on holiday. I had liked the dirty way she looked, with earth smeared on her cheek where she had rubbed a mosquito bite with a muddy glove, and the way she, dog-tired at dusk, would leave all her caked and sweaty clothes in the laundry room, including her underpants, and walk upstairs nude, past her staring ancestral antiques, to soak her aching body in the tub, leaving me to put a quiche or a defrozen meat loaf in the oven for dinner. Men like being useful. I had liked serving my naked queen of tilth.

iii.The Deal

ON MAY DAY, when I went into the open shed that serves as a garage, a shadow swiftly dipped down from a rafter in the corner of my eye, and I knew that the barn swallows had returned, to build their nest. How they find us in the continental ocean of green I have never understood, nor if they are the same birds, or a pair containing one of the old offspring. Their mysterious arrival used to mark the true beginning of summer for Gloria and me. A few days later, she herself showed up. I had not shot her, or if I had it was in another, slightly different, universe.

"Where have you been?" been?" I asked, a bit timidly. I was unclear as to how long she had been gone; as I age, holes in my memory develop, and because they are holes it is difficult to gauge their size. I asked, a bit timidly. I was unclear as to how long she had been gone; as I age, holes in my memory develop, and because they are holes it is difficult to gauge their size.

"You never never listen when I tell you where I'm going," she said. And she proceeded to tell me where she had been. It was true, as her red lips vivaciously moved, with that rather annoying little self-satisfying roll of her jaw during a theatrical pause, my mind became a blank in which isolated words like "conference" and "the gift shop" and "Singapore" nonsensically bobbed. Could they be having conferences of gift-shop owners in Singapore? She was going on, "And at the Calpurnia Club, we had a listen when I tell you where I'm going," she said. And she proceeded to tell me where she had been. It was true, as her red lips vivaciously moved, with that rather annoying little self-satisfying roll of her jaw during a theatrical pause, my mind became a blank in which isolated words like "conference" and "the gift shop" and "Singapore" nonsensically bobbed. Could they be having conferences of gift-shop owners in Singapore? She was going on, "And at the Calpurnia Club, we had a wonderful wonderful lecturer on English herbaceous borders. I asked her about deer and she said in the United Kingdom they were only a problem in Scotland. But another member, a lecturer on English herbaceous borders. I asked her about deer and she said in the United Kingdom they were only a problem in Scotland. But another member, a darling darling woman called Polly Martingale from Dedham-she said she's an aunt of a protege of yours at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, Ned Partridge-" woman called Polly Martingale from Dedham-she said she's an aunt of a protege of yours at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, Ned Partridge-"

"That slimy son of a b.i.t.c.h is no protege of mine."

"-she told me about a product you can get called AgRepel. It's made up of the ground-up shoulders and whatnot of cows. It smells like death. She gave me the phone number of a man in Boxford who carries it and I want to call him right now. Don't argue, Ben. For once in your life don't be oppositional."

It was a plea of sorts. I had wanted to blurt out some explanation for the missing Tabriz carpet and coffeepot and the other fencible goods but no explanation came; my mouth hung open foolishly. I wondered how many of Deirdre's curly black hairs were visible on the bed linen, along with how many of our telltale love-juice stains. Gloria gave me a quick probing look out of her frosty blue eyes. Five years younger than I, she is as alert as a bird on the lookout for worms in scanning me for signs of the inevitable decline that will leave her with a widow's well-heeled freedom. So many of her friends are widows, sole proprietresses of bank accounts no longer joint; blithely, at last, they command to b done all the home projects-the airy wing added to th house's gloomy core; the indoor lap-pool; the resurface driveway; the elaborate garden fence, its crisscrossed slat doubling as a trellis for roses and clematis; the screened-i gazebo beyond the garden, for reading and romanticall solitary reverie-that the wretched husband, alive, would have forbidden. She envies these women the liberty their weeds betoken. To blunt her death-wish for me it has become my habit to deny Gloria nothing, even though some of her home projects, such as lining our bathroom with mirrors and ripping out the old bent-nosed nickel faucets for bra.s.s, Swiss, inhumanly streamlined fixtures, seem bizarre to me. Why all these mirrors in which to count our multiplying wrinkles? Confronting myself in the shaving mirror has become the major hurdle to each day. With the mirrored cabinet door ajar, I can see myself from a dizzying variety of angles, my profile when I bend close receding into that slightly curving infinity a pair of mirrors can conjure out of nothing. The first time I saw my own head in profile, with its slack, opisthognathous jaw and rather flattened back to my skull, I was nine years old, being fitted for my first grown-up jacket at the England Brothers department store on North Street in Pittsfield; I was horrified, discovering this ugly brother inside my own skin. He was a stranger, not any kind of twin. He looked Neandert(h)al. Now I see that ugly brother with his hair thinned and whitened and his dead-looking earlobes elongated as if by African magic, and his eyes shrunk as if by a New Guinea headhunter, and his skin blotched with pink sun-damage and shattered capillaries, not one but dozens of him parabolically receding in the astronomical complexity of Gloria's multiple mirrors. Still, to live with a woman a man must learn to accommodate her instinct to improve the nest. We are condemned, men and women, to symbiosis.

"I am not not oppositional," I told her. oppositional," I told her.

The AgRepel, which came in large plastic buckets from Polly Martingale's man in Boxford, looked like lumpy, dirty white clay and indeed did smell of death. But subtly: we had to get our noses down close to inhale the slaughterhouse redolence, and we wondered, as we lined the rose beds with it and scattered lumps beneath the euonymus and yew bushes, if the deer would lower their heads enough to be repelled.

"Wherever there's deer s.h.i.t, put it," Gloria directed.

"'Scat,'" I said, "or 'spoor' or 'pellets' or 't.u.r.ds,' if you must. But don't keep calling it 's.h.i.t.'" I felt she did it, by now, to offend me.

"It's s.h.i.t," she said. "Because of you and your laziness I have to get down on my knees in my own garden and kneel in tick-lousy deer s.h.i.t."

She sounded in my ears not unlike Deirdre; I wondered if one of them had absorbed the other. I protested unconvincingly, "Their excrement doesn't have the ticks in it. The ticks go from their hides onto field mice, somehow, and then then they bite people. But only when they need to." they bite people. But only when they need to."

The tick and the disease they carried were rather unreal to me, but very real to Gloria. Her face in the shade of its Caribbean sunhat went white with fury at the thought of the deer invading her her property and the spirochete invading property and the spirochete invading her her bloodstream, bringing chills and fever and aches and possible heart damage and arthritis. People even died of it, she a.s.sured me. This omniscient Mrs. Martingale knew somebody who knew somebody from New London who had gone into the hospital and just bloodstream, bringing chills and fever and aches and possible heart damage and arthritis. People even died of it, she a.s.sured me. This omniscient Mrs. Martingale knew somebody who knew somebody from New London who had gone into the hospital and just died died.

I marvelled at how thoroughly Gloria was involved in this world, and not, like me, drifting away from it on a limp tether. When I stopped having to take the train into Sibbes Dudley, and Wise each weekday, I split-so it feels-into: number of disinterested parties. My wave function had collapsed.

Against much inner resistance, knowing full well that a child's innocent heart was being used to blackmail me into sitting still for a fund-raising lecture, I drove an hour along 128, at the height of the morning rush, to partic.i.p.ate in Grandparents' Day at Kevin's private school, Dimmesdale Academy: all boys, fourth through ninth grades. The grounds spread on the edge of the birthplace of the Revolution, Lexington, a bucolic layout at the end of a winding street of posh colonial-style homes, at their halcyon best in the spring froth of blossom and new leaf. Kevin has recovered from his broken wrist and at the age of eleven is a limber and athletic blond with childhood's shambling manners and inaudible voice even though his head comes up to my shoulder. His paternal grandparents have retired to Hawaii but Perdita was there, her carelessly bundled hair liberally interwoven with gray; she had always scorned hairdressers, nail polish, and all lipstick but the shade, a milky pink, fashionable when she was in college. I was late, and had trouble finding the registration desk amidst the welter of little clapboard buildings built one at a time since the inst.i.tution's one-room-schoolhouse beginnings in 1846. The label identifying me, by my own name and Kevin's, kept peeling off the lapel of my excessively tweedy coat. Though some grandparents looked ten years younger than I, and some as many or more years older, I was basically among members of my own generation. We had experienced birth in the conformist Fifties, adolescence in the crazed and colorful Sixties, and youth in the anticlimactic drug-riddled, s.e.x-raddled Seventies. We had by and large dodged our proud nation's wars, the Cold War skirmishes and then the hideous but brief Sino-American holocaust. AIDS, before the development of its astonishingly simple and effective vaccine, had afflicted marginal portions of society, h.o.m.os.e.xuals and drug-takers and the children of the poor, but not us. Those of us here still held winning tickets in the cancer lottery, and had not fallen to any of the accidents, automotive and industrial and cardiovascular, that thin the ranks of active Americans. It was amazing to me how many we were: white-haired and arthritic, we were like the specialized plants that spring up a week after a forest fire has apparently swept all life into ashes. And our mult.i.tudinous grandsons were there to carry mankind deeper into the twenty-first century, to the brink of the unimaginable twenty-second.

I was indignant to have driven an hour and sacrificed a morning of my dwindling life, but there were grandparents present from Arizona and Florida, shaming me once again with my relative lack of family feeling. My pa.s.sion to survive had only been partially placated by childbearing. Perdita had come out from Boston, where she lives in the semi-slum of the South End with a man considerably younger, called Geoff-diffidently artistic, as is she, and gay in part but perhaps not in the part turned toward her. Lankier even than when I first saw her in the Seventies (on the steps of the Du Bois Library, wearing tight jeans colorfully patched on both b.u.t.tocks and a belly-exposing tie-dyed halter, puffing what, from the miserly way she pinched it in her fingers, was clearly a joint), she has let the years evolve a hundred florets of intersecting wrinkles on her face, and wears her grizzled hair constrained by a few hairpins, probably rusty. This gaunt old witch contains a beauty that I am one of the last on earth to still descry. To me she will always be that maiden on the sh.o.r.e, whose wet bare feet shed drying sand grain by grain in the cupped warmth of a back dune.

Linked now only by our progeny, we followed Kevin as he conducted us on a tour of the school-the new gym with its gleam of raw steel and unscuffed hardwood, the strained computer facilities, waiting for a donor to expand them- and sat side by side as the headmaster outlined his vision of the future and a choir of unchanged male voices piped through some madrigals and simplified Broadway show times. Perdita possesses that strange faculty of first wives of being instantly intelligible. "Dandelion," she murmured, and I knew she meant the woman two rows before us, with a head of hair as purely white and as evenly coiffed on her skull as a dandelion poll.

"m.u.f.fin," I answered, and she knew I meant the headmaster, a youngish man both rotund and orotund. The category had been hers, a piece of private college slang back on the U. Ma.s.s, campus, dividing all humanity into three types, of which another was "horse" and the third I had forgotten. Could it have been as simple as "bird"? If our universe needs only three dimensions (plus time) to exist, and if three kinds of quarks, with their antiquarks, make up all the hadrons, and three primary colors all the stripes of the rainbow, a triad of categories might be enough.

"Rodney-"she began.

"Still has reading problems," I finished. This was Kevin's younger brother, who lacked and would lack all his life the loose-jointed ease of his sibling.

"Less so, Mildred says."

"He must have inherited post-linearity from Carol." Carol Eliade was their father, and my oldest daughter's husband- a son of Romanian immigrants, and a wizard, before the war, at keeping one step ahead of the j.a.panese in the miniaturization of computer chips. The war (which was perhaps less between us and China than between China and our protege j.a.pan, over the control of Asia, including separatist Siberia) had left j.a.pan too ruined to compete, although the resilience of a demolished nation is always greater than seems possible. Fresh shoots push through the hot ashes; weeds spring up in new mutations. Global disaster had left intact the faint chemistry between Perdita and me, like a cobweb uniting two rotten old branches. In the math cla.s.s, which was doing exercises in decimals, I was stimulated by her presence to partic.i.p.ate in the riddling drill, which involved a string of solutions that spelled out a trendy phrase, in this case LOVE IS COLOR BLIND. I was still searching for the "B" when Perdita softly pointed out that the little boy sitting next to Kevin had already finished. "He does this every day," I pointed out in turn, with a compet.i.tive snarl that made her laugh. She would always see me as an academically aggressive, socially insecure college student.

Our forty-seven-year-old cobweb broke as we kissed our grandson goodbye and left Kevin running on the newly green, still muddy school field, rapidly shifting a lacrosse stick from hand to hand. The sky always looks so big over flat school fields, with their population of children scurrying in chase of their distant futures, while ominous silver-black clouds unfurl overhead. Driving back to 128, I observed that spring was further along west of Boston than on the North Sh.o.r.e-the green maple flowers, now a chartreuse dusting on the roads, had yielded to half-unfolded leaflets, and tulips were already up in red and yellow rows, along the white picket fences.

"How was the precious Perdita?" Gloria asked on my return. "Still anorectic?"

"O.K.," I said. "Not unpleasant."

"Why would she be unpleasant?" she asked. "She's got this lovely boy-lover in Boston, and still collecting alimony from you."

"I'm not sure he's an actual lover," I said. "My kids say he's gay. I've never met him."

"And did you pay any attention to Kevin?" she asked, having decided that Perdita was an unprofitable subject for her to pursue. Yet the subject nagged her. My renunciation of my former wife had never been quite complete enough to suit her. She was a systematic woman, Gloria, and there was a residue of Perdita in our life that struck her as an impurity-dirt in a corner, as it were. Yet for me to give her what she wanted would be to expunge Perdita to an unreal degree, leaving me with a clean-swept past. Kevin was a safer topic: "He was dear," I said. "Still very innocent, even though I swear he's grown two inches in a month. He was touchingly pleased I came; I guess I had somehow communicated my resistance to driving all that way on a weekday." Weekdays and weekends were still different to me, out of intractable habit.

"Well," she said, "you might explain to him that he's one of ten. You could spend all of your time being a grandfather."

"Instead of being a useless housebound retiree," I said, a touch-an almost subliminal touch-combatively.

But my att.i.tude toward Gloria since her return is meek and grateful. She has taken on the lawn and the plantings and wrestles with them and the workmen who come and go-lopping branches, scattering fertilizer-daily. Beds are re-edged; mulch is laid down over Preen. Miraculously, as the greenery outside the window rises into its Maytime flood (the beech leaves unfold like batches of tender umbrellas being raised; the hosta's unravelling tubes have sprung up all along the driveway), the interior of the house also prospers. The quail reappeared one morning on the dining-room table; dimly remembered doodads cl.u.s.ter more thickly on the mantels and end tables in the living room; one day, I don't doubt, the great blue living-room rug will reappear, like a revived lawn. Under Gloria's impa.s.sioned care the violated house is healing. Soon there will not be a single telltale scar of my transgressions.

I awake each night around four and after urinating in the bathroom have trouble sliding back into sleep. Some vague wedge of dread jams the process. Gloria, unlike Deirdre, snores, not loudly, usually, but with enough variety of pauses and syncopation to keep me listening. The bed seems a slant surface from which I might fall into an abyss. That acrophobic dream about leaving Boston had widened a crack in me. I used to get back into sleep by trying to remember the dreams I was having, but my dreams these days are repellent shambles of half-forgotten faces contorted by the stress of old predicaments-unwanted pregnancies, amorous alliances swelling out of control, professional reversals in the antiseptic offices on State Street, children's clinging illnesses, the wounds and rebuffs they would bring home from school in tears, houses in Coverdale whose rugs and wallpaper are soaked in the acid humidity of domestic boredom and discontent, all shot through with a numbed but breathing version of the terror I felt in the bas.e.m.e.nt with Milly's unbuilt dollhouse. Dreaming, I am unhappy, and yet in morning light I resist waking, lying in bed, collapsing into another doze, long after Gloria's footsteps have begun to make the house's well-built endoskeleton of joists and studs and beams tremble with her energy.

Walking down to the mailbox to pick up the Globe Globe, I observe how freshly green leaves displace the forsythia's confetti of yellow petals, and squint up at the new object that has appeared in our heavens. Like the halo of iridescence that sometimes appears among cirrus clouds, it needs noticing, its very vastness, out of all earthly scale, being a kind of concealment. It is at least twenty times wider than the moon that Newtonian mechanics has appointed to be Earth's companion, and thrice again that than the abandoned honeycomb men placed in orbit before the cataclysmic war. This new moon, visible at night as a faintly luminous lariat slowly moving across the paralyzed sprinkle of stars, by daytime is imprinted on oxygen's overarching blue like the trace of a c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s, a sometimes silvery ring of pallor. It may have existed-theories run-in prehistory; it may have hovered over the dinosaur herds, the first amphibians, the dead continents before the seas evolved life-forms more complex than algae. It is a s.p.a.ceship, that much is clear, from somewhere either in our galaxy or even from another galaxy, for its appearance in our sky indicates that, unless against long astronomical odds its origin is but a few light-years away, its makers and steerers have with an unthinkable technology cut through the physical knot of s.p.a.ce-time-have found a way to travel from point to point by the power of the mind. That mind was an alien element in the material cosmos has long been intuitively recognized, but scientists only toward the end of the last millennium formulated its primal place among the forces of creation. The particles smaller than a quark, it was reluctantly proclaimed, are purely mathematical, that is to say, mental. Further, the cosmos is exquisitely const.i.tuted in all its chemical and atomic laws to provide enough duration and stability for the evolution of intelligent life. Until such intelligence exists, the universe in only the most preliminary sense exists, somewhat as a play or script exists in textual form as a precondition of its being acted, its sets knocked together, and its lighting projected in three dimensions.

It has been abundantly shown by computer simulation that a universe less than fifteen billion years old and less than fifteen billion light-years across, containing fewer than a billion billion (1018) stars, would have been too small to produce carbon-based life. We-and algae and earthworms and angelfish-needed all those exploding supernovae to make the heavy elements; we needed all the dark matter to slow the pace of gravity so life could emerge. In a universe wherein the gravitational fine-structure constant would be 10-30 instead of, as it is, 10- instead of, as it is, 10-40, everything would be 105 times smaller and 10 times smaller and 1010 times denser; our sun would be two kilometers across and burn with a hot blue light for a life of a single year. A planet equivalent to Earth would orbit this star once every twenty days and would rotate once every second, giving it two million days a year. But in the crowded, stronger-gravitied universe, stars would be tearing dark matter away from one another, and the planetary life-forms that might evolve-no bigger than bacteria in any case-would quickly perish. Sufficiently benign conditions require an initial density parameter set with an accuracy of one part in 10 times denser; our sun would be two kilometers across and burn with a hot blue light for a life of a single year. A planet equivalent to Earth would orbit this star once every twenty days and would rotate once every second, giving it two million days a year. But in the crowded, stronger-gravitied universe, stars would be tearing dark matter away from one another, and the planetary life-forms that might evolve-no bigger than bacteria in any case-would quickly perish. Sufficiently benign conditions require an initial density parameter set with an accuracy of one part in 1060. These are the odds against mind's being a blind side-product of material forces: one in 1,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000.

And yet I am insufficiently rea.s.sured.

The slender torus that floats beyond the clouds but lower than the moon shows that somewhere in the universe mind has triumphed over matter, instead of antagonistically coexisting with it as on our planet. But the minds, or giant mind, behind this perfectly circular intrusion into our skies do not, or does not, communicate. Inspection with telescopes, where such instruments have survived the war, discovers no surface features, except for areas of slightly higher smoothness that may be viewing ports. The pale ring hangs up there like a dead man's open eye. Are we being studied as if by an ideally non-interactive zoologist suspended in a scent-proof cage above whooping, head-scratching tribes of chimpanzees? Or is it that there can be no more language between above and below than between a man and an underground nest of ants? Yet myrmecologists do do communicate, in a fashion, with ant colonies, as does a small cruel boy who pokes a stick into one. We gaze upward at the staring ring and wait for the stick in our nest, the thrust of the Word beyond our poor words. It does not come. Only psychotics and publicity-seeking liars ever get abducted, and no detectable rays, from radio to gamma, emanate from the hovering s.p.a.cecraft. Perhaps its projection here from the vastness of elsewhere consumed all its energy; perhaps it has simply nothing to say, having pa.s.sed beyond the word-generating friction of ego-resistant s.p.a.ce-time. communicate, in a fashion, with ant colonies, as does a small cruel boy who pokes a stick into one. We gaze upward at the staring ring and wait for the stick in our nest, the thrust of the Word beyond our poor words. It does not come. Only psychotics and publicity-seeking liars ever get abducted, and no detectable rays, from radio to gamma, emanate from the hovering s.p.a.cecraft. Perhaps its projection here from the vastness of elsewhere consumed all its energy; perhaps it has simply nothing to say, having pa.s.sed beyond the word-generating friction of ego-resistant s.p.a.ce-time.

So we go about our low business within our shattered civilization as if the enormous low-l.u.s.tre torus were not there. Many maintain it is not there. Today it seemed to me fainter, more nearly melted into the blue, as if slowly giving up its inscrutable mission. Ma.s.s illusions are common throughout history, sometimes manifesting themselves in elaborate consensual detail. Yet my belief remains that the object- seven hundred kilometers in diameter by the best estimates-is real, though composed of a substance impalpable on Earth.

The dread underlying my dreams may be surfacing in reality. There have been more sounds and signs of activity in the woods, now that half the trees are in fresh leaf, making a spotty curtain of green. Yesterday I heard hoots and thrashing sounds in the direction of the railroad tracks, and then a regular hammering too loud to be a metallobioform. I walked through the old hemlock planting, past the thick clump of snowdrops, its heavy-headed ground-breaking flowers melted away like their namesakes, with only a tiny hard green nub left as evidence. Everywhere on the forest floor the carpet of dead leaves is pierced by an oval, shiny, not quite symmetrical leaf-Ma.s.sachusetts mayflower, I think, also called "false lily-of-the-valley." And goutweed is springing up, and the miniature red leaf of burgeoning poison ivy. Out of sight of the house, wilderness begins. Dead branches are strewn underfoot; fallen dead trees lean at a slant on the still-living. Some sunken brush piles date from the reign of the previous owner, when he and his sons were young. Others, less settled and covered with needles and leaves, arose in my earlier, more vigorous days here. Ragged, tufted, littered granite escarpments divide the woods here into high and low land; trespa.s.sers seeking a way to the beach have worn a wandering path roughly parallel to the creek that creeps, trickling and twinkling, through the marsh that bounds our land. The escarpments make a series of bowls in which interlopers, usually youngsters, feel sheltered and hidden enough to suck on their cigarettes and six-packs, purchased a few steps away, across the tracks where the commuter trains hurtle. The voices and clatter arose from a bowl guarded from above by the spiky trunk of a long-toppled pine, and out of the sight of the tracks. I spied them from above-three young men with dark hair and what seemed heavy torsos clad only in thin white T-shirts, though the May air is cool, and promises rain.

They looked up startled-the human face, a flashing signal in our eyes, even in the side of our vision, as vivid as a deer tail-when I descended, with an unavoidable snapping of dead wood. I felt naked without a gun, though I had no reason to suppose that they had guns.

"Can I help you?" I asked-the standard proprietorial opener. I could feel my heart pumping, my blood rising in counter-aggressive reflex.

The sarcasm escaped them. They looked at me mutely. They were not Americans of direct African descent but distinctly dusky. Portuguese and Spanish blood had in some nocturnal tropical byway swerved to add a Negro tinge to olive skin. Distrustful brown faces, with black eyes as l.u.s.trous and vulnerable and angry as Deirdre's or the gelatinous...o...b..that gazed back at me from the gliding train window last winter.

I restated my question: "Are you aware that this is private property?" They had begun to build something, with no tools other than one rusty hammer, a coffee can full of nails, and a hacksaw pitifully ill-suited to cutting wood. It was hard to guess, from the few branches they had aligned and insecurely fastened together, what kind of structure was intended, here on a slightly raised knoll of land amid the creased granite boulders.

"Who say?" one-the tallest-asked in turn.

"I fear that I say," I said. "These eleven acres are mine. If you doubt me, let's go together and call the police." Our little local downtown, with a blue-sided public telephone beside the convenience store, was not many steps away, across the railroad tracks. Haskells Crossing, our village is called; every crossing, on the B & M line between Gloucester and Boston, was named in the old days, and some of the names stuck, though the old Haskell estate has long been broken up into two-acre house lots. These boys had followed the tracks north, to a better life.

Another of them snickered, but was enough uncertain of the decorum of the encounter to avert his face, so that he directed at the leafing forest floor his mumbly reply: "Yeah you do that. You go find them, mister. They just love to come ru