Toward The End Of Time Part 9

Men are unreasonable in their contradictory demands on women. I blamed Perdita for not providing total care-for allowing me, in the indolent remissions of her own commitment, some freedom, which I misused. And I blame Gloria for smothering me with a care that nevertheless has not protected me from old age and its perils.

As in the spring I had watched for the crocuses to open, and then the forsythia and lilac to yield each day a bit more of their color, so I watch from the bathroom window, as I shave, the leaves of the burning bush taking on, ever wider and more intensely, a reddish-purple tinge.

The biopsy came back positive: tiny sub-surface tumors in the middle left lobe, like rotten spots in a punky old chestnut.

I had a pa.s.sionate desire to see Jennifer today and, after calling Roberta, drove over to Lynnfield. The baby was up from her nap and seemed pleased to see me-in her mother's arms, she held out her own little arms to me, wanting me to hold her. I felt desperately flattered. She is ten months old, on the gabbly, tottery edge of talking and walking. But the apparatus of challenge and response is still missing some neural cogwheels in her solemn, silky head. "What does the sheep sheep say?" Roberta asked her, the refrain of a childhood book they read every night. say?" Roberta asked her, the refrain of a childhood book they read every night.

Jennifer pivoted her head to look at me as if I were the one being asked the question. "B-, b-," I prompted. She switched her head to look questioningly at her mother. She began to wriggle and get heavy in my arms. I put her down, on the kitchen floor, and for a second she almost stood, before cautiously flopping down onto her diapered bottom and then regaining an upright position by clinging to a kitchen chair. She looked up at the two of us with a guileless puzzlement, the broad bulge of her forehead like that of a pitcher waiting to be filled.

"Baa," both Roberta and I told her, in a spontaneous father-daughter chorus. both Roberta and I told her, in a spontaneous father-daughter chorus. "Baa. " "Baa. "

The infant held on to the chair seat with one hand and put the middle two fingers of the other into her mouth, while staring unblinkingly upward, trying to imagine what we wanted of her. She removed the hand from her mouth and extended that arm as far as it would go and squeezed her spit-wet hand open and shut.

"That's right" right" Roberta's proud voice p.r.o.nounced. "Bye-bye! Little Jenny say bye-bye!" Roberta's proud voice p.r.o.nounced. "Bye-bye! Little Jenny say bye-bye!"

Jennifer smiled, pleased to have found our tune, and let the bye-bye gesture slowly die. Then another of her accomplishments surfaced through the mazy channels of her growing brain. She lifted both hands above her head-or, rather, above her ears, since her arms are so short all her gestures have a lovely stubbiness. Roberta instantly understood. "So biiig" biiig" she eagerly crooned. "Jennifer is she eagerly crooned. "Jennifer is sooo sooo big!" big!"

The child, seeing herself understood, clapped her hands together, nearly missing.

"Patty cake," her mother obediently chimed. cake," her mother obediently chimed. "Patty "Patty cake, cake, patty patty cake, baker's cake, baker's man!" man!"

For these seconds, Jennifer, using both hands, had been standing on her own without realizing it; realizing it, she sat down in fright on the floor, and might have begun to cry had not Roberta swooped down and swept her up into a triumphant, overwhelming embrace. Thus women urge seed into seedling, seedling into fibrous plant. Girl babies excite our intensest tenderness because the pain of love and parturition awaits them, just as all their eggs are already stored in their tiny ovaries.

I had one cup of herbal tea and three low-fat ginger cookies and watched shy little Keith build and destroy two edifices of nesting plastic blocks; then Irene arrived with Olympe and etienne, on their way back to west of Boston from visiting Eeva and Torrance and Tyler in Gloucester. My children and their spouses keep up a seethe of visitation and sibling interaction which no longer requires me or Perdita; we are emeritus parents, and perhaps always were somewhat absent. Our children raised themselves, with the help of the neighbors, television, and the international corporations that hoped to sell them something. My two soft-mannered half-African grandchildren endured with ironic smiles the clumsy b.u.mptiousness of their little white cousins, whom they escorted and carried (Olympe lugging Jennifer like a sack, face outward, her stomach elongating so that her navel seemed about to emit a cry) into the yard while my two daughters, somewhat formally, settled to entertain their father. I did not share with them my recent diagnosis, nor they with me the depths of tribal gossip, presumably enriched by Irene's afternoon with the slant-eyed, bohemian Eeva. It makes me tired to try to recall what we did say- with what rusty banter I tried to revive my paternal role. In fact I was content to sip my second cup of herbal tea and watch the two girls, now women on the near and far side of forty, talk and gesture and demurely t.i.tter with the long-boned, self-careless grace of their mother when she was their age or younger. Perdita had been about their age when I had left her, amid scenes of such grievousness as would attend a dying. It was a dying, a killing, and we lacked the a.s.surance: which the last twenty years have brought, that other lives were coming, that we could Uve without one another.

We had married in 1978, toward the end of a decade of license, but we were an old-fashioned couple, really. We spent some weeks that first summer at her parents' place in remotest Vermont-stingy thin mountain land that reminded me of the Berkshires but which I was seeing from another social angle, as someone not obliged to wring a living from it. I was out of the B.U. B-School by then, and had been taken on by Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise. We would play gin rummy by kerosene light, and push an old reel mower across the b.u.mpy lawn, and swim in an icy brook deep in the woods. Once I sneaked a little Instamatic into our gym bag and took a few photos of her naked, without her knowing, because I thought she was so beautiful. When she saw the prints she was horrified and hid them so that they did not surface until our divorce, when all our possessions were churned up. She had kept them in a linen drawer, under the paper liner. I asked her for them but she told me, blushing, no-they were hers. Her body, never to be so smooth and shapely again, but hers to bestow upon the next man. Like Russian dolls, I contain a freckled boyish ballplayer and Perdita une jeune fille nue comme Diane se baignant une jeune fille nue comme Diane se baignant.

My daughters and I walked out of the little green tract house in Lynnfield to admire their children, all four filthily absorbed in making a racetrack in the bare dirt by the fence.

Along Route 128 as I drove east, tawny stripes of hay nodded in the lowering sun. Gra.s.s wants to die, to grow tall and set seed and die. Keeping it short and green in a lawn is a cruel and unnatural act, pro-Gramineae activists keep reminding us, as they are dragged off and pummelled by representatives of the powerful pro-lawn forces-the mower manufacturers, the great seed-and-fertilizer combines. When I got out of the car in my driveway, an acorn pinged off the car roof and another struck me on the shoulder. The air was still summery and the sky the smooth blue of baked enamel, but the oak trees were letting go. Let go: Let go: natural philosophy in a nutsh.e.l.l. natural philosophy in a nutsh.e.l.l.

Acorn shapes have been on my mind. My sinister locker-room encounter with Dr. Chafetz was but the lowest rung of a ladder of doctors I am climbing. Beyond the plump damp-handed urologist I have attained to a wiry radiologist, in his grizzled fifties but still exuberant over the wonders of technology, which acc.u.mulate even in times of social chaos. "Twenty, thirty years ago," he tells me, "you would have been a sure-as-shootin' candidate for prostatectomy-cut out the whole d.a.m.n thing, and to h.e.l.l with the surrounding tissue. Barbaric! They would saw away in there, in a sea of blood, and the patients would come out totally impotent and most likely peeing in their drawers for years, if they ever ever got sphincter control back. Now, with conformal radiotherapy, we shape the beam to the tumor exactly, and never even singe the colon or the bladder on either side. Precision! To the micron! They used to use only X-rays and some gamma rays to do the zapping-we're getting cleaner, faster results with beams of protons. We're not just killing these cells, Ben-we're inducing them to kill themselves, by a process called apoptosis-that's got sphincter control back. Now, with conformal radiotherapy, we shape the beam to the tumor exactly, and never even singe the colon or the bladder on either side. Precision! To the micron! They used to use only X-rays and some gamma rays to do the zapping-we're getting cleaner, faster results with beams of protons. We're not just killing these cells, Ben-we're inducing them to kill themselves, by a process called apoptosis-that's a-p-o-p-tosis a-p-o-p-tosis-which the developing fetus uses to destroy embryonic gills, for instance. The body's discarding and weeding all the time, all the time. Plus there's all sorts of mop-up tricks you can do with radioactive implants and chemo. Prostate, for example"-the noun "cancer" had been dropped from the phrase-"by the nature of the beast is subject to a hormone therapy that produces an androgen blockade. Not quite a piece of cake, Ben, but close to it. A bagel, let's say."

Did I imagine it, or were more people calling me "Ben" since this crack in my health developed?

"Any questions, Ben? You've been following me?"

I hadn't, quite. When I was back in college, and had a big exam coming up, the closer it came the less I could concentrate on the necessary books: they developed an anti-magnetism which repelled my hand when I reached for them. Each of the finite moments until the test seemed infinitely divisible, with always the next next particle of time the one in which I would face reality and at last concentrate. particle of time the one in which I would face reality and at last concentrate.

Particles of time are not infinitesimal; they acc.u.mulate. I never used to be conscious of any sc.u.m on my teeth, any more than I was aware of any body odor or need to bathe. Perdita and I, I believe, always smelled perfectly bland, if not sweet, to one another. Now I want to brush my teeth all the time, even when I have not eaten since the last brushing. And my neck-why is my neck so sweaty when I awake? Pillow, pajamas, collars-an invisible pollutant has settled on them all, moment by moment.

On the walk down to the mailbox, I notice that the stunted pears are showing ruddiness on their warty little cheeks. But the wild blueberries, which I try to persuade Jeremy to skip over with his whirring weed-whacker, are oddly slow, this August, to turn blue. Or else the birds and those deer are eating them as they ripen. Some ferns are turning a reticent shade of brown. The fall is almost here.

I will miss you, sweet pages blank each new day. Here, have not one line but two: Now-yes, there is still a "now"-the maples hold arcs and crests of orange like bouquets shyly thrust forward by a ma.s.sive green suitor, and the horse-chestnut leaves are wilting from the edges in, and a faintly winy blush hazes some of the trees I see from Route 128, as Gloria drives me by en route to one of my now-incessant medical appointments.

She has decided to rip up all the cosmos in her garden. With a tentative tenderness she asks me if I want to come outside and-not help, of course-merely watch. Each step I take has an attendant difficulty and pain that makes the world-the green of the lawn, the transparency of s.p.a.ce, the resilient solidity of the life-permeated earth-perversely delicious. Everything tastes the way it did in childhood, of newness and effort; each surface presents a puzzling, inviting depth of possibility, of future time without end. The year has made less progress than I had expected in the nearly four weeks that I was off in the hospital, with a view of brick walls and the rusty tops of city sycamores.

I have resolved to spare this journal dedicated to the year's pa.s.sing any circ.u.mstantial account of the obscene operation that I have momentarily survived. It has left me incontinent for a while and impotent I fear forever. A soreness at the base of my bladder, a rasping burning lodged high in the seat of elimination (the devil's lair, in old religious lore) remind me of the violence done my unruly flesh. The operation was, as the wiry radiologist predicted, a twenty-first-century miracle of directed radiation-raw protons, aimed to a micron's tolerance by something called a delayed-focus laser-rather than the cheerful prostatectomic butchery of yore. Still, the negative effects and the factors of uncertainty are not as radically reduced as the celebrants of scientific advance would have you believe. Our bodies, which even in the year 2020 are the sole means by which "we"-we n.o.bodies, so to speak-"live," retain a mulish atavistic recalcitrance. To be human is still to be humbled by the flesh, to suffer and to die. There are now three of us in the house- Gloria, I, and my impending demise. Gloria's eyes are bright with it; her utterances and gestures have an actressy crispness born of her awareness of this witnessing third party. Herself as widowed, as mournfully, bravely free, fills her mind much as the image of an idyllically happy married woman gives direction to the fantasies of a p.u.b.escent girl. She tries to be kinder, but in her enhanced vitality has more edges, which cut into my heightened sensitivity. Just being in her garish, painfully distinct and articulate presence has become arduous.

Of my hospital stay I chiefly remember the white, syrupy conspiracy of it all, like a ubiquitous, softly luminous ethereal lotion, and the eager complicity with which I entered into the therapeutic rituals, the obligatory indignities, the graciously shared disgrace. What an odd relief it is to shed all the roles and suits and formal pretenses life has asked of us and to become purely a body, whose most ignominious and flagrant detail is openly, cooperatively examined and discussed-cherished, even, as an infant's toes and burps and t.u.r.ds are loved. Amid the pain and anxiety and helplessness, self-love holds a little orgy for itself. Others, solemn, in white, scurry in and out, vigorously partic.i.p.ating in the indecencies, bestowing technical names upon the hitherto unspeakable. Not even the most wanton wh.o.r.e, unhinged like a puppet by her craving for cocaine, forgives you as much as the night nurse who takes away the bedpan. Smilingly she, in that phosph.o.r.escent hospital twilight wherein wink the multi-colored lights of multiple sleepless monitors, gazes down into your face and inserts into your mouth, like a technically improved nipple, the digital thermometer with its grainy plastic skin. In these crevices of the nightmare, a deep neediness is put to rest.

I took an innocent pride, in short, in being a good patient-like being a good soldier, a morally dubious exercise in solidarity. I asked for no more pain medication than the authorities decreed, I made appropriate jokes in the intervals of my care, I admired the giant humming machines under whose poisonous focus I was periodically strapped, I was stoical about my hair loss and blistered a.n.u.s; I minded only the infrequent sieges of nausea and the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures made of my beloved genitals.

"What didn't you like about the cosmos?" I asked, with a sickly croak. In my frail sensitivity I imagined I could feel the damp of the lawn creeping up through my shoe soles- baroquely ornate running shoes, purchased to speed my convalescence.

"It didn't fit," Gloria stated firmly. "It wanted to take over the entire garden."

"It wasn't a good soldier," I amplified, in this new voice of mine that seems to have a permanent scratch in it.

"Exactly" Shards of earth and vegetation flew. Fistfuls of torn-up flowers stared skyward, lacking the nervous systems to realize that all those chemical transactions called life had been abruptly cancelled. Shards of earth and vegetation flew. Fistfuls of torn-up flowers stared skyward, lacking the nervous systems to realize that all those chemical transactions called life had been abruptly cancelled.

I felt-eerie, phantasmal sensation!-a trickle of urine warmly glide from my bladder into the plastic catheter, which conveyed it downward into the c.u.mbersome leg bag strapped below my knee. The leg bag was flesh-colored, amusingly-as if I might enter a beauty contest wearing it and it mustn't show. Sometimes it backed up, and urine already ejected once backed up as high as my flaccid p.e.n.i.s spilling down my thighs.

Big belling morning glories had climbed the green fence, and the single dahlia in my absence had grown and proliferated into a small tree crowded with numerous blooms the blushing color of a maiden's l.a.b.i.a. There seemed something rancid and evil about the garden-clumps of nameless livid growths formed caves for slugs and havens for beady-bodied daddy longlegs with ornately evolved venomous mandibles. In fact moles, rats, and woodchucks did burrow and rummage in the soft, much-mulched soil. Woodchucks nibble off the tops of Gloria's flowers-they are especially partial to poppies-so she heartlessly sets out so-called Havaheart traps for them, low rectangular cages whose doors fall diagonally and lock when the hapless animal treads on a central trigger. In my absence she had caught a creature who had calmly chewed an escape hatch through the 14-gauge galvanized wire. That must mean that she had caught a metallo-bioform, and that they were getting bigger. All the specimens I had ever seen or read about could have slipped out through the half-inch square mesh.

"Ben, as long as you're just standing there watching me struggle, wouldn't you like to throw the cosmos into the green cart and pull it down to the mulching pile?"

"Bending over is agony for me."

"The doctor said the more you exercised the better you'd be."

"The doctor doesn't have a reamed p.r.i.c.k and a bag of p.i.s.s strapped to his leg."

"You don't have to be rude about it." Another clump of uprooted cosmos was flung and a spray of dirt speckled the tops of my hitherto pristine running shoes. They were aqua, turquoise, crimson, black, and white, with striped laces. Gloria added, "The cart is in the garage."

The effort left me feeling I had dragged a load of broken concrete up the side of Mount Greylock. She told me, "While you were in the hospital, I was frightened. I kept hearing noises and voices in the woods."

A tension of guilt tugged at my wound, my seared and cleansed pockets of cancerous flesh. Though the delayed-focus laser in theory left the intervening tissue unaffected, in truth the flesh knew it had been violated, and why. Flesh knows everything, and forgets nothing.

"Oh?" I said. "I've been struck since I was home by how quiet everything is." I had been listening, in my captivity, for the Lynn boys, my adopted grandsons, to come to the door dutifully inquiring after my health, or for Doreen at night to come and hiss s.e.xily beneath my window. I even scanned the driveway for her cigarette b.u.t.ts. My flesh remembered the scent of her cigarettes in the sweatshop closeness of the shack, and her malty smell, and the glazed hard place between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples. She liked-the only thing she admitted liking-my rapidly flicking them with my tongue. At night I would lie and listen for sounds of human life from the woods but there was only the contralto drone of the cicadas-a thousand brainless voices blended, like an inhuman radio signal from s.p.a.ce.

"I know," Gloria said. Her cheeks as she lowered her eyes to weed bulged with a complacent smile. "I did something about it."

"What?" I braced for the answer. Any mental disturbance or anxiety tugs at the seat of my pain with its torque.

"Don't you bother yourself about it," she said. "But i worked."

And in my feebleness and maimed self-esteem I a.s.sente to her mastery of our arrangements, here on this hill, in on post-war, post-law-and-order twilight; I let it slide over me as one gravitational field, with only the slightest grinding of Stardust, slides over another.

Signs: the cicadas' monotone at night, and one bright-scarlet leaf on the slowly ruddying euonymus bush that I look down upon as I shakily shave, and white asters, early fall's signature bloom, everywhere-at the gravel edges of the driveway, and in the shadows beneath the hemlocks, and on into the woods, white asters with their woody stems and rather raggy-looking serrated leaves. How strange it must be, being an autumn flower, waiting while the others-the snowdrops and crocuses, the daisies and loosestrife, the Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod-all have their go at romancing the busy pollinators; and then, as the days shorten and the insect population grows sluggish and terminal, but for a few darting, reconnoitering dragonflies and aimlessly bobbing cabbage b.u.t.terflies, to unfurl their modest, virginal, starlike attractions. What patience Nature possesses, I thought, as with grotesque caution, my r.e.c.t.u.m protesting every tensed muscle, I made my way down into the woods, terrified of slipping on a patch of pine needles or some loose dirt that would send me and my hypersensitive wound tumbling.

Gloria is watchfully home most of the days now. Her two a.s.sociates-the other two-thirds of ownership-have taken up the slack at the gift: shop. Her gossipy get-togethers at the Calpurnia Club, her shopping flings at the Chestnut Hill Mall, her Tuesday book group, her Thursday bridge afternoons over at the Willowbank have all been put on hold as she hovers about me like a cheerful, soigne vulture. She has found a new hairdresser, on Newbury Street, who has achieved a perfect tint, a pale platinum blond with a tinge of copper, which blends with the gray so subtly that her hair does not look dyed at all, just faintly unearthly: a halo, a crest for the emerging widow. Around the house, except when fresh from gardening, she dresses with an ominous formality-shoes rather than sneakers, dresses rather than slacks or jeans. Not quite church clothes, but clothes fit for the gracious reception of an unannounced, distinguished guest, whom I take to be the inanimate version of myself that I am hatching-the solid, peglike, ultimate Russian doll inside a succession of hollow ones.

But today she had to go off for an hour of dental hygiene in Swampscott, and I felt strong enough-barely-to make it out into the woods and down the rocks to the shack by the path. I keep fighting fantasies of falling and the catheter being rammed deep up into my bowels. As I gripped a beech sapling to halt my slithery descent, I saw over the s.h.a.ggy shoulder of a granite outcropping that the kids' shack was gone. Not only was it gone, I observed as I drew near, but the ground for thirty feet all around it had been cleared as if by a lawnmower. A furious lawnmower: the old dry limbs and even the plywood and wire screening the boys had stolen for their little haven was shredded into bits, as if chewed and spit out. The ground was coated with fragments the size of my palm-tarpaper, aluminum mesh, laminated wood, corrugated plastic, cloth, rubber, and leather. It took me a minute to realize that these fragments were not from a rag heap but had been torn from bodies, bodies that were-where There was in the air a smell not only of rotting mulch in at autumn woods, or of the boggy creek that seeped through cattails a stone's throw away, but of sweetly putrefying mam mal. And, now that I knew what to look for, I had no trouble finding, in the evenly spread layer of debris, splinters of bone, withered shreds of skin barely distinguishable from the leaves that were starting to drift across the decaying layers of earlier years' leaf-fall, and blackened strips of what had been internal organs. I remembered the snake I had wounded. As best I could judge from the state of decomposition, a week or two had gone by; organic scavengers ranging from ants to foxes must have carried off much of the carrion.

How many bodies were here going back to nature (as if they had ever left) I could not estimate. My r.e.c.t.u.m was screaming, affronted by the effort of getting down the hill, and I still had to climb back up before Gloria returned with radiant, plaque-free teeth and invigorated gums. Not more than two, I guessed. Jose and Ray doing night duty. Little Manolete I could not bear to include in the slaughter, in my mind's eye. The metallobioforms had pulverized even the skulls; the tufts of shiny black hair scattered about like rabbit fur could have belonged to any of them but Doreen. I prayed-let's call it that-that she had not been present at the strike, but as I turned to leave my eye caught a bit of blue cotton with a white band such as might hem bikini panties. Beneath her tomboyish garb she did use to surprise me with dainty pastel underthings. Bleak as our relationship was, I think I was beginning to amuse her, and she would plan for our next tryst. The greenish glint of her eyes, which would deepen when my rough old tongue had worked on her for a while, had gone back to earth.

But such underpants could have been left in the shack in the natural careless course of events. Many of the cloth fragments were stiff with brown dried blood, and there was no blood on the sc.r.a.p of blue, I saw as I held it, rubbing its fine knit texture between finger and thumb.

As I stood there in the circle of the ma.s.sacre-as geometrical as if drawn with a giant compa.s.s-I realized that the metal vermin might be underfoot, about to bring me down. As nimbly as my catheter and leg bag permitted, I danced to the edge and beyond, where the undergrowth was still unchewed, still messy with fallen sticks and greenbrier and wild woodland asters. Hurting and hobbled as I was, I fairly flew up the hill.

Why had the metallobioforms decided to clear this s.p.a.ce? Or did they, in the tangle of fine copper wire which did for their brains, "decide" to do anything? Dampness, the friend of organic forms, was their enemy, and this little knoll was the driest spot in the immediate vicinity. The trinkets were limited in their range by the parasitic nature of their energy; the "spark-eating" pseudozoans had to cl.u.s.ter near electric wires or, in the cities, ma.s.s-transit third rails, and the "oil-eaters" required an abundance of spilled petroleum they were likely to find, in a backwater like Haskells Crossing, around the Amoco station. After clearing such a circular patch, they must have had to scuttle or slither out across the railroad tracks (where they could snack on the drippings of diesel fuel and brake lubricant on the ties) into our little downtown,. to replenish their exhausted energies. Many trinkets, like carrier aircraft whose missions took them just beyond the possibility of return, didn't make it; their junky, rusting bodies-most no bigger than ladybugs, which they resembled in shape, without the playful spots-littered the underbrush. But the species seemed to be extending its range nevertheless, and to be penetrating woodlands when before the war only organic wildlife had been observed.

Even back on my own lawn, I kept nervously checking mi ankles and lifting my feet, imagining the remorseless, stinging bites gathering into a fiery buzz-saw force. Survivors describe, on television, an attack as like having one's feet and then legs plunged into a meat-grinder. Such must have been the experience of heavy, laconic Jose and voluble Ray and little inky-eyed Manolete with his droll propensity for jerky, ambitious gestures. They had been the last people on Earth who had hoped to learn something from me. Had I been here to counsel them, they might all still be alive.

A wild wet late September storm outside: trees tossing and tousling in the struggle with air gone mad. Leaves' pale undersides show in waves in the woods between my windows and the beach, and small fallen branches sodden with greenery litter the driveway at the front of the house, away from the sea, which Gloria calls the back. The oaks around the circle whistle and roar in their afflicted tops so that I expect to see one come crashing down or drop a giant torn limb. But this is no hurricane, just a friendly New England nor'easter; the wind relents just enough, like a disease that declines to kill us, playing with us to pa.s.s the time.

My catheter was removed a few days ago: a relief, in that the scaffolding of impedimenta in which I have been enclosed is thus reduced, but also an embarra.s.sment, since it promoted me to diapers-Depends Adult Incontinence Pants. They get wet and heavy within an hour, and Gloria has tactfully set me up in the guest room with a rubber sheet over the mattress. I awake and change myself several times during the night; yet in the morning I am drowsily surprised by the transposition of our bedroom curtains and bookcase to the spa.r.s.er, bleaker furnishings of the guest room. Its ceiling over in one corner is broken into a set of broad prismatic angles, to accommodate a short flight of steps on the third floor above, and I gaze, half awake, at this architectural disturbance as if it is a thing in itself, a crouching angular high shape sharing my s.p.a.ce, malevolent but quiet, in lieu of a wife.

Gloria takes care of me but the house shakes with the irritable clicking and slamming of the part.i.tions she has put up between us. She wants to keep dry. In my impotence I have ceased to be of any use. From her angle our relationship is all sufferance, and a n.o.ble non-complaining; she is earning stars in Heaven, as people used to say, and her virtue afflicts me with its hardness and glitter so that I cringe. What I loved about her in comparison with Perdita was this: lovemaking with Perdita mixed us up, the two of us, like a dark batter of flesh and desire, and rarely in the exactly correct proportions, so that one or the other of us felt cheated, and the other guilty, as if our s.e.x should be a merger as precisely fair as the mixture of genes in our children; whereas with Gloria there was no confusion of responsibilities. I would use her, and she me, to achieve two distinct, unapologetic o.r.g.a.s.ms, sometimes simultaneous and sometimes not. This s.e.xual clarity seemed worth laying down my life for-my respectability, my financial security, my children's happiness. As it turned out, the price was less than I had feared; life went on, the world continued turning, as it would in the wake of this fierce September blow, broken limbs and all.

I keep getting out of bed to paddle from window to window, seeing the world drenched, feeling my diaper sag toward another changing. In my days of young fatherhood with Perdita we had a diaper service, which would take away each Monday an ammonia-rich, water-laden sack, and give us square bundles of fresh, dry, folded diapers instead. No such service now exists. What I remove now I put in a greer garbage bag that each Wednesday Gloria in the back of her station wagon carts down to the side of the road to take its place in some far-off landfill, for the delectation of future archaeologists. They will see us as faithful newspaper-readers and revellers in absorptive pads.

If I can no longer give her an o.r.g.a.s.m with my stiff p.r.i.c.k, my only use to Gloria is as a stiff corpse bequeathing to her liquid capital. In our feverish, catch-as-catch-can courtship, I more than once gave her an o.r.g.a.s.m with my hand (in the movies) or foot (under a restaurant table) or with my mouth as she kneeled on a bed looking down like a mounded snow-woman with my head held firm between her melting thighs. But I fear that now she would find such resorts impossibly undignified for a woman of over sixty. I myself turned sixty-seven in the hospital, a quantum jump un.o.bserved except by a touching shower of cartoony cards from my ten grandchildren, whose signatures ranged from Kevin's maturely subdued ballpoint italic to a crayon scribble from Jennifer, her little s...o...b..ry hand no doubt bunchily held within Roberta's.

I read a lot, in my ignominious, tender, doze-p.r.o.ne state, avoiding the emotional stresses of fiction-that clacking, crudely carpentered old roller coaster, every up and down mocked by the triviality, when all is said and done, of human experience, its Sisyphean repet.i.tiveness-and sticking to the alternative lives, in time and s.p.a.ce, of history and the National Geographic National Geographic. This splendid magazine almost alone continued to print right through the Sino-American Conflict, bringing us beautiful photographic spreads, miles removed from the hateful clamor of propaganda, on the picturesque yak-herders in the yurt-dotted sandy backlands of the very empire we were striving to annihilate. Somewhere amid the nuclear blasts they found the ink, the clay-coated stock, and the innocent text to sustain that march of yellow spines continuous from the days of-explorer, writer, statesman-Teddy Roosevelt.

The overlooked corners of the maps and time charts fascinate me-the so-called Dark Ages, for instance, from the fall of Rome to the year 1000. Not only do these centuries contain the unconscious (to its citizens) permutation of Roman inst.i.tutions into pre-medieval simulacra, and the incongruous sunburst of Irish monasticism while the Saracens and Vikings were squeezing Europe to a terrified sliver, but in humble anonymous farmsteads and workshops technological leaps never dared by the theorizing, slave-bound ancients were at last executed-the crank and the horseshoe, the horse collar and the stirrup all first appear in, of all apparently G.o.dforsaken centuries, the ninth. By the year 1000 the wheeled Saxon plow, wind and water mills, and three-field crop rotation were extending a carpet of tillage the sages of Greece and tyrants of Rome had never imagined. Perhaps now, in the decadent and half-destroyed world that spreads below my hilltop, similar technological seeds are germinating. Decadence, like destruction, has this to be said for it: it frees men up. Men die, but mankind is as tough and resilient as the living wood that groans and sighs outside my window.

A big white truck roars in the driveway, splashing to a stop. Gloria, her clogs swiftly clacking, goes to the door and there is a surprisingly long, even an intimate, exchange. Stiffly pushing out of bed, whose wrinkled, odorous sheets have become my loathsome second skin, I move to the window and look down, in time to see the FedEx man-or woman; the hair is intermediate-turn away and get back into the driver's seat. He or she is tucking some sepia scrip into a leather billfold, and there is a thick leather triangle belted beneath the dark-blue shirt. I call for Gloria to come upstairs; she finally obliges. Her radiant, intelligent, mature face, framed by cleverly tinted ash-blond hair, is as painful to look at as the sun.

"Was that something for me?" I croak.

"No, dear. For me me, believe it or not."

"What was it?"

"It was a transaction."

"Obviously. What sort of transaction?"

"Well, I didn't want to tell you, but FedEx collects a monthly fee now."

"For what?"

Her already bright face brightened further. "For everything. For the utilities, and road maintenance, and our protection. FedEx is taking over a lot of what the government used to do but can't. It's like the Pony Express, taming the West."

"Or Mussolini making the trains run on time." The allusion went by her; the last war had made World War II as dim as a post-office mural. I asked, "What about the nice people I used to pay protection to? Spin and Phil, and then the boys from Lynn."

"A bunch of pathetic thugs, darling. They've all gone out of business. FedEx is nationwide; they have a network that can put New England into touch with Chicago and California again. It's a G.o.dsend, really."

"You sound like a commercial."

"When something is an improvement, I'm not afraid to say so, unlike some grumpy old cynics I know. You just concentrate on keeping your diapers changed, and do your exercises."

Kegel exercises-mental exercises designed to reactivate the traumatized urethral sphincter. It was frustratingly difficult to locate with the mind those cl.u.s.ters of tiny muscles (there are two, one around the r.e.c.t.u.m and the other around the base of the p.e.n.i.s) which we learn to manage not long after we learn to walk and talk, thus obtaining our ticket of admission to respectable human society. Well, I had fallen out of the club. And I had never known that Gloria regarded me as a cynic. In relation to what sunny philosophy of her own? In a marriage, as our flesh matters less, our opinions matter more. But I didn't want to argue, I didn't have the strength. I said, "It looked from the window as though he was packing a gun."

"She. A very nice, competent young woman was driving the truck, Mr. Chauvinist. And yes, they do have to carry guns, with their new responsibilities. They need to defend themselves, and us, against anti-social elements. Those voices I kept hearing in the woods-I told FedEx about them, and sure enough they stopped."

"They were children's voices," I said, her revelation touching some other muscles in me I didn't know I had.

"They were trespa.s.sing voices," Gloria said, irresistible in her clarity of purpose and conscience.

"Did it ever occur to you," I asked her, "that I I might be an anti-social element?" might be an anti-social element?"

"What you are is a very sick man who will get better if you do your exercises."

"My trouble is," I confessed, "I don't even know if I'm doing them. I may be just tightening my stomach muscles."

"Think p.r.i.c.k," she said. My fall has brought a new frankness to our relationship, a tonic simplicity as in those far off days when we knew upon meeting that, if we had smidgeon of privacy and ten minutes of time, we would f.u.c.k, cementing our bond, nailing down our hotly contested stake in each other. Think p.r.i.c.k: Think p.r.i.c.k: nothing cynical about that. nothing cynical about that.

The house is cold now in the mornings and evenings, but Gloria won't let me turn on the furnace. Her father, a rigid, pipe-puffing Connecticut squire, never touched the thermostat until All Saints' Day, she says. By the same calendar he switched from whiskey-and-soda to gin-and-tonic on Memorial Day, and back again on Labor Day. Seersucker suits and tweeds moved in and out of his closet as systematically as changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, and he never took his Mercedes out of the garage without checking the oil. He was a saint of proper procedures. On the coldest days before All Saints' Day, he would set a log fire in the Wilton living room, and they would all have tea, little Gloria's chamomile in a flowered cup, Mommy and Daddy's smoky Darjeeling poured from the blue-green pot with evil-looking long-tailed birds on it, and little cakes served on a tray by their faithful maid Mary, named after the mother of G.o.d. She had a pointed nose red at the tip, from the master's love of a cold house, perhaps. When Gloria touches me her hands feel icy. I wonder if I am running a permanent fever, my body furious at how it has been invaded.

Opening the kitchen cabinet to get down a mug for my morning tea (common Lipton's, in a tagged bag), I am blinded by sunlight and fear I might clumsily break something. The slant of sun is different, lower, now. We are past the equinox. The Earth is like a ship that has slightly changed course; we would not notice but that the sun warms the panelled wood of our cabin at a slightly different spot in the grain as we dress for dinner. Last night, getting up to change my diaper, I saw the half-moon tipped halfway onto its back, and I made myself realize, in my drowsy gut, that the moon's illumined half was turned toward the sun, which had plunged out of sight behind the Kellys' trees hours ago, but in the slant direction from which the moon was lit. Two b.a.l.l.s in the sky, one bright, one reflective: it's that simple. We live among their orbits like dust mites in the works of a clock.

The storm gone northeast to Newfoundland, the weather is clear and calm. The sea has milky stripes of extra calm in it, and even the lobster boats on the far side of Cat Island look sharp and white and close. Twenty miles away, the sh.o.r.e of Hingham and Hull-where last July I could see fireworks go off, fuzzy and faint as comets-floats a sharp, detailed blue above a mirroring width of what seems sheer air.

Other optical illusions: 1. Shaving the other morning, I saw what seemed a giant bright-amber b.u.t.terfly flapping frantically at my bathroom window, and only slowly realized that it was my stirred-up shaving water, into which I kept dipping my razor, reflecting electric light back into the window, semi-opaque at that newly shadowy 7:00 a.m. hour.

2. On the first day that I felt I had strength to walk down to the mailbox, I saw, as I shuffled ("One small step for a man ...") through the turn in the driveway, a long dark silhouette of something perched crookedly on the mailbox lid. My first thought was that a great bird, a crane or buzzard or pterodactyl, had alighted there; my next, that a package toe big to fit inside had been attached to the outside catch with rubber bands at a weird angle. Then, as I fearfully advanced I saw the shadow to be a piece of low hemlock limb intervening in my field of out-of-practice vision. It was always there. I had not taken this walk for seven weeks.

The vines in the woods-poison ivy and Virginia creeper- are beginning to redden, and the maples, each in its way. The tall red maple, so called, gradually turns a sober burgundy, while the more impulsive, larger-leaved sugar maple flashes into swathes of orange and a neon pink. The Norway maples planted downtown in the village will yield a clear yellow a bit duller than the hickories'. I saw from the car window as Gloria drove me to the Lahey Clinic in Danvers for some blood tests a splendid tall hickory whose outer leaves, basking in the mellow September sunlight, were still green, while the shaded inner leaves were already golden- a core of gold, a flickering inner life sheathed in seemly decorum; it gave the impression, as we sped by in the Infiniti, of a captive girlish soul, a twirling dryad.

Roberta brought Keith and Jennifer to visit me-my children have become solicitous, fluttering bothersomely, albeit loyally, about the wreck of my progenitive apparatus, whereby they came to be. In their adult, wrinkling faces I still see the plump cheeks and candid trusting gaze of ten-year-olds looking to me for protection and guidance and, most difficult to provide, entertainment. How can I explain that I must be left alone, without any pulling and hauling from loving kin, if I am to heal? That I have had my use of the world and my only salvation lies within, in tending the altar of my wound and waiting for nature or the force beyond it to slide me subtly away from my own disaster, by an invisible series of steps, into another world?

We fed Jennifer lunch. She kept taking the silver porringer, which cost a fistful of scrip at Firestone & Parson, and dumping its contents on the high-chair tray and then deliberately dropping the already much-dented porringer to the floor. The fourth time she did it, with her challenging slate-blue stare directly on me, I exploded. "Stop it "Stop it," I said to Jennifer, and to Roberta, whiningly, "Why does she keep doing doing that?" that?"

The baby, who had recently had her first birthday, was not used to being shouted at; her mouth formed a tiny circlet, with a bubble in it, before her lips downturned and she began to cry, to howl, and then to sob and sniffle.

Roberta comforted her. "Oh, Precious," she said, "Grampy didn't mean it; he's just forgotten what little girls are like." To me she explained, "Daddy, it's just her way of getting used to s.p.a.ce." to s.p.a.ce."

My daughter's remark, derived no doubt from some digitized handbook of child development, was helpful: I saw an affinity between the infant and myself, beyond our both being clad in diapers. With gestures and perceptions as fumbling as hers, I was getting used to time time.

It is a curious ent.i.ty. It doesn't exist, I have read, at the particle level: the basic laws of physics are time-symmetric, but for one tiny exception, the particle called the neutral kaon. Were it not for the neutral kaon, perhaps, buildings would self-a.s.semble as frequently as they collapse, and old men would become young in more than their dreams.

In my dreams, I seem to roam a long harvest table heaped with the past eras of my life. One night, I am back in Hammond Falls High School, swinging down the locker-lined halls in my penny loafers and frayed blue jeans-frayed and torn up to the limit the school dress code allows, for beneath the anti-social pose I am a conscientious student, with a college career and lifelong escape from Hammond Falls my sneaking ambition. I chestily inhale effluvia of hair oil and cheap perfume and hormonal overproduction; I eye the knockout girls in their rounded sweaters and pleated skirts and antic.i.p.ate a Sat.u.r.day-night sally into Pittsfield with my pals-dinner at the Dalton Avenue McDonald's or Teo's and a movie at the Showplace or the Capitol on North Street, followed by apple pie at Rosa's or the Popcorn Wagon. City streets, illegal beers, lamplight reflected in black puddles, freedom and sin around the corner. The tender heat and latent violence of high school, its fast cra.s.s glamour, are all around me, along with the quaint orderliness of its hourly bells and scheduled migrations from room to room. Killers in our walks, we of the Cla.s.s of 71 are yet as docile as concentration-camp inmates. Though the "system" is widely mocked and deplored, no better has materialized to rescue us from these locker-lined halls, with their hopeful, rebellious clatter.

Then I wake to my soaked diapers, the patter of squirrels on the roof, and the odd construction, like a crazy-angled coffin, buried in the far corner of the guest-room ceiling. With a deadly lurch in my stomach I realize I will never attend high school again, not unless time reverses. Another night, I am still married to Perdita, in our colonial house on East Main Street in Coverdale; we are vaguely surrounded by children in all sizes, but the real seethe is between us and our peers, the other young couples, all closeted in their homes yet dying to burst out, each marital partner helplessly seeking, as in a beaker of jiggled chemicals, to bond with another. A thrilling, tragic tangle of illicit alliances past and future is spread beneath us like a net beneath the flying bodies of trapeze artists; we are still lithe, though in our thirties. Our houses and gardens are neglected; our children signal for our attention in the corners of our eyes. The melting walls of domesticity, the too-many points of contact-with spouses, lovers, would-be lovers, still-living parents, children daily growing more complicated and knowing, cats and dogs whose sudden deaths underline the terror of it all-engulf my sleeping mind, steeped in its liquorous essence of Turnbull. Perdita, gorgeously and pitiably naked, is sobbing her eyes out in the pantry while a party we are giving is still going on; I am conscious of the social impropriety of her smooth, mythic costume, and awake, dawningly grateful that I need not any more unravel the reason for her grief.

What a prodigy of storage it is that all the stages of my life are coiled in my brain, with their stresses and stimulations. My present abject condition is another dish on the harvest table, a shipboard buffet heaped up backwards between the fluorescent soup of life at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise and the plum pudding of the childhood Christmas when I got my first set of skis-wooden ones, and secondhand, I could see from the nicks of wear. Time in my brain has become a kind of s.p.a.ce-areas of coiled cerebrum across which enlivening electricity idly sizzles in my sleep.

And yet the dominant atmosphere of my dreams is one of dread, of atrocity. Where does it come from? Mine has been a happy life, as these things go: war and plague have veered around me. New England was the most lightly bombed sector of the former United States. The Sino-American Conflict as a whole lasted four months, and was mostly a matter of highly trained young men and women in sealed chambers of safety reading 3-D computer graphics and pushing b.u.t.tons, thus obliterating quant.i.ties of civilians who never knew what hit them. Millions more Chinese than Americans died. The poisonous fallout chiefly sickened the world's dark majority in their ghettos and unsanitary villages. And yet I terrifyingly dreamed, just last night, of a pond surrounded by boys with flexible sticks, like bamboo whips, who flayed the pale broad fish as they came to the surface for air. An earlier dream had been cobwebbed with a grimy wealth of mechanical struts and lattices, infernal machinery of some local or global conspiracy or witchcraft was closing in on me, thickening like digestive juices around a swallowed gnat; I escaped only by awaking. All this terror must be history-der Weltgeist. Nan.o.bolts of cerebral electricity swarm across that part of my brain which stores racial memories, from Neanderthal butcheries on.

The post-equinoctial sunlight comes at me from unexpected angles, as if liberated. It lies, flecked with dirt from the windowpanes, on the page I am polluting with these scribbles, and blinds me as I rinse my cereal bowl at the kitchen sink, so that I nearly drop it, as if slapped. Squirrels frantic with the mult.i.tude of acorns needing to be buried scrabble heavily across the roof overhead. Geese in their endearingly imperfect Vs honk very loudly. Everything outdoors is brilliant and ready to topple. The tilted sunlight glitters in the poplars and shines through the leaves; though they are still mainly green, they are thinning, losing substance. The dogwood in the circle reddens. Gloria has set Jeremy to pulling up brown hosta, while I in my infirmity cower indoors. Jeremy never did get to Mexico. We shed our dreams one by one.

A week has gone by. Time in my sense of it is fragmented and thrusts this way and that, like the ice jam around the North Pole. Some of it rushes by; the darkness of morning slips through a choppy, brilliant interval into the darkness of evening; sometimes an hour sticks straight up, unmoving. A number of trees have turned a blatant yellow. The tenderest maples, with small, scarcely indented leaves, approach the sensational salmon pink inside a whelk sh.e.l.l. The Bradford pears downtown, I saw through the car windows as Gloria took me on a ride to the bank and the post office, are as blandly green as in June. There is an odd variousness to it all; here in mid-October one beech is all golden jangle and glitter while its mate nearby hasn't turned a leaf. The burning bush that began to blush in August is still half green, while its smaller companion has quickly a.s.sumed a luminous magenta unreal to see. One of our dogwoods is a subdued brownish burgundy, while the leaves of the other are mottled, no two alike, each individually dipped in a saffron dye that skips dark curdled spots like freckles of rot on a pear's skin. A scrubby sumac, with f.l.a.n.g.ed stems, that mingles with the wild roses shows an inky red, almost an eggplant color, while its leaves keep a pale mint green on their undersides. And, on their spindly, p.r.i.c.kly trees, apples and pears-unbidden, uneaten, gnarled-and berries-white on the big cedar along the drive, black on the stalks of goose-foot maple-add to the visual harvest, along with Gloria's gallantly persisting roses and her thriving many-branched dahlia. Sunlight takes on a supernal value, reflected back from all this varicolored warmth of tinge; the broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter.

I awake at night because of my wet diaper and, changed into a dry one, still cannot get back to sleep. The house creaks around me like a galleon shifting sails; from the third story come distinct b.u.mping sounds, but the steady green lights of our alarm system indicate no corporeal trespa.s.ser. Wind whistles outside in the soon-to-be-naked trees. It is time to lower the storm windows. For reasons of thrift and coziness I like to do it early; Gloria, who loves fresh air, puts it off a long as possible, to a day in November so bitter my frozen fingers smart as they manipulate the little corroded catches I return to the guest bed and wait for morning. The wind counterfeits the sound of the first train. I yearn for the first stir of traffic in the village. Though I will them to close, my ears open wide to drink the new day. The tense black surface of expectancy at last parts and the five-thirty train telescopes its onrush of metal wheels out from the amorphous sighing of the woods: the sound enlarges, arches into a volume that makes the house shudder on its rigid underlay of granite, and then swiftly sinks in pitch and volume as the train slows to a pause at the Haskells Crossing Station. Who can be getting on it? Who can be getting off? There is no going back into sleep; within a half-hour, the car that brings Gloria The New York Times The New York Times will rush up the driveway and circle by the porch. I listen with every nerve for the sound of its approach, but it comes upon me with an unexpected closeness, suddenly next to the house, filling the silence with its automotive pomp-the wet slur of tires, the crackle of crushed twigs, the creak of the springs as the car swerves toward the porch, a groan of brakes lightly applied, the rapid ticking of the engine in the pause, and then, in one chord, the b.u.mp of the folded paper hitting the porch and the car's dismissive acceleration down the driveway. A c.o.c.ky, synchronized performance, nicely perfected since the snowy winter mornings when the driver ignominiously parked short of the steep curve beyond the drying yard and walked the rest of the way up. To him, as he sails past, the house must look as oblivious as a white mausoleum in the half-light. Little does he know it has a consciousness: I am awake, a painfully alert ghost. All over the dark Northeast men and women are awake in that stir of mild misery we call life. will rush up the driveway and circle by the porch. I listen with every nerve for the sound of its approach, but it comes upon me with an unexpected closeness, suddenly next to the house, filling the silence with its automotive pomp-the wet slur of tires, the crackle of crushed twigs, the creak of the springs as the car swerves toward the porch, a groan of brakes lightly applied, the rapid ticking of the engine in the pause, and then, in one chord, the b.u.mp of the folded paper hitting the porch and the car's dismissive acceleration down the driveway. A c.o.c.ky, synchronized performance, nicely perfected since the snowy winter mornings when the driver ignominiously parked short of the steep curve beyond the drying yard and walked the rest of the way up. To him, as he sails past, the house must look as oblivious as a white mausoleum in the half-light. Little does he know it has a consciousness: I am awake, a painfully alert ghost. All over the dark Northeast men and women are awake in that stir of mild misery we call life.