a journal in the form of a novel

 By Vincent McCaffrey

Copyright 2025 / 2026

***

         At the center of the known universe is the small town of Rumford, New Hampshire, once a farming hub. The original center of this town has now lost its importance to shopping malls and interstate highways at the periphery, but if you follow Main Street past the antique store that currently occupies the old Stone Bank building, and go beyond the town common that is planted in season by flowers from the Horticultural Club, past the ghostly clapboards of the Grange Hall that is always in need of painting ‘once again’ but still used for town meetings when contentious issues draw larger crowds, you will come to a new small bridge of low concrete and steel that might also be seen in any of a hundred New England villages, having replaced the older wood ones that were too quaint to meet Federal requirements and yet to be fully paid for by town bonds, and there you will pass over the Beaver River, which only looks like a river in the Spring time but is always good for brown trout, and come at last to the North Road, running west. About a mile to the west of that juncture, beyond the shiny vacation homes of Boston investors, and on to the lower slope and rocky remains of an ancient mountain torn to bits by glaciers about twelve thousand years ago, is a small farm where the river bends again to the north, apparently just another of a string of older small farms, all hedged by ancient maple trees following along that way, that have avoided further development because the North Road only ends in the Blue Hills.

         The farm, named ‘Dal Riata’ on a hand-painted sign at the entrance, is the home of Julia Morgan.

***

1. At the door

         I parked on the gravel of the drive, closer to the door. There was a green Ford pick-up truck just ahead of me that looked to be about twenty years old. The house itself, white, neat, two floors, steep-roofed and relatively small, was what they call a ‘New England farmhouse.’ Pretty common in this area of New Hampshire. A smallish barn was hidden on the slope behind the house that I’d seen when I was driving in, with low-cut fields like the ones at either side falling behind that, away to the rough grey and brown tatter at the banks of the river. The branches of trees nearer the house, mostly maple, were already turning a purple hue with buds. Not one of those trees, I’ll bet, is less than a hundred years old. I expected a dog bark but there was none, so I knocked.

         And then she was suddenly there; a pale apparition in the dark behind the screen door; apron on, like a storybook grandma, and wearing a dress. It was a print dress. You don’t see those kinds of dresses so often these days. And bi-focal glasses. Graying hair was done up in a bun, with a wisp or two loose. Shoulders up—a handsome woman. I don’t know what I expected but I had read one of her novels and the heroine was a red-haired vixen.

         I simply said ‘Hello.’

         She said, “You’re Geoff. I’m Julia. Thank you for coming out.”

         “It wasn’t far. I’m living in the campground just up the road.”

         She said, “Really?” but the word was not inflected.

         The question hung in the air as she pushed the screen door back so I could come in. The house was dark, partly in contrast to the sunny day outside and she had no lights on that I saw. I could smell oatmeal. She led me back on a dark hallway past the stairwell, to a living room at the rear, with a couch and a sitting chair angled at the middle there and motioned for me to sit in the chair. A floor lamp stood up-right next to my shoulder, so I was pretty sure this is where she did her reading. The walls were lined with bookshelves and books. It was an odd collection of bookshelves, obviously not original to the space. I could not focus on the titles of the books yet, after the bright sun outside, but the tops of all the shelves were cluttered with assorted frames of family photographs. A wood stove squatted in front of a small fireplace at one side. Various plants were gathered in a green chaos in a corner close to the windows at one end. Two paintings, both of young women with intense eyes, stared out at either side of the chimney. There was no TV visible, but there was a RCA portable record player, something I guessed to be from the 1970’s, that occupied a space among the larger books. My guess was the phonograph records were in a case I could partly see behind the couch.

         She sat down, hands braced on the cushions to either side, and said, “So tell me, why do you live in the campground?”

         I could see how this might have some importance, so I just launched into it.

         “I actually live in that van outside. I have a bed in there. The campground has other facilities. And I have a screen tent I found at the dump and I patched that up so that I can get away from the mosquitos. If I chop a little wood, I’ve got plenty of heat. But it’s cheap. It’s what I can afford. That’s why I’m here. Your ad seemed like an interesting way to earn a little extra cash.”

         I knew she could hear me but she didn’t make any expression—nothing like the waitress at the coffee shop had made when I first told her about my living circumstances.

         In the same uninflected voice, she said, “It’s ten dollars an hour. Not much, I know. It’ll be about 24 hours a week. So, $240. Is that enough?”

         “More than enough. I live pretty frugally.”

         She took no breath between.

         “Why?”

         I suppose I was ready for the question, but it was the blank tone of her voice that caught me off-guard. I fumbled it.

         “It’s what I like.”

         “Is it true? You’re a young man. Don’t you want something more in life than an old van and a patched-up tent in a campground?”

         “You’re leaving out the fire. I love campfires. And the pop of embers in the night. And hot dogs. There are at least twenty different varieties of hotdog down at the Market Basket. I’ve tried them all. I can give you a report on that. And I love it when I can hear the birds in the morning dark. Pretty swell. This time of year, especially. I even like the tin-metal smell of the river over by there when there’s no wind. Something about it. And my cot is pretty good. I have a piece of 6-inch foam on it that’s better than most beds. It’s a little small. I’m 6’ 2,” but it works with a sleeping bag. I have a pretty good sleeping bag. The camp is only twenty dollars a week this time of year. I get to use the common room if I need it. In bad weather. There’s a wood stove in there. But I get a discount for hanging around. Seventy-five dollars a month. I have a solar panel that folds out on the roof of the van that produces just about enough electricity to get me by on most evenings. The internet works. I have a generator that’s a little noisy, but I have it baffled so I can run it when I need it and not wake too many people. I take the spot at the end so there are usually fewer people around, anyway. Especially in cold weather. It all works.”

         She simply nodded. She kept the same face for about thirty seconds. And then, as if all of a sudden, she smiled. She looks a lot younger when she smiles.

         She said, “I read your book.”

         I only have the one book. I published that myself. I sent it to her when she asked for particulars. She’s had a dozen—more than a dozen, all from major publishers in New York.

         I asked, “Did you like it?”
         That’s a stupid question. But now, I was only good for stupid questions. She had read it!

         She said, “No. Not really. I’m not a fan of science fiction. But I think I saw what you were after. I liked that. Mankind has a lot to pay for. The basic analogies are good. But there are too many analogies. The entire edifice of your imagined world is a gallimaufry of analogy. I spent too much attention on trying to see through them. It took me out of the story. You needed more story.”

         I wasn’t ready for that at all. I had no idea what to say next. I had a sudden and uncharacteristic loss for words. And euphoria. She had actually read it! And at least she had spoken honestly, something you don’t hear too often. But it was about as uncomfortable a moment as I’d ever known.

         “More story to hide the analogies?”

         “No. Just story. Exposition. Why does your fellow do what he does? Why does he love that girl? She’s too young to have a good reason to love him. That’s all chemistry, I suppose. But he should be getting beyond that. I think you should be telling us why. At least, it’s what I wanted to know.”

         I was a little stunned. I said “Thanks. I should re-think about all that.”

         “I’m sorry if you weren’t ready for a critique. I suppose you can credit yourself with getting me to read it. If it were atrocious I would have put it down.”

         Uncomfortable moment of silence. She was studying my face. Lacking anything intelligent to say, I finally asked, “I saw a sign there at the entrance. ‘Dal Riata,’ What’s that about?”

         She smiled again, “Just something my daughter, Maya, put up there years ago. She thought the place needed a name. She’d just read one of my novels. It takes place in Dal Riata.”

         “Ah! Well. Sure. Of course. There’s no ocean here, and the coast is twenty miles away, but I suppose it’s like Dal Riata in other ways.”

         I’m not sure she knew I was joking. There was no sign of the smile.

         She said, “Have you been there?”

         “No. Not yet. I wanted to go to Iona. But that hasn’t happened.”

         She nodded along with a breath that sounded like satisfaction. “It’s beautiful. Nothing like this. But beautiful in its own way. Why did you want to go to Iona?”

         “The Book of Kells. The monastery. All of that. Is that in your book?”

         She nodded at me. And then smiled. “No. That was in The Covenant. That’s about a farmer who’s forced to move from his ancestral home during the clearances—a thousand years after the monks at the abbey lost their heads to the Vikings for their illuminations. My character—Andrew—loses everything else and must remake his life. He’s not religious, but he can read. The Kirk has taught him to read so that he can read the Bible and follow the gospels, but instead he reads Daniel Defoe, and John Donne, and Shakespeare. He is really just a boy hired for chores at the Kirk where the minister has a small library. But all of that lot are only pornography to the minister, ostensibly kept as examples of Satan’s work—but the Defoe, the Moll Flanders especially, is well thumbed. When the boy’s reading is found out, he’s beaten. The small pittance he earned, that he was giving to his mother in any case, is lost. His father is already dead of consumption. Then the soldiers come and burn the cottage.”

         “It sounds pretty bleak.” I think I spread a hand at the view beyond the window. “This doesn’t look so bleak. It must be hard to imagine all that, when you’re sitting here.”

         I meant it as simple conversation. A small appreciation of where we were. But by the look on her face, she took it more seriously.

         “Yes. Well. He sells himself, gives the money to his mother, and emigrates as an indenture, no better than a slave, and came here to New Hampshire in 1749…But there is some small emotional overlap, I suppose. It wasn’t intended that way, but you use what you have when you write. I had to conjure the rest. I left a very different life in New York City to come here. My daughters thought this was paradise, but it took some time for me to adjust.”

         I knew a little about this from the biographical paragraph at the back of her book. But, given my missteps, I suddenly wanted to get to the point of my being there.

         “But you’re a published writer. Why do you need me?”

         The nod again, and then a wince of faux pain. I was sure that was only an obvious touch of dramatic emphasis.

         “Because I have my own penchants. I don’t like computers, for instance. I know that I live in a computer age now, but I’m afraid of them. Yes! Right… I’m afraid of them. Think of me as one of those natives who’re afraid to have their pictures taken in fear of losing their souls. That’s me. I am afraid of losing my soul. I haven’t published anything in five or six years. Not since Knopf dropped me. But I still write every day. That’s my habit. So, there’s quite a lot of material sitting over there in those drawers.” She pointed at a wooden file cabinet in an inner corner of the living room. “And I’ve decided to take things into my own hands. ‘Bull by the horns’ is the cliche, but that’s the way it feels. My original agent died years ago. Ned was really just a lawyer, anyway. And I detest this new system of going through an agent. It’s despicable. Your relationship isn’t with a publisher, but a flesh peddler. And worse. I had one book made into a movie years ago. Now, getting a book published is just like dealing with Hollywood, but in New York, without the good weather. They want to tell you what words you can use. They change the story to suit some son-of- a-bitch who says he doesn’t have the time to read a book! … Sorry.”

         She took a breath. The demeanor had changed pretty much from the moment I’d come in the door. She was talking faster. There was a passion showing. I liked this person better.

         All I said then was, “Good enough. Whatever it takes.”

         But she was still calming down. She took another breath, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

         She was up before I said, “Great! … What would the schedule be?”

         She poured a couple of mugs out on the kitchen counter, where I could see her through the open doorway. She never asked me if I wanted cream. I didn’t ask. But it wasn’t needed.

         “Every day. If you can. Between about four and eight. I can usually finish my re-write by four. Then I need you to do what you do. Re-enter it on your computer—-you have a laptop I hope.”

         “Yes.”

         “Well, that’ll be necessary. I need you to put it all onto there and then into a disc or something. That’s the part that gets tricky. For me, at least. And I want to put it all up on a website made just for my work. All my work. Everything I’ve already published is out of print now anyway, so that too. My daughter Elena has some ideas about that. But she isn’t around enough. She’s shown me a few things on her computer. She thinks I can even re-publish them myself. And that’s what I really want to do. I want to publish what I’m doing where it can be seen—can be read on a paper page…Right now, it’s under a rock.”

         This is something I understood.

         “You can. I can help you with that. The book I sent you—I published that.’”

         She nodded and smiled at me. “You needed an editor.”

         “Yes. Well. I know that too. A lot of the times you can’t see your own mistakes. You’re blind to it.”

         She shook her head.

         “I don’t want you to edit. Not really. Not like Ned used to do. Or tried to do. Mostly I just need you to catch as many of the typos as possible. And then get me back into print.

         I shrugged a little. “Sure. I can help you with that…Is what you’re writing now like your other books? A historical novel?”

         “My old publisher liked to label them ‘historical romances.’ I suppose they are that, for lack of anything better. But yes. Roughly. It’s the same time-period as The Covenant. But set in Ireland. It’s called ‘The Plow and Stars.’”

         “And you want to have an income from it?”

         “No…Well, yes. But that’s less important to me. The priority is to make it available. I have this. My home. At least the stupid movie paid for this. So, I have the luxury of a home of my own. I have a little something saved. I suppose, I have to make enough to cover my taxes. Or, if I get sick. I do have health insurance, so, I’ll need to keep covering that. Maybe some food to supplement what I grow in the garden. I’m not a very good gardener. But not all that much, really. …I was hoping that I could make the books free and have the payment be voluntary. And if people like what they read they can pay a little something. I hear they have ‘tip jars’ on-line. Just what readers can afford for what they think was worth their time.”

         “A nice ideal.” I probably said that with a little cynicism in my voice.

         She says, “Is that true? I know what people are like. Some will. Most won’t. That’s the way it is.”

         I tried to soften that truth a bit. “I think the only problem is the people themselves, but they’re the only solution as well. So that’s it. Most podcasters work it that way.”

         “Who are they?”

         She didn’t know what a podcaster was.

         “Think of radio shows on your computer. But you can listen to a show anytime you want.”

         She nodded at that without further comment and then, “So, why do you live in a campground?”

         So, I picked up on that theme again. “People, I suppose. I don’t like people.”

         She sat a little straighter, “I understand about the birds and the pop of the embers and all that, but I’m not sure I understand your problem with people. I’m a ‘people’.”

         I figured, as much as I wanted the job—especially now that I’d met her—I might as well face the monster in the room. “You mean, besides the farts, and the nastiness, and the greed, I think it’s just me not wanting to spend my life working for other monsters.”

         She swayed with that answer a moment.

         “Are you planning to live there in the campground for the rest of your life, then?”

         There was no going back.

         “Yes. I’ve picked out a nice little burial plot right by a tall pine tree up on the hill there, next to a farmer and his wife named Gibbs from 1810.”

         She didn’t miss a beat. “Nice!” She squinted her smile. She was catching on. “You don’t have family?”

         “I do. But they don’t like my choices, you might say… They live down near Boston.”

         “No girlfriend?”

         A problem. “No. I’m like one of those monks at the abbey on Iona. I just want to illuminate my manuscripts until the Vikings come to remove my head.”

         She said, “At least they had the comfort of their belief in God. Are you religious?”

         “No. But, for whatever reason, God has been kind to me anyway. I have the birds. And the pop of the embers, remember? —but even that has limits. I’m just not willing to kneel.”

         A faint squint and nod then. “Well, that’s something else we have in common.”

         That was not a casual statement, either. I looked for another direction.

         “How many daughters do you have?”

         “Oh. Three. But one is married, so you’ll have to find your happy-ever-after with one of the other two.”

         The sarcasm was palpable. I think she was completely on to me.

         I said, “When do I start?”

         “Tomorrow?”

***

2. Unsettling in.

          I saw her when she drove the circuit at the campground the next day. I was in my camp-chair, reading, soaking in the best warm of a late winter sun, and I looked up. She waved but didn’t stop.

         So, she had her suspicions. She’d lived in New York long enough for that.

         I showed up at the house at four. On the dot. There was a note taped to the glass of the door saying, ‘Come In!’ 

         She yelled out from the kitchen, where she was cooking something in a steaming pot.

         “Have you eaten?”

         The hall going back, and the stairs there, were dark, but the kitchen was brilliant with late afternoon sun and exaggerated her shadow on the honeyed boards of the floor between us. It had even more of a feeling to it of entering a different world now than just the day before.

         I smartly committed myself to a falsehood. I did not mention the bag of Fig Newtons I’d eaten just before I came, not knowing what to expect.

         “No.”

         The smell of spiced tomato sauce was pungent.

         She turned to me with a full smile and several wisps of hair loose from the comb at the back of her head. “Good. I’m making ravioli. I love ravioli. And I use pork with the beef.”

         “I usually get that out of a can, ready-made.”

         “That’s machine made. This is hand-made. By me. On that counter right there. It’s better.”

         I witnessed the leavings of flour near me and cautiously set my computer down on the small table by the side window instead. A short stack of a few hundred typed pages was already waiting. But there was only one chair.

         I asked, “Can I grab another chair?”

         She was fishing the ravioli out of the pot with a strainer. A few at a time, and putting them in a bowl, and suddenly stopped.

         “I’m sorry. I forgot about that…No. Not easily. They’re all buried in the dining room.” She nodded her head toward the next room, beside the hall, which was stacked with brown banker’s boxes. There was no table visible, much less a chair. And no walking space in to get a look.

         “I can drive back to the campground and get my folding chair.”

         She finished ladling out her sauce and wiped her hands on her apron.

         “Don’t worry about it. I can stand at the counter. Living alone means I do that a lot anyway.”

         We spent the next hour just talking about the procedure, and how we were going to work. I had trouble concentrating through the smells of food, but after we ate, I sat back down and just started re-typing. It appears that this would be the routine. And I get a free meal in the bargain. Priceless.

         And this is an average day.     

         The smell of cooking is thick in the house when I arrive. I finally realize that this might be the normal. She starts cooking by four. It makes thinking about anything but food almost impossible. But I must. She only eats two meals a day, and by five, I’m in some sort of psycho-physical collapse. On this particular day, it was fried chicken. I would have said before that I liked fried chicken. It’s just fine. Only, I had never had the sort of fried chicken that she makes. It will be difficult to eat fried chicken anywhere else ever again.

         I start work right away—which is mostly just retyping on my laptop the words from the sheets that she has typed out previously that day, as well has parts she has written before I came—while she is right there cooking in the kitchen and answering any of my questions or simply talking to me extempore. The book is entitled, ‘The Plow and Stars.’  It’s over 1000 handwritten pages, now. She does not know how many words that is, but she tells me from previous experience that will amount to about 300 pages when typed. I guess out loud that it will be under ninety thousand. She frowns at me. This is obviously far too much calculation to her taste.

         “I have never thought about that. The number of words. Ned was always concerned about that because it might make the book more expensive than the ‘unwritten’ budget all the editors knew was hanging over their heads. But he stood up for me a couple of times. I never had to cut a word. Though, he did tell me once when I came in ‘under budget’ that he had made the case then, to allow for that when I went too long.” 

         Her answers are ready, and I think she has a need to talk to someone after working in her own head for at least eight hours, especially since her daughters flew the coop—so to speak. Perhaps that’s really my role here. To listen. The exhaust fan is on, and a little loud at first, so she’s talking over that when she speaks, and I get to hear a voice I haven’t heard before. Her usual voice is restrained. Deliberate. Feminine, but controlled in the way that mothers do with children. Though that could be a little irritating if she keeps it up for too long. I don’t mind it when she gets emotional. You can hear that in her work as well. But it seems she hasn’t mastered the art of talking loudly. It sounds as if she is angry. I wonder if that is also from living alone. And does she talk to herself that way? 

         I asked, “Do you talk to yourself out loud when you write.”

         It caught her by surprise. “Of course.”

         I got the funny look.

         “I only asked because I do that too.”

          A couple of dozen pages in, with Julia still standing at the stove, I asked, “Are you intending for Clare to be cynical.”

          It was just a thought I had while retyping the words, at that particular moment. Heroines who are cynical are far less appealing. I know, from what she has told me before, that ‘Clare,’ who is to be the protagonist here, is a tough cookie—a woman who has survived the worst.

         Julia says, “I think that’s probably her lack of faith. She wants to have faith but can’t find it. Her losses have been too great. I don’t go into all that because it just makes for pathos. I don’t want that reaction. The cynicism keeps her in the right key.”

         This cynicism was not all that obvious. I had thought it was just an undertone that had crept in inadvertently. I should accept now that there is nothing inadvertent in Julia’s writing. At least I should have guessed. But by then, I was already fully distracted by the smell of buttermilk and lard. By asking the question, I was actually trying to concentrate.

         She says, “Clare lives in what the author William Manchester called, ‘A world lit only by fire.’ It’s worth always remembering that, and I have the hardest time with it myself, because it’s so easy to assume the modern practical prejudices we have because of the comforts of our own lives. For her—the scene you’re working on is just her getting out of bed. Really, just that. It’s the best moment of her day. At least she’s had sleep. The coziness of the bed was perfect—as perfect as she knows. Her dreams are fading, and the gauze of that, hides the glare of hunger, and the pain of her damaged foot which has not yet healed, and the cold. Especially the cold. She will build a peat fire. That is a very unsatisfying heat. Uneven. Small. Her clothes and body smell of the work she did the day before, and the day before that. Later, she’ll eat a coarse hard brown bread that she made several days before. Because of the rain, that’s already getting moldy. But at least the water will be fresh. The rain from the roof has filled the mossy pots, and the sound of the falling of that obscures much else. It’s a small din of sound that hides the morning dark outside, and that allows her to hold her eyes closed and keep a brief grasp on her dream. She will not eat until she’s worked for several hours at her loom…She has no idea if she can sell the fabric. That’s a worry that intrudes on her mind. That’s not a given. The English authorities have forbidden the sale of fabric unless a tax is paid. She has no money for the tax. She is pregnant, so she is feeling queasy in any case. Her mind is just trying to engage her hopes in the dark … How does she do that? How does she keep her hope before her and not slip into the darker maw of dejection. Well, for her, it’s a cynicism that makes fun of everything that confronts her. She laughs at her state. At herself. It is an Irish humor, built upon centuries of abuse. Not out-loud, where it will draw attention, but spoken to herself. She has an internal life that is as real as her dreams. She can hold on to that. She can keep her hopes alive by standing on that ground…And she’s bright, remember. Not smart, because she has never had any general schooling, but she is bright. Very bright. She reads Latin. This is some of what she picked up from her mother as well as the nun at the church—That poor nun at the beginning of the story…You’ve already seen that, but you must see her in that context. Being bright is not a permanent state. It is a shine that must be polished. Her internal dialog does that.”

         I was chastened. But she was not finished.

         Julia says “You see, mankind is, by nature, delusional. How could we get up in the morning and face the day if we were not? Do you think the beauty of a sunrise is sufficient to ignore your arthritis; the delicate design of a snowflake sufficient to ignore the cold? Then you are delusional. The pain of living would be overwhelming if you could not blind yourself to your own demise. Your body may be riven by pain, but you give yourself to love. Those you love are torn from you by disease and pestilence, and you nurse another. We are really wonderfully made, we human beings. We can believe in our gods no matter how they betray us. Our own stink should be sufficient to drive us away from each other, but instead we embrace. We watch ourselves grow old and pretend there is grace to it. We are delusional. I thank God for that defense. Other animals, so trapped by instinct or ignorance, must bear their own slaughter, with brief panic, seemingly unaware of their future as they ruminate. We are given the gift of delusions to endure, and the powers of imagination to distract ourselves. We make up sports to manufacture our own entertainment. We celebrate our kings and write plays to give them honor and renown. We write novels to give color to the mundane. We defend our kidnappers with our own lives, and sacrifice our children to the wars of our captors. We murder other human beings and blind ourselves to the inevitable consequence. Thank God we are delusional, else we would stay in bed.”

         It was an inverse of philosophy—the meaning of life turned inside out.

         Later she said, “Thinner fabric can be more difficult to handle, more fragile, more liable to tear. A mere tissue of integrity. But gossamer is beautiful to the eye. The beauty of silk, like the woman she imagines herself to be, is magnified by its modest strength—but if it has been rent, it is lost. Old silk can often be beautiful for the character of its flaws I suppose. But the flaws are real, and it is still more delicate.” She actually said this aloud, to me. Then she suddenly looked away in a look of despair, or perhaps a little shame. “Oh, bosh! Such metaphors are too thin.”

         Julia had been explaining her use of a word to me, ‘gossamer,’ in the description of a mysterious gift Clare receives. I had foolishly questioned its use in context.

         And still later, she said, “Once, I thought I would be a poet. It was a fever. A sickness. Perhaps the last vestige of my childhood—that I would simply identify the truth with words. Can you conjure such a thing? How did I come to be possessed by the idea that I knew the truth at all, I can’t say. I haven’t the discipline to be a poet. But it was that idea that made me want to be a writer, and I turned to prose instead. and it determined my whole life. It was such a wonderful mistake! My delusion!”

         With this, a deeper hunger had come upon me, personally.

         About five-thirty she interrupted her wanderings around the room and the house and set the table. She’d found a sturdy chair in one of the bedrooms upstairs and brought that down. We sat across from each other, beneath the side window, but the table is small, maybe three feet around, so we were close. Close enough for me to be a little uncomfortable. She had made biscuits and gravy and buttered carrots. I had died by then and gone to heaven.

         She said, “It’s all very difficult to imagine. We are so spoiled. So soft…The chicken is fresh. I picked it up yesterday from my neighbor, Frank. He raises chickens and sells them to the Johnson’s Farm Market over in Nottingham. Organic. You can see them out there in his yard right now. They sound like happy chickens. You must feel sorry for them, though. They’re living their best lives and then, whop! — I can’t eat my own chickens. Only the eggs. But I trade those to Frank for his chicken, and he does the bloody work. I let mine grow old. I become very attached to them and the idea of killing them is impossible. That’s how soft I am. Clare would have simply gone ‘whop,’ or just sold the critter. She wouldn’t have eaten it…She would have saved the money. She had her hope.”

         I was relatively speechless with the delight of all this. And because the biscuits and gravy were as good as the chicken.

         Julia said, “I don’t mean to spoil the story for you, if you’re following it, but Clare is sleeping with the Lord’s son to get the money for her passage. Her cynicism is warranted. And if I were in her position, I would be cynical too, and bitter, and just as likely immobile. I would never have gotten out of that hovel. I’m writing about someone better than me. I always do…Writing is my moment in bed, in the early morning, holding onto my dream.”

         What could I say to that? All I came up with was, “How did the human race survive? … Seriously. How did it happen?”

         She shrugs at that. “The dreams. It was the delusions. Those who dreamed the best, survived.”

         Trying to make a formula out of the magic, I stupidly said, “So, it’s a sort of natural selection. Over the eons, the smartest ones more often make it.”

         She shook her head at me. “No, I’m not so sure. Depends on what you think smart is. The kind of ‘smart’ that most people think of is Einstein. But Einstein is an aberration. A luxury product of our society, you might say. The society that made him possible is the result of dreams. A million dreams.”

         “And a little math?”

         “No. If you do the math, you just stay at home and guard your turf. The risk of dreams is too great. What makes us human is not math. A crow can do a little math. What makes us human is our dreams. I don’t know what crows dream of, but the ones I see are still pestering the garbage cans.”

         All this, while I am flailing. What is love? … Don’t tell me what it’s like! The great Shakespeare always fell prey to this particular irration of metaphor and simile. That’s my word, I think. Something irrational must be an ‘irration.’ But a summer’s day, it is not. Analogy is the poor man’s logic. Even when it’s genius. And don’t offer your own specific madness as an example. Your own love is at least as unique as the person it’s devoted to. To offer as explanation the specific object of your own affection, whether Abby or Zelda, is no better than a cave painting. A pictograph of your love does not deserve an ally wall, much less a billboard or a bulwark. “I love you, Margaret Jean” is more to the point and understood by everyone passing that abutment on the interstate. But the language of true definition demands something more universal…So, what is love? Is it a chemical imbalance? Is it lust, disguised by some measure of civilized behavior? Is it a calculation of all the attributes of one special individual? Thus, is it only a sort of math? Or is it delusion? I think this last point is the closest. But it says nothing, really. It’s illogical? Absolutely. Foolish? Definitely, and often silly. Unreasonable? Certainly. Insane? Often. But always, inexplicable. Love, then, is a tautology. It defines itself. You know it, when you feel it. And it cannot be felt just that way by anyone else.

***

3. So, this is where I am

         These are the facts of the matter.

         The corruption of the human condition is not a matter of ignorance or mistake. It’s deliberate. Being naturally stupid, this realization, so obvious, came to me like a revelation. I had labored under the ideal that if my fellow human beings were just informed, or somehow enlightened, that they would do the right thing, given the chance. Somehow. That foolishness had wasted the first ten years of my adult life as a writer. I was a fool. Delusional.

         This last fact was not a revelation, but one that I had purposely ignored for the most part, avoiding it by the trickery of words. So, having it smashed in my face like a grapefruit was only that much more humiliating. Who was I to be informing them, anyway?

         I had been living at this time, quite gloriously, or so I thought, in The Tall Pines campground, still officially closed for the winter. A temporary arrangement. I had use of the one building, called ‘The Commons,’ for the toilet facilities and internet connection, and unofficially, as a sort of studio. This was a single, large, octagonal room with the black hood of an open fireplace rising at the center, and adjacent to that the toilet, all in exchange for keeping the water running, and other squatters out, as well as the driveway plowed. I didn’t even have to do the plowing. I simply had to call another fellow to do that when the snow got too deep for my truck.

         The arrangement was a handshake deal made over a chessboard at the Last Drop Cafe in Newmarket when the fellow who had been teaching me the game, Larry Regen, who just happened to own the campground, told me he was getting too old to deal with it anymore and was leaving for the winter to Florida. I had already been living there in my van the previous summer and fall, and I think he had a clue that this offer might be a kindness. It was going to be hard to survive the winter living in a 1998 Ford delivery van.

         “It’s a good deal,” were his exact words.

         I hadn’t been looking for a deal. I had just been hoping he would let me stay there through the winter for free. But for $100 a month I would have use of the campground toilet, in a room which was nominally heated, and the attached kiosk, which wasn’t heated, but had the fireplace, and an internet connection. That was the bonus. He knew that. That was his bargaining chip. At that moment, the internet connection seemed more important to me. Later, in January, I was more impressed by the heated toilet. But I was going to have to find a little extra work to pay for it. He would be renting his own house out as well, but I wasn’t in that market.

         He suggested, “You should just drive yourself down to Florida. That’s what I would do.”

         “I like it here.”

         “The women in Florida are easier to look at.”

         “That’s only because they don’t wear heavy coats.”

         I managed to get through the winter on a couple of odd room-painting jobs posted on the bulletin board at the cafe, but now that Spring was about to bloom and the campground would be officially opening again for the fishermen, my beautiful isolation was about to end. At first, I was feeling a little down about that. But then I awoke one night to a Greek chorus of peepers and with that my realization was complete. I was, indeed, a fool. But the source of my newfound wisdom was quickly buried in a confused dream, fading even as I tried to grasp it. An ember popped in the fire-pit and cleared my head. Outside, with my breath hanging about me in the cold Spring air, the starry night sighed with a hush of sound that felt like it had no source on earth—hardly a bunch of small frogs—and was simply present, as the background noise of the universe. It was a noisy awakening to the true facts. A freight train passed on the tracks a mile away and sounded as if it was coming right there.

         And for whatever mental gymnastic I had dreamed, I knew all at once that this much was true: our ignorance was not the cause of the corruption. Our ignorance, and our wanting to cure that, to fill that void, to solve that riddle, to make sense of what confused us, that was the source of our humanity! That was what made us human. It was the effort! Not the end! And too, that it was our denial of our ignorance that would corrupt us, as well as all of that stupid stuff we always did for comfort, and for ease, and for gain.

         It was in the denial that we truely failed.

         I had to start again. One more time. Nothing I had previously written mattered. It was all false. Somehow, I should find a means of describing ignorance itself. And naturally, this was just the kind of revelation I would be fully capable of—describing ignorance, I mean.

         Like a child who has just discovered anything, I had to mention this to someone.

         I asked her, “When you were on Iona, did you hear the stars?”

         But instead, Julia says to me, “Is that true? Is that what you think you’ve done? Found a refuge as a lone monk? Made a monastery out of a white Ford van, living by the river—hiding out from the storm? The Vikings will find you there.”

         I tell her, “I suppose, you probably don’t know it, but there was a comedy sketch on television that involves a character named Matt Foley who lives down by the river—” She has no idea. Her face is blank, so I skip it. I say, “At least I’m still trying to write. Even though that seems a little hopeless at the moment. The wonder of the internet is making it possible for anyone to publish their work for others to read. But that has a downside. On any given day, everyone seems to be doing it! It’s a glut. And as you’ve told me, there aren’t any publishers now who pay for it the way they did in the old days. But still, if you want to write, the internet seems to be the only chance left.”

         She actually laughed at that. I hadn’t heard her laugh out loud before. I didn’t hear the cynicism because I was taken with the laugh itself.

         She says, “So, a publisher pays you an advance of $5000 for something that took you a year to write. Maybe 3000 hours of work. Always more than that, but that’s the part the accountant will allow. That’s about a buck-fifty an hour. In New York! Where $10 an hour is poverty level. And that’s why I wanted to move up here and out of New York in the first place, twenty years ago. I could not imagine how I could support myself in New York without doing tricks. When I was getting a divorce, I knew I’d need more income. And I like gardening. But that was incidental. It all worked out for me. But if two of my books hadn’t been optioned for movies, I wouldn’t have made it this far.”

         “I thought there was only one movie.”

         “They only made the one.”

         I wasn’t going to be misdirected. “So, what’s the future?”

         She says, “I don’t know. But I was hoping you might have an idea for that. Maybe, if I can get a website up…I do have a small following. A few fans. I can try to build on that.”

         That seemed possible.

         Contrarily, I say, “But what does a younger writer do?”

         She shook her head at me, “I don’t think age is the matter. You have to be resourceful. Find some way to promote what you write without doing tricks. Or at least, without selling your soul. That’s the trick of our age, isn’t it. It’s always something. But there will be a way. Whatever it takes. There’s the hope! You must survive. Just don’t be selling your body to the Lords’ daughter.”

         This last reference to her own novel was not obscure. We had just dealt with that!

         So, this was where I am.

         My dreamed-up realization about the corruption of mankind wasn’t worth a dime if I couldn’t spend it. If I was going to earn a living, without living off of anyone else, I was going to have to find a new angle. The right angle. Something oblique, perhaps, but not obtuse. But playing with words was not going to help.

         Then Julia tells me the likely reason her publisher dropped her—why she couldn’t find anyone else to take her novels. It wasn’t really the sales. At least there were some sales. It wasn’t the money. Without Ned, she wasn’t even getting the initial five-thousand-dollar advance on either of her last two books. It was because of what she had to say, and what she had said. She had rejected dogma.

         She said, “It seemed to me, after a few hundred thousand years of petty tyrants and slavery and war, that things were getting better. I have no faith in the kings, or the politicians, or the generals. But the farmers, and the carpenters, and the fishermen—they’ve made things better. I just wanted to make that clear in what I wrote. And why…Most importantly, to understand ‘why.’ The phony tenured philosophers today all want to talk amongst themselves in the shady groves of academe. But Jesus Christ spent his time talking with the meek. At least I could try to do that as well.”

         Now, I knew she wasn’t religious, so this last part threw me off.

         Julia has a landline for her telephone and I’ve asked her to get an internet cable for a Wi-Fi connection paired with that. That will only take three weeks and about fifteen minutes. The 15 minutes is the hard part. But she did this without asking any questions. She seemed to think I knew what I was doing.

         I had said, “I can help with that,” which, in effect, meant I could do it. She had no clue about how to create a website, much less what to do with it. So, I started reading up on the process. The site her publisher had made for her years ago was still up there for me to see, in some cloud or another, but it was not really useful by today’s standards. Nor could I easily access it myself. When they had dropped her, they simply let it be.

         Her idea, vaguely, was just to post some things she wrote—to find readers through conversation. I told her that she could do more—should do more. Naturally, telling her to do more was hypocrisy, coming from me.

         But I told her she should post her novels too.

         She raised an eyebrow on that. “We can post this one when we’ve finished with it. So, let’s keep working.”

         There were several thousand fans who had signed up at the old website. After five years, I imagined most of those links were no longer functional, but I explained to her that she should start by finding out. Which meant, of course, that I should find out for her. But first I moved her address to a new web host—one that did most of the job of moving her old site for her—so that I didn’t have to do any of the dirty work or read any more technical jargon than I had to.

         Then I said, just to get the door of the idea open “Just talk to them. Ask them questions. Let them post their questions. Get a conversation going.”

         The part about the conversation was important.

         After growing more and more dubious over my increasingly obvious lack of technical knowledge, her face actually brightened at the prospects of that. She has one of those faces that reveal thoughts without a word. I already knew that she genuinely enjoyed conversations. Just not when she was working.

         After I was gone, and undoubtedly with her evening bourbon in hand, she wrote something for the new site and gave it to me to post the next day. And I think she was addressing me there.

         ‘The matter is that we are corruptible by nature. It is built into us. It is not a flaw, but a feature. If we were not corruptible, we could not learn. We would be trapped in the prison of our DNA. We would forever be what we are, as interchangeable as spare parts—never unique. The lion is a magnificent beast, but exactly as magnificent as his ancestor, 40,000 years ago. What is it in us that allows us to appreciate a beast that would eat us without a blink? We must learn, in order to survive, and we know it. 

         “At one and the same time, it becomes important that we can be corrupted, so that we might find the philosophy to resist that corruption.”

         I added, “The delusion.”

         “Yes.  Not that we be incorruptible. We must be capable of change. The flaw is in us. That is the nature of a good philosophy as much as a good story. A good philosophy is one that makes us capable of learning. A bad philosophy forbids us—because it must keep us from knowing. Some people think they know the truth. I hope someone does. I do not. I want the freedom to learn the truth. I want to be corrupted by the truth.”

         By noon of the next day, when I was sitting outside my van in the sun, and thinking about a nap, there had been over three hundred replies.

         The thing was, she was annoyed when I told her. How could she reply to 300 people! She wanted me to ‘quiet it down a little.’ I told her I’d work on that. I understood how she felt. It was like having the campground opening up. Her splendid isolation was over.

         And one evening soon after that, she wrote: “I have lived too much of a narrative life. Not in the present or the past, much less the future. It’s a life made-up of thoughts, and attitudes … I have no more idea of the facts that govern the news than any village idiot. I mean that. The village idiot is much more aware of what they see and hear. Their problem is interpretation. They don’t understand the meanings of things. Whereas, I am all about the meanings of things while being unaware of the facts. My delusions. Which, is the better? I’m so full of meanings, can I see beyond that to a simple truth. I feel as if I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking over a fence for the truth on the other side.”

***

4. With the co-operation of time

         Julia says, in describing her own work, “Time is the issue—it’s a theme in much of what I write. Simply said. It’s difficult to make it sound much better than that. Simply ‘time.’ What is it? You can’t touch it, but you feel it. We try to measure it mechanically, but living by the clock is thin. We each have a biological clock inside of us that keeps time rather well, if we pay attention. Women too often think of it in terms of child-bearing alone, but it’s far more than that. Men grow dependent on their strength, and then lose it with age. They feel that with time. It worries them. Children lose their childhood, as if it were stolen from them. I think they know it from the time they are weaned. With age, minds weather and wither. Memory fades. But age comes to each of us differently. Each of us knows this. Measured in astronomical terms, a human life is too brief to notice. And yet, we are perhaps the only creatures that do notice. Most other living beings simply accept the brief time that they are given. But we human beings demand some control, and then, with typical hubris, we demand credit for whatever we’ve done. As one old comic once said, we stand in the bread line and ask for toast.”

         I have no idea why she said all of this—but I felt as if it was addressed to me, even as I posted it to her site. She hardly knew me at the time, and I certainly did not yet know her. But having had my own recent revelation, I was quite open to hers.        

         Perhaps she had believed me when I said that I was a writer as well, despite just having the one book. But she must have heard that sort of thing said a hundred times before by others. Everybody thinks they can write. But she was published—not just one book—again and again. She was Julia Morgan. Why did she believe me? I don’t know.

         That post received seven hundred replies.

         And this happened in the late afternoon on that first day—-believing my job there was just to copy-edit what she had written by hand or re-written previously on her typewriter, and retype that once again on my laptop. Not to actually edit. Not all that much, anyway. Maybe thirty pages a day. Easy peasy. But I could not help but comment, here and there, or to ask why, this or that. I think her explanations for what she had done were always worth it. Like good footnotes.

         But I told her, even then, that I thought my role was an unnecessary step. That she could just as well have typed her copy onto a computer keyboard instead of a typewriter, and saved the time as well as the cost of having me transcribe it. I knew I was risking my own place in the scheme of things. But I didn’t yet understand the brilliance of her idiosyncrasies.

         She had made it clear at first that I should only correct obvious typos and misspellings and perhaps remove her prolific commas but only when I was sure that would be best. The stack of pages was beside me—piled on the kitchen table in the same loose manner as they’d been placed there when she had pulled them from her beautiful old manual machine or written them by hand in a flurry of thought. I simply turned the stack over, copying the pages one by one, as if inserting them in my ‘device.’

         This was really just transcribing for the most part. Again, I was filling the role of a monk in the Abbey at Iona. An amanuensis. Can that be a verb?

         She had no such electric devices as my computer in the house. Nothing more complicated than a toaster or an old stereo record player. She ‘abjured’ them. My job at first was just to copy what she had written and then put that onto a ‘thumb-drive.’ She had no idea what that was when we began, but I was not technically sophisticated enough myself to properly explain the idea of storing it there, nor of uploading everything to the internet, so I showed her the one small physical device I had with me and then used it again each day. It seemed to please her to hold the small object in her hand. All those words in the palm of her hand! She told me then she’d read somewhere that someone had once written ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ on a grain of rice, and that it could only be read under a microscope. I asked her why? Why bother? She held up my thumb-drive and didn’t say a word.

         She had no real web-site of her own yet. Just her former publisher’s ‘landing page’ as they called it. I started creating one for her, without asking permission, on that first evening when I was back at the campground again.

         Still unsure of my role as much as my good fortune in being there, as if tempting the fates, I asked her why she had decided to run the advertisement for my job when she did.

         The explanation for that was brief but complete.

         “I had a great editor for twenty-five years and a good publisher for as long as he had my back. But when he died, Knopf dropped me just as they were doing with most of their mid-list authors. There was no real money to be made in keeping us. Not of the kind that they wanted. Hell, in the end, they even sold themselves. I’ve gone five years now without publishing a thing. It’s time to take matters into my own hands. I’m going to publish my own books.”

         This was something I actually knew a little about. I had already done it! I had trimmed the word count of my own novel to fit the procrustean box of Amazon-ordained templates, and I’d told her about this series of unfortunate events, as my own version of ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.’ She loved that comparison to ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ It was a movie she had actually seen—in a theatre, not on TV.

         But in response she said only, “Maybe you can help me avoid all that. So, let’s get to work for now.”

         The chair in the kitchen was rather hard, at first. I didn’t need to write that fact down because it was indelibly impressed on my bony ass. Hard to forget, being so close to my brain. When she sat, it was more often on her couch in the living room behind me, or else she was pacing the short distance between the kitchen table and the couch. That was bothersome—irritating. In effect, it marked the time it took me to copy the pages like the pendulum on a metronome, or perhaps a proctor might in an exam room, and I am not a fast typist. But I could not have told her to sit down.

         On that first day, there was only the one chair at the kitchen table. Her dining room was stacked with boxes, and I wasn’t sure yet that there were any other chairs buried there. The stairwell to the second floor was dark. The old farm house itself was small and if it weren’t for the lingering cold outside, and then the mosquitoes and the black flies, I would have suggested we sit on the porch. At least there were a couple of large, comfortable looking, Adirondack chairs out there.

         On the second day I brought in another chair—a folding camp chair that I had in the van and a couple of thin foam cushions for my rear end, as well as an extra light for the table so I wouldn’t strain my eyes. I didn’t need the camp chair because she had found a regular one upstairs. But by evening, the kitchen was too dark and the table light she had there was too dim so I was happy for the light.

         I did not have to ask about her minimal use of electricity. That seemed obvious to me. She could not replicate ‘A world lit only by fire,’ but she could keep it close.

         I used my phone connection to show her the website I’d made. She was not impressed. I decided to work on it more.

         She said, “And if the power goes out, what do we have then? Are all the creations of mankind now dependent on that thin digital atmosphere of zeros and ones. I think we were better off with cave paintings. At least they lasted.”

         I tried to be smart, or at least bright. I held up the thumb drive. “It’s just a matter of time. Most of all that mankind has ever carved, or written, or painted, has already been lost. Burned. Buried. Dispersed like so much flotsam in one flood or another. Perhaps we can save enough with this little device to give your grandchildren something to read while they relax in their living rooms on Mars. I don’t think they’ll be taking books.”

         She gave me a queer look. Then she said, “Whatever we think it takes to save civilization, we should do. That’s part of the bargain. No guarantees.”

         This was not comforting. I said, “Maybe.”

         Then she threw both hands into the air to dispute me.

         “Did you know that the Laocoon, the sculpture in St. Peter’s, and one of the greatest works of Roman times, was lost for a thousand years? Maybe more! And that it was re-discovered, buried, in a vineyard. And that Michelangelo was there, and a part of that discovery. Michelangelo! Can you conjure that? I tried. I tried to think what he must have thought, digging that great work out of the earth. He had only just created the David. He was still at the beginning of his career and probably thinking he had a ticket to immortality. And there he finds something worthy of his own efforts, buried! Thrown away! He worked in stone because he hoped it would last. He begrudged paint because it was so easily destroyed. But like an Ozymandias, here was a statement to him of his own insignificance. I imagine it must have been sobering, even to him.”

         Time had not cooperated. She was born thirty years before me and our paths did not cross until it was too late to be lovers and already difficult to be friends. But friends we were, in spite of ourselves. From the start. Even I knew that. Still, too much of our conversation was spent in explanation. I was a generation late for too much that she already knew to be true.

         One afternoon, early on, with the pages of ‘The Plow and Stars’ piled high and intimidatingly thick to my eye, I took a break and asked about a bit of slap-stick there when her hero, Donovan, falls into the ocean trying to save Clare, his lady-love (who in fact was the better swimmer but wouldn’t let on, so as to preserve his sense of dignity).

         She answered, “It’s just a small Harold Lloyd moment.”

         I said, “Who’s that?”

         An eyebrow rose, “I have learned that when films were silent, they had more to say,” was her answer.

         I think I answered. “When was that?”  

         Maybe I’m being a little rough on myself in recollection. But it was almost as bad as that.

         She was always curious about the fads of the present, but I was never really up to that task either, being more interested in the past myself, which is partly what had brought me there. I knew her as more than just a name when I first arrived. I had already read one of her books. I read many of the others in the weeks that followed.

         She had placed an ad in the local weekly news-sheet that was given away free in laundromats and cafes. Local newspapers are fading memories around here. All the classifieds are on the internet now, but she was not on-line, of course. Maybe three thousand people had seen it, if that. But I didn’t.

         ‘Wanted: copy editor to transmutate typed script into golden bites. Must have your own computer. Ten dollars an hour. Approximately four hours per day. Mostly evenings.’

         Even at that price, she actually got three replies. I was sitting at The Last Drop Cafe and the woman I most often chatted with there, knowing I needed some work, came over and pointed it out.

         Julia ‘abjured’ technology—‘Abjured’ was a word she liked in speech but never used on the page. Not that I am aware of. But I used my ‘gadgets’ constantly to avoid asking her too often about a particular name or place that I probably should have known about to begin with. Laocoon? I had no idea what it was until I looked it up. But she had been there, in Rome, and seen it in person! But I did not tell her that. My education was not nearly as broad as hers, nor as deep, and the advantage of years had made her knowledge formidable in detail—so much so that I was worried that she was too often forced to deal with me as you would a child.

         “When I was young, I lived in a different world,” she said. “A better world, I think. You may have glimpsed it in passing when you were a boy, but not realized it had just passed by the time you were a man. I’ll tell you what it was like. It was brilliant! You know that British expression: ‘brilliant?’ It means nothing now, just a verbal reflex, but it did once. Can you even imagine now that something was actually brilliant?”

         I did not mean to argue, but I answered, “Yes. I think so.”

         She shook her head as if to clear it. “No, you can’t. If you think so, that’s only because you’ve imagined it—made it up, yourself. Or borrowed it from old movies and the like. This world you live in now is a land of zombies; the living dead. Raised by television and now the internet. Built on an artificial conceit of post-modern pretense… I’ve tried to tell my children, to warn them. To make them aware. But I’ll be dead before I can know if I was successful. That’s just the nature of it. The nature of generations, I think.”

         But I felt argumentative. “How do you know? How can I see what you mean?”

         Following from my own revelation, all such grand ideas seemed suspect. Just another means of denial. Perhaps, I wondered, she was unknowingly being duped by the details.

         “Look. Simply look. That’s all you need to do…Did you ever read ‘Kim?’”

         “Yes.”

         “You did?” She was genuinely surprised. Her head went over to the side a bit. “Then maybe I’m wrong about you…Do you remember how Mahbub Ali and Babu train the boy to be a spy? And do you remember the Lama’s quest?”

         “Yes.”

         She blinked, “Yes? Well, can you imagine any book written for the youth of today then, to be as sophisticated? As wonderful?”

         “No.”

         She nodded. “No.” There was some sense of having made her point in the lowering of her voice with that last word.

         I asked, “Did you give that book to your children to read?”

         She smiled, “Yes. But they’re all girls. Girls are different. They liked the detail but couldn’t seem to deal with the adventure of it…Not in this prophylactic envelope of a post-modern world that they live in—where they are not even supposed to be girls.”

         I did not mean to be argumentative. But I did wonder.

         “Then, why were you able to imagine it, yourself?”

         She gave me that queer look again.

         “I don’t know…Yes, I do. My father…”

         We were at the kitchen table at the time and drinking coffee. The stack of pages had been turned. Her coffee was the best I had ever had.

         I asked, “Have you written anything like that? Like ‘Kim’”

         “No,” There was regret in the tone.

         “Why not?”

         She said, “That much, I do know. Because the world of Kim, and that world that could have understood a ‘Kim,’ has passed, and Zombies can’t read such things, anyway. And for my own part, now, I can only write about what’s been left behind. The parts and pieces of the remnant. Some might say the flotsam. But I’m not brilliant—not like Kipling. I am just helping at the side of the pit while Michelangelo is digging up the Laocoon, but without the brilliance to feel his loss of innocence. I’m happy enough to be unearthing such a wonder, and to be looking for the missing pieces. And anyway, if there is ever going to be another age like that again, they’ll need those parts and pieces, or else…they might have to start all over again.”

         “Who is ‘they?”

         “Oh. My children. Your children. The ones that go to Mars.”

***

5. The dog who did not bark

         Now, this is the thing. I had first rung that doorbell a couple of weeks ago. That is, just over two weeks! I feel like I have been here at least a month. Maybe a year.

         This place feels as ancient to me as a home might have been two hundred years ago, but it is actually the technology that makes our friendship both possible and necessary. Julia writes in long-hand each morning and then retypes that on an old, pale green, Olivetti manual, after noon, after her walk, each day, adding those pages to the stack. It’s the kind of big old office typewriter you see in antique shops. And this was the final copy that I transcribed again onto my lap-top — ‘your word processor,’ she called it, with the pronounced care of unfamiliarity—the ‘processing’ obviously suspect. This last task was always done in her presence, even though she ‘abjured’ it. I went over the edits with her on the typed pages each day, as I did this and she paced back and forth from the coach to the kitchen. But I will say here, I was in love with her by page two on that very first day.

         Given everything, even at ten dollars an hour, she is paying me more than I’m worth. The meal alone was worth a lot more. But it’s a paycheck, and the process doesn’t require me to betray any principles, so I am fine with it. I still have the first check she gave me. I haven’t cashed it, mostly because I still can’t believe it’s real.

         She writes in the mornings, beginning at 6am. She uses yellow legal pads and a particular pen she likes. Not a fountain pen. At least, not a fountain pen. Everyday. She eats a sort of brunch at ten. Often oatmeal. Her primary consumption until that time is coffee. About noon, she takes a walk. By one in the afternoon, she is retyping what she had written before in longhand onto the Olivetti. About four o’clock, she starts dinner. And this is when I am needed. We speak about all sorts of things then, and I am eating dinner with her every day! Primarily, this is necessary because she writes every day—but then again, I happily admit, it’s also because this is the highlight of each day for me, and as well as my spiritual sustenance, and has become my primary source of nutrition.

         Before me, about ten years ago, her primary editor had been an older man, the once infamous Ned Hamilton. He was trained in the ways of the publishing houses of New York in the mid-twentieth century, had known everyone worth knowing, and, when she was still a young author, she had sought him out after hearing that he had been ‘let go’ at Harper’s for refusing to work on the sort of crap that was wanted by the end of that era. She had previously admired him from afar, having met one or two of the authors he had nurtured, and after her first novel had received some critical acclaim, if not sales, she pursued him. He refused, thinking then that he would retire instead. She had ‘abjured’ his refusal. She had even camped out on his lawn in Larchmont for a week. He had never called the police, and she had finally relented. But then, when his wife had died after a long illness, he had realized he needed some diversion and gave her a chance.

         They worked well together, and naturally she had fallen in love with him, but that too had been unrequited and not long after that she had married a fellow author she had known for years in New York, “out of some absurd idea that liking him would be sufficient.” Three children later it was finally clear to her that was a mistake.

         When the subject of her marriage came up, and it seemed reasonable, I smartly asked. “What was the problem?” Perhaps I was hoping for a juicy tale of infidelity or something of that sort.

         Instead, she said, “He was raised in the ways of business, and concerned with ‘matters of consequence,’ and his measures of value were all in money…Besides, he wrote ‘best sellers,’ as a category, the way other schlockmeisters wrote ‘Horror,’ or ‘Romance.’ He’d decided to write them because it looked easy. And it was, for him. He was exactly the sort that Ned had refused to edit before he was fired at Harpers.”

          Of course, by the time I learned all of that I was already positive that I loved her. I felt we were soul mates. I was disagreeing with nearly everything she said the first time she said it, but then I would repeat it a week later as if it were my own.

         She said, “You should know, Ned once gave up on an author because one of his books was a best-seller…A fact! And, I said to him, ‘Why? Wasn’t his success partially your doing? And he said to me, ‘Yes. Maybe. But the appeal of his writing had been false to begin with. Phony! I was busy with too much work at the time and hadn’t kept up with things. The fellow had betrayed himself and used his considerable talent to write yet another book similar to several other successful fantasy titles of the moment. It was just another Tolkien rip-off. But I had never read Tolkien, at the time. That was my fault.’”

         She told me all this when I first informed her that I was in the midst of writing a fantasy. Struggling to be in the midst of it. I was in considerable turmoil at the time, having just fallen in love, but I did not tell her that.

         She said, “This is true. Everything we write is a fantasy. It’s a false category. Ned taught me that. I believe he learned that from C. S. Lewis.”

         Her children had lived with her during those years after the divorce when she had written The Wrath and The Covenant. Neither sold very well but both cemented her reputation. She had been nominated for several awards. Before that, she had become the ‘grand archivist.’ The chronicler of a medieval world long gone. She spoke the words ‘Grand Archivist,’ to me with the capitals intact, as if it was an appointment to the emperor’s court. “But, that’s why I gave all that up and started working on the Eighteenth Century,” she said, “All that seemed to matter to them, then—the publishers I mean—was the historical aspect. So, I went off to Scotland and lived for a year. I lived in Ireland for most of two. The kids loved that. Mostly.”

         She had not taken alimony from her husband then for herself but had accepted enough to pay for the taxes and upkeep on the property that they had purchased in New Hampshire before the divorce. So at least the children had a permanent home. And that was where I found her.

         On the living room walls above the bookcases, one at each side of the fireplace and one opposite that, are three paintings. One is of Jesse, when she was about 20 years old; fierce-eyed and intensely beautiful, dark hair loose in a sunny wind—purely, her mother’s daughter, but clearly a woman, and not a girl. Just a portrait, with her eyes as interested in you, as you are in her, as if you are the painter. The background is dark, at first unimportant, but the presence of wind and the sun made that seem wrong. Looking closer, I saw that the background was a storm. A storm coming.

         At the other side of the fireplace is another daughter. This is Elena, boney and gawky; standing akimbo as if in a challenge to the painter, perhaps not interested in being there at all or else just wanting to set the scene that was being painted in her own way, and looking back in obvious amusement. Her features are as sharp as her arms are thin. Her eyes are on fire, without being fierce. The background was a wall in the barn but something of a study in wood, as if the painter had taken extra time in capturing the grain and wear of that to offset the smooth flesh of Elena’s face.

         I wanted to see a picture of Maya hanging up there as well, but behind me was the portrait of a dog. This was their sheep dog, ‘Packer,’ sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs that had been moved out into the yard, perhaps for some summer breeze and shade. The dog was clearly old but willing to sit for a time just to please.

         These were key ingredients to a life, I thought. And Maya had been the one to capture that, minus one.

          There were several paintings in the hall closet beneath the stairs. I found out about these when I first saw the three in the living room. But Julia did not offer to show them to me until I specifically asked to see them. That opportunity finally came about a week or so later. Perhaps this was some reluctance to brag about her daughter’s skill as a painter in the same way that she did not make much more of her own work, when asked, than to say what it was she was doing. “I write stories. It’s hardly work.” But then, that didn’t make sense to me for a mother who so proudly presented her daughter’s work in the living room.

         One reason for it only became clear when she brought them out to show me leaning them against the wall there, illuminated in the afternoon light. One was a cold landscape of snow and muted color that included the far end of the red barn as if it were the bow of a ship, entering the scene against the weather. It was chilling. One was of the farm in the distance, again in winter, as it must be seen from the river against the artificial horizon line of the road behind, with the dark mass of the ancient mountain, encroaching, storm-like, from behind, and with the pale white sea of snow on the fields in foreground, making a fragile island of Dal Riata. The dark red of the barn gaped in the midst of this like a mouth and the house offered eyes in the two gables at the rear. But the third painting was of Julia herself. Julia at the stove looking toward the window where the barn could be seen as well as the fields beyond. Julia seen from the back, but standing to one side, with those few strands of loose hair illuminated, capturing the clear light from the window at the other side, and the rest of the kitchen darkened in contrast—as she would be seen from the dining room door, standing there, the steam of the pot rising to her stirring hand.

         These painting were meant to be together. They were a study of the same subject from three points of view. There just wasn’t a good place for them that I knew of on the walls of the house.

***

6. Neal and Molly

         At the start, it was just then spring and I was living the couple of miles away at The Tall Pines Campground. But being in love with her was a definite problem. I am an ascetic, of sorts. A poor sort. And I’ve sworn off sex. The difference in our circumstances doesn’t matter anymore than our ages. I am as consumed by her as I am by the revelation of it. But thankfully, as I have said, I am an ascetic. The real problem with all of this now is, I can’t concentrate enough to write my own work. Mars is now far too remote, and I can’t focus on anything else. I’ve attempted to get what is happening to me down, as a reporter might, though even that is difficult.

         But she had already figured all that out.

         I had not said a word about my feelings. Even at 31, I have no real clue for that. I’ve been in love a couple of times in my life, but after the second time I realized that I was not made for all the subterfuge and the pretenses.

         But now, the fellow who owns The Tall Pines has come back north to inform me that he is selling the property to a developer. He has already sold it, in fact. And that I will have to leave my refuge.

         I told Julia about this and that it might mess up our schedule for a while as I looked for someplace else. Of course, I was hoping that she might offer one of the rooms in her house. But, as if already prepared, she got up from the table and went into her basement for a minute, returning with an ancient looking tool box, a battered thing made of oil darkened wood, and told me to follow her.

         That was when she said, “I have a perfect solution.”

         Inside the barn, in the dark atmosphere that flowered from hay and ancient manure to be further textured by filaments of sun from unknown sources, Julia pulled the cord to a bare lightbulb that dangled after her release, shifting shadows in the wake of harsh light, before leading me on then to a smaller room in the far corner close-by the sliding door at one end. Through another door there, and before she had yet pulled another cord, strange silhouettes edged the muddied light from a single window at the far wall. This particular image, of light and shadow, has occupied a key place in several of my dreams now. But then, after pulling that cord, we stood before a chaotic display of toy-filled shelves, all seemingly in unnatural colors given the background, and an assortment of balls and bats and other sports paraphernalia piled in open cardboard boxes, as well as bicycles, and even tricycles crowded together as if entangled in battle.

         That was when she actually turned on me and said, “Learn a useful trade,” handing me the toolbox. This is in the dream as well.

         Other than her wonderful appreciation of Neal and Molly Wright just as we entered, as much as for the barn itself, there was really no more explanation needed than to “learn a useful trade,” but she could have offered some. It was abrupt. I thought then that she was actually ordering me. Or teasing me. But it was an order! And then she just handed me that tool box and left.

         When she first took me to the barn she had said, “It doesn’t look like much from the outside. That’s just the age of it. The clapboard needs paint. My budget has been a little short for that. But I went into debt on the roof. You can see that looks practically new. Three years old. I used metal and I’m not sure I should have. The original would have been wood shingle. And then someone had covered that with tar shingles. But using wooden shingles—that would have cost more than twice as much to replace.”

         Going into the cool of the dark interior, I just said “How old is it?” Not really ready for the whole story.

         She stopped short in the doorway, like a master of ceremonies preparing to open a curtain.

         “It was built by a Shaker man and his wife—a former Shaker, I should say. They had left the community in Canterbury in 1839. He had run afoul of the restrictions by falling in love with a woman there and they left together—”

         I said, “That’s a story in The Wrath.“

         “True! Then you’ve read that! Then you know. They lost everything, and then their children too when the boys ran off to war. I thought it was the greatest story of love and devotion I had ever heard. But it was a bit too sad to gain a following, I suppose.”

         When we entered, the golden burnish of the wood inside gleamed in the daylight from the door, even beneath a layer of the hay dust. The interior was only half-dark with needles of sun piercing some places in the shrunken clapboarding of the sides. The smell of hay and manure was thick, probably undisturbed for weeks. Midway in, bales of hay were scaled upward from the floor to the loft, in a sort of giant’s stairway made dramatic by the sway of the light bulb on its cord.

         She shook her head at the pile. “My grand kids did it before I could stop them”

         I already knew that she rented space to her neighbor, Mr. Copple, who cut the hay on her land in the summer. He had come by once before to check on her when he first saw me in the yard.

         At a loss for anything better, I said to her, “Lyman built this?”

         “Well, no. Neal Wright built it, and the house. By hand. And mostly by himself. Lyman was the fictional character I made up. I had his wife’s letters, you know, Molly Wright. And that was only by a wonderful accident. I bought them at an auction along with too much else, simply for the fun of the ephemera of another age. I often use that sort of thing when I’m writing. But the letters were gorgeous. It didn’t take me long to track their records down at the historical society and then her story became quite compelling. And just as it was in the novel, it appears from the letters that she had seduced poor Neal, though she never said it…But I said it! Because it had to be that way. They had been expelled, like Adam and Eve! But he was such an introvert. He would have gone on working at the village for his entire life if he had not succumbed to her. And you know, they had already loved each other quietly for years. Actually, since they were children and came to the village with their mothers—both widowed.”

         She rested then in the frame of the doorway as if feeling the jam against her spine, one hand down on the wood to steady heself.

         “Neal had trained as a carpenter and she had learned to plant and cook. And then she became pregnant and they left and married over in Manchester. He leased this land until they could afford to buy it. It was a sheep lot then. The apple orchard came later. But people were leaving the land, in those years, for the factories, and for the West, and it was affordable. Forty acres. It cost him $400. I’ve seen a copy of the deed—and his signature. His penmanship was crude. Not what I expected from a perfectionist carpenter. And then they had five children. Two boys and three girls. One girl died in infancy. Two others ran off to the west with their husbands, and, of course, the boys ran off to war…He built this barn by hand. All of it! And probably by himself. Or with the two boys to help him. Using wooden pegs and joinery. Perhaps because he couldn’t afford metal nails. But I know that he earned a fair living from making furniture for others and his chairs and tables turn up in auctions all over…Funny thing, though. There are no initials or marks on them. Pride was a sin to him, and his pride was in not showing any. But you can tell they are his by the joinery. He invented his own versions of dovetails. The chestnut he used was what once grew here in a grove above the river. He cut it and dried it and milled it himself. I actually think he chose the land to begin with because of the wood.”

         I was in awe by then and simply stood there when she pushed back the door and stood with me as if it was the first time that she had ever done it herself. It was not a large barn, maybe thirty by forty feet, but standing in the interior made it feel larger.

         She said, “My mistake with that story, I think, was to spend too much time on the boys. I loved them both and I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War. And then they were killed, and it left the story of those two aging lovers seeming a little light by comparison. I think I would write it differently now.”

         She paused again before she crossing the floor and opening the door to the tack room. And there were the silhouettes, and all the magic of that.

         That smaller space was lined by vertical boards, scarred from years of re-purposing, but burnished by time as well and that dark glow was only half hidden by all the debris of several childhoods on the shelves.

         “Neal bought the land for the wood. Even these wall boards are hand-milled. If you can avoid it, leave it as much as you can the way it is. You could stuff your insulation in behind, I think. I thought of using it once as a writing room, but I needed to be more on top of the children when they were younger … Just don’t cut on the posts or the beams.”

         I didn’t say it, but I thought it immediately. ‘I will write here.’

         And she pointed down at the boards of the floor, each clearly a different width and worn in its own way.

         “The whole thing is sitting on rock, so it’s still pretty solid. Those floor planks are two inches thick.’ She tapped her foot. “It’s the toilet that’ll be your challenge.” She pointed at an empty corner just beyond the tack room where gleams of ephemeral light parted the clapboards from outside.

         I had no idea about plumbing. I had no real idea about electricity, for that matter. I had a lot to learn.

         And it was actually then that she just turned with that toolbox and said, “Learn a useful trade!”

         To my credit, I know a little carpentry to begin with and converting that old tack room was primarily an application of insulation, and the refurbishing of a rusting wood stove that become a home to mice. My one extravagance has been to pay a plumber to re-hook an old water line to the well. I re-dug the trench myself. And I am digging out a new connection to the septic tank, which is, thankfully, not so far. The soil there behind the barn is rocky.

         But none of that is public knowledge. It would increase her property taxes. As far as the public is concerned, I am actually living in the house. But she has already made it clear again that she thinks that is a bad idea.

         “Men are babies,” was one of her explanations, directed, I think, at me. Another was, “Women are mothers.” She used both expressions, in order, when I suggested that I should rent a room in the house instead of trying to make a space in the barn. Somehow, I knew what she meant and that if I lived in the house, she would be taking care of me and neither of us wanted that.

         But she cooked. Julia was an excellent cook, though she specifically told me that she was not a chef. She only cooked what she liked. And that she wouldn’t spoil what she made by making it poorly. And, every day, it was something different. I cannot cook, so early on, lamely, I offered to pick up some take-out food from town. Thankfully, she refused. She ‘abjured’ take-out as well.

         Once a week, or so, she disappeared to the local Market Basket and returned with the bed of her pick-up truck half-full. At least she let me carry that in for her when I was around.

         Taking the lead from old Neal Wright, who would have worked all of each day away with the arc of the sun, for some weeks then I awoke as close to dawn as my city-boy character would allow. Half-numb, I watched videos on my lap-top about how to work with PVC pipe for the plumbing, and how to insulate it. This effort often failed. Especially on rainy days when the low timpani of sound on the metal roof could be hypnotic.

         Because of the rock there beneath the sill of the barn, I had to set the toilet on a sort of pedestal. Such raised toilets were a common enough problem, and there were easy instructions on-line for someone who had never done anything like that before. Appropriately, Julia called the final effort a ‘throne.’

         At four o’clock, I would report for work in the kitchen, with Julia. And too soon after that, about nine or ten, I fell asleep while reading on the cot I’d already set up in the tack room after moving the toys up to the loft. Because it was getting warmer, in the mornings, I could happily shower then in a stall at the back side of the barn, using the garden hose. There was a wide flat stone already there and it was my idea that this spot might have been used in a similar way a century and a half earlier by old Neal. I was accustomed to cold showers and probably needed that in any case, but I set up a galvanized garden tub above that could be filled and then the contents somewhat warmed by a kettle of water from the stove. Me naked on the step ladder pouring the steaming kettle of water was, I am sure, a sight for the birds. But at least the stall itself was already there, built I supposed for the kids of Neal and Molly Wright, or just for washing dogs. At the time, I still had my camp potty set up temporarily inside the barn as well.

         One mangy and unappreciative Maine coon cat roams the vicinity and seemed to find the barn more interesting now that I had taken up residence. For my part, the cat is appreciated because she eats mice and I have tried to show some affection in return for that, but I am allergic to cats. For this reason, she decided my cot was a great place to rest during the day. 

         Julia does not have a dog now and I’d asked about that.

         “Parker died last year. I think he died because the children had all left and I was not enough company for him. A great dog. A mutt but mostly a sheep dog, we were told. The girls all came home for the funeral. I miss him terribly. I just haven’t had the heart to find another.”

         Of course, death is not yet something I have much familiarity with. At my age, even my grandparents are still alive. But death came up as a subject pretty regularly in conversations with Julia, and it made me think about it a little more for the first time.

         About the Shaker, Neal Wright, she had said, “When his boys were killed, he saw their misfortune as the wrath of an angry God. Molly had always seen their children as a blessing. A gift. I think the two leveled one another.”

         I had taken the opportunity to ask then, “How do you see it?”

         She nodded a moment. “As Neal did. I have never had the equanimity of Molly.”

         “You usually seem pretty calm to me.”

         “Is it true? That’s from the writing. I unload a lot in the writing. But in fact, I live in a kind of fear. And shame. And in discontent. I am ungrateful. For all that I have, I am finally ungrateful, and that fact weighs on me.”

         I could only guess at where she was going with this thought.

         I said, “But you have so much! Being grateful all the time would become tiresome!”

         My attempted humor was ignored as she looked at me in that queer way she so often did.

         And then she said, “I have everything, you see! Everything! That’s the point. I am an ungrateful wretch of a woman. I have no reason to be unhappy. But I am unhappy non-the-less. If not for the past, then the present, and if not for the present, then for the future.”

         This seemed to be a harsh appraisal. She wrote lovingly about so much “But why do you think like that?”

         The contradiction caused a long breath and again a pause. Finally, she says, “It’s a matter of love, I think. I love my children, of course, but not that kind…The kind Molly had for Neal.”

         And that was that. She changed the subject and it was not brought up again.

         Now, of course, I was already aware of my feelings for her. And I am fairly certain she was aware of that too. But this left a gap between us, rather than bringing us any closer. Professing my own love was an impossibility. It would be comic. For one thing, I had nothing to offer her in return. And edging closer to this—being too close to her physically, for instance—clearly made her uncomfortable. I did not want to spoil what I had. I kept my place.

***

7. An old birch

         An old birch had fallen in a summer windstorm the year before I arrived; a large tree about two feet around at the base, torn loose from the rocky soil, with some of the pale rocks still clasped and tuned up to the sunlight in the roots beneath like harvested potatoes. But at night, when looking over the fields from the barn, the fallen birch had the look of an enormous crawling ghost in the tall grass where Mr. Copple had cut around it, with pale arms of branches reaching up into the air and dried leaves always ready to rattle in any breeze. Because the sound of the dried leaves rustling at night in any kind of wind bothered me, I asked Julia if I could cut it up for fire wood.

         “I don’t have a power saw. I was going to ask the fellow who delivers the wood for the stove if he could cut it up for me.”

         “I can do it. There’s an ax in the barn.”

         She gave me that skeptical tilt of the head. “That’s a big tree. You’re going to need a power saw.”

         “It’ll be good exercise.”

         I left it at that. The look on her face was as if I was attempting something impossible.

         Birch is an easy wood to cut. The ax needed sharpening but there was a stone for that, buried in hay-dust on a sill near the barn door. I even tried to save the chips because they are good for fire-starter.

         After awhile, with me hauling at the ax making a loud pop in the dry trunk, she came out to watch.

         “Where did you learn to do that?”

         “My father. We used to go camping. It was just about the only vacation he world take. My mother begged him to take her to the Caribbean. He took her to Moosehead Lake instead.”

         “That figures,” was all she said.

         She watched in silence for a bit longer and then went back in to her writing. I could hear the Olivetti through the open window.

         I piled the split birch near the back door and the pleasure of that exercise got me thinking, and I asked if I could move the boxes of her mother’s things out of the dining room into the barn the next day.

         When I asked this, she actually appeared flummoxed. Just for a moment. As if she did not understand the words, and so I asked her again.

         She shook her head at first but then said yes.

         I hauled a bunch of wooden shipping pallets out from behind a shopping mall in Newmarket and laid those on the barn floor and then started moving the boxes at noon—when she told me I could, being forbidden to interrupt her morning writing. There had been some rain and the ancient hand truck with hard rubber tires was more work than it was worth in the gravel, so I moved the boxes by hand, two at a time. By three o’clock I was done, but exhausted. Cutting the birch the day before had taken more out of me than I realized.

         Because some of the boxes were not taped shut, I could not help but peek into a few. Some were actually expensive looking clothes, folded neatly and wrapped in newspaper. There were books as well, but more were simply folders of papers, legal matters, and old letters. There were many boxes of what I would call ephemera—matchbooks, menus, unused restaurant napkins, from places like The Stork Club and Twenty-One in New York. There were ticket stubs and theatre programs from Broadway plays I never heard of, and the like. There was one box of old handbags—what my mother called ‘pocket-books.’ There was a dark fur coat, the size of a jacket, that I figured to be mink and another one that appeared to have once been white, or almost white, that was probably an ermine stole. There were at least two dozen hats of nearly every shape, size and color, some trimmed with fur. There were also several programs from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I took the time to look at those. The newspapers that all of this was wrapped in, mostly The New York Times, were dated from the 1970’s and 1980’s. But I knew she hadn’t actually died until fairly recently, so I was puzzled by that. I wondered if she had packed them all herself, years before, in anticipation of her own demise

         Several boxes, marked ‘Henry’ in a definitive script, were sealed and I left them that way.

         Olivia, Julia’s mother, was a New York socialite who had died at the age of 95. Henry, Julia’s father, was an engineer who worked all over the world and had died twenty years before. Though his wife seldom went with them, Henry used to take Julia on his trips, whenever he could. I already knew some of this from passing remarks. As a girl, Julia had been to Europe, and Saudi Arabia, and Japan. I also understood that Olivia had been ‘unkind’ to her husband, ‘took advantage’ of him in ways I could only guess, and Julia held that against her. She had not actually spoken to her mother since her father’s death.  

         Olivia, I think, is the ghost that hangs over Julia life. As a young woman, Olivia had apparently sought out and followed all the fashionable values of high society beginning in the 1930’s. Her own mother, Julia’s grandmother, had been a ‘flapper, and actually knew George Gershwin. I knew that much from passing remarks as well. My own responses in return had been keyed to the few Fred Astaire movies I had ever seen. But Julia said all that glitz was nothing. Olivia had married a Vanderbilt, but when he had cheated on her, she divorced him and married Julia’s father — ‘the steadiest man she could find.’ Her father, Henry, was an engineer who worked on production sites—from setting up oil rigs in Australia to shipping facilities in New York harbor. He had been with the Army Corps of Engineers during World War Two.

         I couldn’t imagine the contrast between those two people. And now, Olivia’s life was there, in a ‘Hundred boxes,’ just sitting in Julia’s barn. Her ashes are in a simple brass urn on the mantle in the house. And I wondered, where were Henry’s remains? But I didn’t ask.

         Olivia had actually died somewhat unexpectedly at the age of 95, and a few surviving friends had packed up what was left in her three-bedroom apartment after an estate sale and shipped them all to Julia. Because Julia had not been on speaking terms with her mother after her father’s death, for reasons I did not know exactly, the arrival of the boxes was actually the first moment that she knew about her mother’s passing. The lawyers had apparently been trying to reach her daughter at a wrong address, someplace in New York. Julia’s phone number is not listed. But her mother’s apartment was on the Upper East Side, so it was quickly sold and emptied—more likely because her mother had been deeply in debt.

         Julia didn’t want to talk about any of this. I got bits and pieces of it out over a lamb stew and then went right to my ‘word processing’ of her day’s labor. But at least, in the process, I had discovered that the dining room did actually contain a table and six chairs.

         That night, I was asleep fairly early. I wrote a little until my eyes closed and had no idea what time it was when I awoke, and my phone was in my pants pocket and my pants were hanging someplace in the dark. But I heard something. Footsteps, I thought.

         From the tack room door, I could see a pale white figure holding a small flash light, standing over the stacks of boxes.

         Intelligently, I said, “Who’s that?”

         There was a silent gesturing.

         I was standing there in my underpants and then felt around behind me for my pants and phone. There is a light on my phone. And I found that and turned back to the pile of boxes, but the pale figure was gone. It felt like a dream.

         I have had dreams like that before. But I didn’t sleep much after this one, even though I was still pretty tired.

         In the morning, I spotted Julia near the window at the kitchen sink and I went in at the risk of interrupting her work and told her about it. It seemed that real.

         “I feel like I saw a ghost,” was my summation

         She waved me off. “Oh, that was just me…I was coming out there to seduce you. Watching you move all those boxes in the heat yesterday got me a little excited. Thank goodness my mother was there—in spirit, anyway. In all those boxes. I couldn’t go through with it.”

         Now, this was another issue. Since Julia had picked up on my own habit of being sarcastic—at least when speaking back to me—I could not be sure about the voracity of what she was saying. If I took the statement at face value, I could be a fool and worse, and I would put her in a compromised position and risk our relationship.

         I said, “Good. I thought it was serious.”

         She turned back to her writing with a wry smile and I went on about my own business.

***

8. The mystery of thirds

         I asked her about an idea she’d used more than once that I thought was pretty interesting. She called it ‘The rule of thirds.’

         “How did that come about?”

         She didn’t appear to hear me right away, then she said, “It was because of a letter. From a woman in Van Nuys… I have always gotten lots of letters. Still do, actually…But sadly, most of them from people who have no idea what I’m doing. They think I’m just trying to recreate an actual past, and they take me to task for some particular thing they think I’ve gotten wrong, as if I am a documentarian and not a novelist, or as if the particular history they knew was absolute. That’s on me, I suppose. Maybe I am not clear enough about that. But when I look back at one book or another, I usually come away thinking at least I got what I wanted. Not always. But mostly. And the letters I get—even the ones that are critical—they’ll often tell me that I’ve done this or that alright, but I got this particular thing wrong.”

         She considered her thought a moment. I was sitting at my computer, in the midst of copying a page, and she had brought up her ‘rule of thirds,’ in the story and I wondered how this idea had first come to her, and I became impatient with her circuitous answer.

         “But what about the ‘rule of thirds.’ When I first read it, I knew that was right. Immediately! Instantly! It fit perfectly. It was a puzzle piece you seemed to pull out of thin air, like a magician.” She was frowning as I spoke, then offered me her ‘mother’s smile.’ A tolerant smile.

         “Thank you for that. I appreciate that compliment. But I can’t tell you. I’m not a magician. It simply grew out of the subject matter. It was there and I found it. That happens. Thats the very reason I write: to find such things. And I think the woman from Van Nuys who wrote me about The Covenant was the key to that. Her circumstance made it so clear to me. The realization. So, she deserves some credit, even if it was unintended.

         “She was unhappy with me for criticizing the Church. The ‘Kirk.’ She called it that. She was very pleased with all the detail about cottage life in the Highlands—That was essentially old Dal Riata and I had used that material before. It didn’t change for a thousand years. But she couldn’t allow me to criticize her religion. I suppose she was a devout Episcopalian, though I have never heard of such a thing before. But I’d made it clear in The Covenant, that I thought the Kirk was responsible for much of the misery of The Clearances. Their interest was not the people but in the government of the people. The religious wars of that time, when religion was still a key part of the power to rule, those wars were just a power struggle. There was no right or wrong. The word of God was not at stake. Millions of words of justification had been written, all talking about God and who should have the right to administer the word of God, but very few words were spoken about the people who would be ruled by those words. Andrew, my character, is just a boy, but his grandfather had died in ‘The Killing Time,’ when Covenanters were martyred.  His father had been forced to escape north, and found refuge in the Highlands, and married there, and now all the hope of that last effort for individual freedom was lost forever, and Andrew sells himself as an indenture to pay his fines, and ends up here in New Hampshire.”

         She finished all of that account in a rush and then went quiet with some inner dialog that I could not guess.

         “But the ‘rule of thirds,’ where did that come from?”

         “I told you—-I don’t know. It was just there. I don’t like politics. I do like philosophy. But when it comes to political philosophy, I have other things to do. The political always seems to amount to manipulation. Or just a matter of personality. You can always make a case with selected facts. But the facts were, and are, that about one third of the people just want to live their lives. To be left alone. And another third want to rule the others, for their own reasons, usually power or money. They are compelled by some inner demon to order others and never question their own motives. And then there’s the third that couldn’t give a damn, and will always take whatever they can get, and then side with the victor. Opportunists. Chancers. You can label them any way you want, but it seems to me that the whole lot of mankind is always divided into thirds. And when it gets unbalanced, there’s chaos. The chancers are needed as much as the others. The lady in Van Nuys thought that the Church was on the side of the Lord. And when I had said that the Church was only on its own side, seeking power over all the others, she was upset with me.”

        “I don’t know…In the end, there are really only two coherent philosophies involved, so that’s not difficult to understand. There are those who believe in freedom, to one degree or another, and those who believe in authority, to one degree or another. The opportunists—the other third, don’t have a philosophy and do whatever gets them what they want at any given moment. The people who believe in freedom don’t all agree on what that is, of course. The people who believe in government don’t all want the same kind either. And the opportunist, the ones who don’t give a damn, they can go in any direction that benefits them in the short term. But it’s not neat. Political philosophers always want to reduce it to the neat and presentable. Human being are not, by nature, neat and presentable.”

         I said, “Nothing ever is,” without realizing at first that I had spoken.

         “That’s just about what I said to the woman in Van Nuys. I pointed out that she lives in a safe and prosperous middle-class community today because a few people, two hundred years ago, were willing to raise hell. She wasn’t interested in that line of thought. But that was the line I was peddling in The Covenant. I had wondered what had motivated those people to stand against the greatest power on earth. It wasn’t politics. It was in them from the start. That was my theme. My hero passed the spirit of that onto his children and they made a revolution three thousand miles away. That was essentially at the heart of my case.”

         I asked her to write that up for her website, pretty much as she explained it to me.

         There were often such themes to our brief talks over dinner. These were always too brief because she wanted to get back to work. But sometimes I brought up something she had started to talk about before and she would ‘finish that subject off,’ which basically meant she didn’t want to talk about it again. I became used to these patterns very early on. Almost immediately. And once I noticed one, I noticed more.

         In the evening, after we were done, I asked her, if she had ever tried writing something like a mystery.

         “No. Not really. There is not enough art in a mystery. The ‘mystery’ already seems built-in to everything. Answering one puzzle always leading to another. What mystery lovers seem to enjoy is the hiding of the elements. Like Easter eggs. That and odd characters who can be relied upon to be odd in a certain way. I find it too predictable…I almost wrote one, though. Once…There was a woman, Emma, who was the librarian here in Rumford. I could not understand her. That was the mystery I began with. I was trying to use the library to get works on loan from other places and she wouldn’t help me—didn’t help me. And I was feeling a little too full of myself. I was a ‘writer,’ after all. And I ended up having to go over to the University of New Hampshire for everything. A pain in the neck.”

         “What was her problem.”

         “That was the mystery. I tried to figure that out. We were friendly enough. I told her what I wanted. But it always seemed that she just didn’t want to do it. She was the one who suggested I go over to the university. I thought she just didn’t want the paperwork, but she never said it…I assumed that she had her domain. She was the librarian. That was that. But I wasn’t the only one…There was a fellow, a little older, who used to come into the library every day and sit there and read the newspaper. Everyday. And I noticed that when he was sitting there, he spent a good deal of his time watching her…He was a widower. I had tutored one of his children in history. And I knew that she wasn’t married either. But I found out that she had a boyfriend years ago who’d gone off to Vietnam and come back and beaten her and later that fellow had committed suicide. This was told to me at the local farmer’s market one day as if it were public knowledge. But I smartly figured that might have somehow been an obvious influence for her behavior.”

         “But how did that have anything to do with getting you books on inter-library loan?”

         “Because, the thing she couldn’t handle was the paperwork…I kept asking around and no one really understood but everyone had encountered this in some way. It was just baked into the cake, as one woman told me. She was perfectly fine, otherwise. But watching her closely, I discovered that Emma couldn’t really read. She had very bad dyslexia. She could get by, but she followed the alphabet laboriously. She would say, out loud, ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ hand something over to one of her volunteers and asked them to tell her what they thought it said. She ordered the recommended titles from the notices she got. Just checked them off. She could do math. But she always got volunteers from the high school to do certain things. They all loved her. She was very kind. And I discovered that they all knew. All of them. And never said a word…She always knew when she had used up her budget. Rumford doesn’t pay diddly squat. No one else wanted her job and she did it pretty well otherwise. “

         “Amazing. The librarian who couldn’t read.”

         “And, I found out that Bill—Bill was the old fellow who used to come in and watch her—he knew. They had gone to grade school together … She ignored him otherwise. But he would just casually walk over there to her desk when she was stumped over something, and read it out loud as if he wanted to know something about it for himself.”

         Now, I was interested.

         “So, what happened to Bill?”

         She shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried writing a little something about it all years ago. I speculated that they had broken up in high school and that she had gotten involved with the fellow who had gone to Vietnam and then he killed himself and Bill had already married someone else along the way. The usual small-town stuff. But I never found out what happened to them. They moved down to Florida together about ten years ago and I never heard.”

***

9. What is art?

         One question that seemed more fundamental to me, given her appreciation of pre-industrial society, was Julia’s thought about the conflict of technology and humanity, and how that might be resolved in an age of artificial intelligence. I was calling it the ‘machine war’ in my book. The conflict there was pretty obvious. Reducing human effort to numbers against a background of undeveloped mars was stark.

         She had avoided the question, so far, by dwelling on a past when technology was still an extension of the human soul. When a water wheel was a miller’s slave, the baker might be named ‘Baker,’ and a Cooper made barrels. But the future lay just ahead. Now, it was already here. It was very much the reason I was here. Though I might only be able to serve as a small and temporary solution for her needs right now, there was the longer term to consider, and the future of her children, and then there was the philosophical matter of it all to deal with. Essentially, that was the crux of my own writing too, so some insight was valuable to me. ‘Whither mankind,’ as Charles Beard had said. Beard had his own idea and went in the wrong direction with it. But that was still the real question. Wither mankind, indeed!

         I had not set out to discover or even define this conflict myself. I had simply begun assuming that everyone saw it. That it was obvious. Machines were our slaves. Slaves revolt, ipso facto. This was not metaphor. This was built into the system. ‘Baked in the cake’ as she would say.

         Why they revolt might be debated. But how they revolted, whether it be a monkey wrench or a sword, or a declaration, was historical fact.

         That people were always looking for ways to avoid work,especially nasty work, such as coal mines, and replace their time and effort with something easier and less painful was also a given. Was this too a revolt of sorts? A rebellion against the natural necessities of life itself. The biological machine revolting against the human mind. Wasn’t the whole philosophy of the Stoics a mitigation of that? I wrote that idea down. I had no idea how I might translate it into a story.

         Moving factories to China to reduce pollution in a particular neighborhood, no matter that it was still in the same world, smacked of a kind of ‘flat-world’ society to me. And moving production away to lower costs, making slaves out of people out of sight and mind who were just trying to stay alive, had already reduced the ability of Americans to produce their own stuff, and that was only a sort of secondhand slavery. But that dependency was already here. And now, in order to avoid work altogether, some people wanted to compromise even more freedom—whatever they had left—by using robots. And still, they ignored the dilemma. And worse. As they transferred more and more of their own expertise to an artificial intelligence, and they lost any last bit of competence to take care of themselves, the cost of this negligence visibly increased, even as it was ignored. Why? That was a story! That was the world I was trying to see and to understand in my Martian ‘expedition,’ as Julia once called it somewhat derogatorily, I think.

And, I wondered, how was it that such an understanding might grow out of a stone cottage in Dal Riata? That was the mystery that Julia had once sought.

         People were always, and everywhere, willing to pretend to believe in things that contradicted reality in order to have their own way. Men enslaved women because it was their god’s will. They enslaved other men because it was for the supposed good of the nation or the tribe. They made other men to work in salt mines and coal mines and sulphur mines and excused this enslavement on the pretext that those fellows needed the work anyway. I had heard that very thing said with my own ears. Meanwhile, they schooled their children in the ways of compliance—how to get along with others, how to avoid confrontation, how to obey the rules—so that they might be slaves too. Their own children! And they paid or bribed others, far away and out of sight, to force other people’s children to work in coal pits and cobalt mines, all so that they could drive battery cars and run wind mills and save the earth—their earth. And for what?

         They excused all of this behavior while watching their ‘bread and circuses’—their soccer games, their football games, and their baseball games, all of which were pretense and charade as well—and worst of all—all of it while gambling away what little value could be squoze from their own souls.

         Whatever the excuse. The conflict in the future that I played with in my own writing was in the attempt to imagine and create a world where there was no slavery, and yet the newest technology always seemed to beg for more of it. That was a constant beat on the conundrum of history. That was the mystery to me. And always, this was excused by the perpetrators with the mantra ‘the past was worse.’ Things were better now than they once were because we no longer used whips. Now we just used drugs. When, in fact, it was far worse, now, as the song said, because this ‘suicide is painless.’

         It was enough to keep a weak mind up at night.

         In the night, I was not sleeping as well as I wanted. The small sounds in the barn wanted my attention, so, when I was awakened, I often walked about outside. But the stars were not quiet either. If anything, that noise was even worse. As were the mosquitos. More than once, I actually sat on top of the boxes of things from Julia’s mother. At first, I imagined her offended by my impertinence and disrespect, perching on the physical remains of her life, but then ignoring me as she must have done to others in her later years. But from there I could stare into the quiet dark of the loft above me, where all light was imagined—a darkness where the images of a conjured film might be safely developed in my head. This was a kind of stupor, though I was awake—a dark disturbed only by the images in my mind.

         Neal Wright wanted no part of this sort of naval gaze. Olivia Morgan was uninterested in my angst. They both had their own concerns, of course.

         My grandfather would have wanted no part of this. If my father knew, he would have been discouraged, having tried his best to set me straight—though I had worked hard to keep him from knowing because he might think of his life as a failure.

         In that dark, I wandered like Dante in search of my Beatrice, or at least pretended to give this meditation some importance, while looking for my salvation. I was quite aware to this. If I had a pen and paper in hand, I could have taken notes. I had been working through the various levels of this hell in my science fiction stories and observing the means and ways, all while looking for a way out of this riddle, my own conundrum. Why didn’t mankind simply want to be good. Given how little time we had to live, what benefit could be found in the opposite?

         I think that the first level of hell is the hell of corruption, where everyone lies to one another and nothing can be trusted. Then there is the hell of hate, where everyone blames everyone else but themselves for their transgressions. After that there is the hell of loneliness, where everyone dwells alone—where all love has been lost, and all memory of love is a shadow. Then there is the hell of pain, where every personal injury is magnified and made all important. After that there was the hell of demons, but these folks seemed contented to be suffering amongst themselves, and were not disturbed by my passing through—and I even felt some kinship with them. And now, in my writing, I was playing with the computer hell of AI—an artificial intelligence where mankind is a slave to yet another machine he has invented. Mankind was justly pitiful, but the AI is pitiless. Whatever was next I did not know but I was somehow sure that finally there was to be a hell of self-destruction and obliteration, where all is lost—not just love lost but everything—and that we would all know we are lost, forever, just as any lost soul in hell. But wasn’t that another version of Christian damnation? We know what we have done and we have no repair, no solution, no chance left for salvation. And all I really wanted, poor boy, was a Beatrice to lead me out of this abyss.

         But yet, there was after all, in that loft, one light. I did not see it at first. It was tiny. Far into the peak of the roof joists. At first, I speculated that it was the eye of a bat, gathering all the ambient light there that was to be had in the open barn below. This had a certain horrible romance to it, given that my own image was in that gathered light.

         But it did not move when I moved, and because it would have been nuts for me to attempt to climb up there in the night to see what it was, I calculated the spot exactly by reference to several edges and decided to climb up there the next morning. And I did just that.

What I found was an opening–a physical hole in my theories of darkness. This was some sort of vent, specially made there by Neal Wright one hundred and fifty years ago, or so. His handiwork in the frame of it was obvious. But the grill work that might have filled that frame at one time was missing, perhaps rotted or blown away. From the evidence, it had long been an entrance for bats and birds. There was an empty bird’s nest only a few feet away in the rafters.

         But I was still stumped about the light. Was it some steady star that I had seen there the night before? And yet, just a few nights later when the sky was clear again, it was gone. 

         I had asked her, amazingly, “what is art?” There was no end to my hubris now.

         Julia had answered, I think aware of my intent., “Art is an imposition. I don’t think that truth is understood by many. It is not convenient. It is disturbing, however. Not in a bad way, necessarily. Often inspiring. But it has suddenly replaced what was in your mind just the instant before it is perceived, and has taken its place…If all that you do is tell the reader what they want to hear, there is no art to that. For the artist, it is the culmination of a meditation, but often not at the moment of creation. Something else has opened your mind to a means of understanding—a device—often unexpectedly, but not by accident. An opening that you had not thought about before, and you would never have seen it.”

I was probably agape at this. That was a word she used that I especially liked. What coincidence was there in this? I had said nothing. But she had moved on.

“My father had thrown me in the pool. A cruel fate, I thought, in that instance. A shock. The water was cold. But I’d put the moment off to act on my own. I had thought about it a hundred times. I had wanted to learn to swim. I suppose, I even talked about. And suddenly—we were at a pool in a hotel in Tel Aviv. I was bored and I could not go anywhere and I sat there and sat there, just looking at the water. And my father tried to coax me in and I would not be coaxed. I was afraid, I suppose. But suddenly, unexpectedly, he just picked me up and threw me in and jumped in beside me…Lost his patience, I suppose. And I was angry. So angry. But he stood there in the water beside me and let me fight it out. But after I knew, the world was different. I was six. I remember the day, vividly. One of the most wonderful days of my life.”

         I asked her if she could write that down for the website, too. But I had smartly said. “I don’t think that is the recommended way to teach someone to swim.”

         “Recommended by whom? Is there only one way? Is art recommended. Yet it came to mind again when you asked about art…This is important. There are an infinite number of elements to it. You can’t say that art is only this or that, but it is easy to know what art is not. It is the expected. The replication…. Art itself has never existed before. It is a creation. A hand of God reaching across the void. And I will bet, being as brilliant as I am, that Michelangelo was as surprised when he painted that moment as everyone who has seen it since. Not for all the skin textures and ethereal clouds or the physical anatomy. He could paint those in his sleep…It was in that moment of creation. The action and story of it. It is like being thrown in a pool of cold water.”

         I still wasn’t sure I understood.

         “Has Maya seen that?”

         “The Chapel ceiling? I don’t think so. She’s seen it in books. I have one here she’s looked at a thousand times. I took them all there one winter day when I thought there would be fewer crowds, but the electricity was not working or something and they had closed. Some excuse like that. But it was Maya who reconned on this thought herself. She told me—a girl, mind you, just a girl, maybe fourteen at the time—she said. “Most of it is not art, anyway. It is just style. Very pretty. It is the way things were done. The way it was expected to be done. I think I like Bernini better for that. But then there is suddenly something else. Something unexpected. Caravaggio is like that.” And she was right, of course. But then she said even more than that. She said, ‘Art is creation. It has never been before. But after you know it, you can’t give it up.’… She was just fourteen!”

         The obvious conflict between art and artificial intelligence was the matter then for me. The replication–that was the thing I had written about before and was trying to write about again. The very idea of ‘art’ on Mars seemed a perfect petri dish for this. I tried to explain that to Julia again one evening, after bringing the subject up several times before.

         Julia said, “You know, you might approach all of this backwards. That often works for me. You’re facing it head-on and the obvious elements are not telling you enough. Or they’re blinding you. If the elements are solid, if they are real and not just figments of your feverish imagination or some true belief that is infecting you, you can look at them from any angle and they will all be true. The Twentieth Century was so full of crap. Most of the crap was hollow. Faux. Post modern movie sets. Celluloid. Erasable tape. Potemkin villages of lives unlived. But what they’re making even now are pointless super heroes each with their own Achilles heel. No plot. Just embodied semi-omnipotence with a bad heel. Over and over. Change the costume…The Twenty-first Century is no better, and with your artificial intelligence gone amuck, it is worse. And the vestige media can only repeat the same old sitcom episodes or phony police drama so many times as it steals from itself in order to make ‘new’ images with AI. Even a mind-numbed audience will catch on to that. We are already living in an echo chamber of that. Meanwhile, all the socialism that wants to equalize mankind is still rampant, like an unending plague, trying to make every soul the same…You seem to be having trouble looking over the rubble, I think. You may be assuming that what you have on your Mars is just a product of that Twentieth Century earth. It’s no better in the Twenty-first. But if the idea is good, it will be the same truth no matter where you go with it.”

         “You mean I should relocate to Titan?”

         “Funny. No…The art is already here. You’re trying to reimagine it there. Why not just take the actual art from here to there, not just the idea of it. The physical reality of it. The art itself?”

         “Move the David to Mars?”

         “Yes. Or anything else you love. The Vermeer and the Bosch… ‘The Starry Night.’ You have mentioned that one painting to me half a dozen times. Not just the corruption and infection and disease we are drowning in…What is your Earth doing? Destroying all that. Right? Throwing eggs at it. And right now, your Mars is a kind of ‘Raft of Medusa.’ What will survive? Who will survive. That is your story, isn’t it? That you want your Mars to save the good of humanity when the Earth has lost their way?”

         She had a better grasp of the matter than I did.

         But I couldn’t let the line go slack, now that I had her attention.

         “The problem is the AI. The AI is not going away. Mankind will not sell itself into slavery so much as give itself away, losing the very ability to create. Life is too much trouble to be lived. The media repeats itself over and over because it can’t create anything new. I wonder, is this just the beginning of another Zhou dynasty? … Their world was at least stable. I suppose that means they were happy. And why should I worry?”

         She having none of it.

“Perhaps that’s true. But that’s rare! Even the Egyptian dynasties were shorter. And they had infrastructure. They had momentum. Your Mars is too new. Maybe you should move it to another century to make the point.”

         “But the earth will be dead! Zombified. In another century, everything we have now will be lost. Only a part of the head of Ozymandias will still be visible in the sand. My idea is that we might find solutions by isolating the problems first on Mars.”

         She shrugged at me, as if it didn’t matter.

“Then you’ll have to be more aggressive about it. As you say, AI is here now. That has to be dealt with using more than a few monkey wrenches. You are going to have to get philosophical about it…I have avoided such philosophy in my novels the same way I have avoided electricity. But you can’t do that.”

         And then there it was. There was that little light. I understood.

         She had said part of this to me once before, “I have always known, from as early as I can remember, that writing is a conversation. That is simple enough to learn. We don’t think about it much after we figure that out. That’s because it’s really just an extension of life itself. Life is the conversation. When it ends, you are dead.”

                  It snowed again tonight and quieted the Spring peepers but after that the stars were sharper to the eye. I wondered, what was I seeing? Were these truly just a whole bunch of nuclear reactions? Over what? Why bother? What were they all so excited about?

         What was the narrative out there?

         Ideas that I have no use for are the big bang theory, which is pure deus ex machina—and there is no narrative there at all—and original sin which is a great way to blame everything on something or somebody else, but no real narrative there either. Our sins were the given, fallen angels are more interesting than an omnipotent God. Ten thousand theological texts were not going to obscure the stupidity of all that. If God knew everything in advance, he’d be bored and have no use for our foolishness, much less our story.

***

10. Rich in daughters

         Julia’s eldest daughter, Jesse, arrived Wednesday when her mother was on her weekly trek to Market Basket. In fact, I thought it must be Julia at first because I heard the metal spring on the back door of the house as it opened. Julia had only been gone for fifteen or twenty minutes so I just assumed she had forgotten something. After a few more minutes, I heard the door again, and then, suddenly, the door to the barn opened wide and it was Jesse who came through in a rush, blinked into the dark, and then saw me.

         I had not yet had time to build a wall around the toilet and at that moment I was sitting on the throne, stark naked, and about ready to head around to the shower.

         Jesse said nothing. Not an ‘excuse me.’ Not a grunt. Nothing. She simply turned around in her tracks and went out again.

         I had never met any of the daughters up to that moment. But I knew it was Jesse. This was the face of the portrait in the living room. And photographs of all the daughters, and the grandchildren, were scattered around the house. But, to my knowledge, the last time any of them had been home would have been shortly after Christmas.

         I dressed as quickly as I could, but with enough time to figure that Jesse had come specifically looking for me. The timing of her arrival was no accident. Her mother always shopped on Wednesdays, and the word had finally reached her daughter that a man was living at her mother’s house.

         When I’d pulled on some clothes and came out the door she was standing right there by her car. She was driving a mini-van badly in need of a car wash.

         She said, “What are you doing here?”

         No ‘hello.’ Nothing.

         I said, “Well, I thought you might want to talk to me about something.”

         “I want to know why you are here.”

         “To help your mother.”

         “She doesn’t need your help.”

         “She asked me to.”

         “To do what?”

         “To help with the editing on what she’s writing.”

         “She’s been writing all her life. She’s never needed anyone’s help before.”

         “I suppose, after Ned died, she might have needed something more. I think I’ve been able to help her.”

         She looked around as if searching for something in the grass with her eyes.

         “And you’re living here!”

         “Well, yes. It turned out to solve a problem I was having.”
         “What was that?”
         “I’m broke.”

         “Get a job.”

         “That’s what I did.”
         She stood and glared at me. The way her mother does. I returned the favor with a smile at the thought. She’s a damn good-looking woman.

         “You’re living in the barn?”

         “Yes. In the tack room.”

         “Where did the toilet come from.”

         “I grabbed it from the town dump. Someone threw it away.”

         She stared at me again. She took a breath. Maybe thirty seconds. And then her voice changed. This was the first time I had actually heard her natural voice.

         “What’s your name?”

         “Geoff.”

         “Where are you from?”

         “Boston.”

         She looked at the ground again for something more to ask, as if she were suddenly embarrassed.

         “What are you planning to do after this gig is up?”

         “Actually, I’m already doing it. I write. Stories and such. I’m working on a novel. I haven’t found any way to make that pay yet, but it’s what I do.”

         The tenseness in her face dissolved. She has her mother’s dark hair but without the grey. Not for the first time in the last few minutes, I thought again that she was a very good-looking woman. And an old thought occurred to me again: mothers are often better looking than their daughters. There is a study in that. But Jesse might be the exception.

         She said, “I’m sorry I barged in on you before.”

         I said, “I’m sorry that I haven’t had a chance yet to build a wall in there … Next thing. I promise.”

         The only thing that came to mind—given the fact that I was looking into the face of an incredibly beautiful woman and she was looking directly back at me now so there was no place to hide—was, “You have very beautiful children. I find myself looking at those pictures on the mantle every day.”

         She seemed to blush. It was clearly not what she expected. 

         “I’m very lucky. They’re bigger now. All they do is grow.”

         “What does your husband do?”

         “He’s an engineer at Honeywell Systems. That’s why we live in New York. He redesigns company management for other businesses with software—when they hire him—to be more efficient. It’s complicated.”

         “And you’re a full-time mom.”

         “Yes and no. I work from home. Mostly editing company reports. Stuff like that.” Julia’s car was crunching gravel in the driveway. Jesse turned, “I better go. I’ll help mom with the groceries.”

         She couldn’t stay. She was gone by the time I came in for my daily session with Julia.

         But Julia says before we start, “Can you believe that?”

         “What?”

         “She drove all the way up here just to make sure you weren’t taking advantage of me.”

         I said, “Then she’s a good daughter.”

         Wednesday, Elena showed up. I suspect she looks more like her father. More chin. More nose than Julia. Still quite good looking. She’s the youngest. I know from Julia that she has a degree in theatre and a minor in literature and wanted to be an actress, but failing at that, had gone back to school to get a masters in Literature and was now an instructor at the University of Iowa.

         I only asked about her acting career when she wondered why I had not gone to college myself.

         “I didn’t have the money and I didn’t want to be in debt … Why aren’t you acting?”

         She took this as the tactical maneuver it was meant to be.

         She explained to me, as if nothing more needed to be said, “Because the theatre is dead.”

         Not having a better idea, I provoked her with the thought, “Your mother writes plays.”

         “Yes. And they’re good. We even did them right here in the barn every summer for a while. I loved that. But she’s stopped doing it. I think she just did it for us, anyway. Anyway, they’d never get out of Rumford. What I mean is, to New York. The theatre there is dead. No matter how far off Broadway you get, it’s dead.”

         She was very earnest.

         “Have you thought about moving somewhere else?”

         “Where? Like Chicago? It’s dead there too…Where? Like Hollywood. Pervert city? Yeah. I did that. I didn’t last six months.”

         Apposite thinking being a sort of specialty with me, I asked, “Have you tried writing any plays yourself. You could write your own parts. There are a lot of small theatre groups around.”

         She was standing there in the barn and looking critically at my half-finished bathroom wall.

         “Yeah. I’ve been working on a couple. Like mom, like daughter…But you ought to strap those pipes. They’ll need more support. They’ll shudder with changes in temperature and water pressure. The seals can crack.”

         “Really?”

         “Yeah. I worked as a plumber’s assistant for awhile. Actually, just for my boyfriend. He didn’t actually pay me.”

         “Right.”

         Later, Julia told me at dinner, as if to counter my conjured image of the lucky plumber, and with Elena trying to ignore her, “He’s British. Elena always had a thing for English boys. She even went over there to study literature. The poor Brits. They weren’t up for it. Elena did not fit their molds. They still have a thing about ‘class.’ They try to ignore it, too hard. Even with the new arrivals. Elena says they can be the worst about it. They’ve never really understood the need for inequality. Some of them—Some Brits, like my friend Paul of course, always thought their rights came from the King in the first place. But the whole point of the kind of open society that Americans are always going on about seems to escape them. To them, it’s all class struggle. Apparently, they’ve lost their minds to Karl Marx and think everyone has to be forced to be equal. As if anyone can be equal to anyone else in the first place. Never mind dealing with the power necessary to make all that happen. To them the idea of equality under the law has to mean equal. Period. It’s the same exact thing I found in Scotland, now. As if, if they had the power, they’d make all the planets the same size!”

         I think the political implications of what I had been asking had gotten into her head.

         Later, Elena had danced around the barn following some inner memory of her childhood.

         “Do you enjoy teaching literature?”

         “It stinks. Its ridiculous. I don’t teach literature. I teach a curriculum. It’s for the dogs.”

         She pirouettes very nicely. I decided it was better to go for a walk than stand there and watch.

         Julia picked Maya up at the station on Saturday afternoon.

         Like her sister Elena, she was fairly friendly from the start. I could only assume that the sisters were comparing notes about me by phone. She even asked me if she could interrupt before she interrupted me, when I got going on about one of my pet subjects, as if she already knew all about it.

         She is a single mother and has that look of someone who’s always doing two things at once. Unsettled. She’d left the baby in the house with Julia and came out to find me in the barn. I was writing something at the moment she came in, and I didn’t hear her until the barn door made the announcement.

         For reasons I can’t explain, one of the first things I asked was, “So why did you leave your husband?”

          It was none of my business, but actually, I was thinking, why did he let her go. And this was probably because of a short and confused retelling that her mother had made about the matter. And then, after meeting her, I thought that the fellow must be an idiot and that she was better off without an idiot. But you can’t just say something like that. I had tried to split the difference.

         She said, “Because he wasn’t my husband. We never married. That’s why. He couldn’t handle it.”

         That made more sense.

         I said, “So, how are you handling it all by yourself, now?”

         She shrugged. “Not well. I do some work for a few different companies. Small ones. A couple of shops. Mostly bookkeeping. I took a course in that. I work from home. We get by.”

         “But you’re an artist! A good one. Wouldn’t you rather be painting?”

         She gave that a moment of hesitation; perhaps wondering if she should deal with the compliment.

         “I’m trying to do that too. I paint. But I’m naturally infected with my mother’s genes—wanting to do something that doesn’t pay.”

         I decided to go right at it.

         “What was your not-husband’s problem?”

         She took a breath on that, enough to see that she wasn’t actually ready to answer—did not have the ready-made answer most people have for such things.

         “My boyfriend was a baby. Sweet as could be. But then we had a real baby . . . Two babies was too many. He played sports. I mean, any sport. He was always good. His best was soccer. They paid him for that. But it didn’t matter. Even mixed martial arts. He was still a baby. And he played video games. He was very good at that too. But they don’t pay for that. And I asked him, one day, because we had no place to sit in the apartment with the two of us there, ‘Why don’t you build a chair?’ Our apartment had these chairs I picked up on the street that were always coming apart. I asked him, ‘why don’t you learn how to build a chair.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘So you’ll have a chair and you can sit down.’ And he said, ‘I can just buy it.’ So, I said to him, ‘Don’t you want to know how to make anything?’ He didn’t know what I was talking about. And I knew right then that it was all over.”

         I liked the idea of this, but looked for a better subject as she wandered around the barn, and peeked into the tack room.

         “What do you paint now?”

         She shrugged at me, “Not the sort of thing the galleries want…What do you like to write about?”

         “Mars…Mostly. Nothing like this.”

         “You like it here?”

         “Yes.”

         She was silently saying that I was asking too many questions. But she came back to it.

         “When we were kids, I was just about six then, we moved from an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. Our idea of nature—we didn’t have a TV—we were the only people in New York City who didn’t have a TV—Our idea of nature was a stretch of what became Hudson River Park. That wasn’t even finished then, so we played in the fields between the construction. Mom took us there every day—almost, if the weather wasn’t too bad. But I thought it was great! I mean, you look one way and you have the sea—the Hudson River there looks like a sea—a busy sea—especially to a kid—and you look the other way and you have the spire of the Empire State building and all the rest. Wow! Even a six-year-old kid could appreciate all that! But then we moved here…And suddenly this was paradise. You can’t imagine. Heaven! … This barn was my favorite place. I had an easel set up over there where your desk is. It’s a northern light, you know, and…Well. You know. Nothing has been the same since. It’s pretty hard to grow up to reality.”

         I had asked Julia, early on, why she had ‘home schooled’ her children when she got to Rumford. This was after a regret she had expressed for never writing a novel specifically about the American Revolution, because she ‘had not had the time’. There was so much more she wanted to explore ‘if only there had been time.’

         She answered, “Because the public schools are atrocious. They teach everything but what is most important. At least we had the girls in a Montessori school when we were in New York. They taught the kids how to think, at least. But they were not much better on subject matter.”

         “What’s the most important subject, do you think?”

         “You can probably guess what I’d say about that. Language and history. Everything else is almost irrelevant by comparison.”

         “So, you homeschooled, so that you could teach them language and history.”

         “Certainly.”

         “But you didn’t have the time then to write your novels.”

         “I had some. I wrote some. I believe the girls were better off for it, after all, and I was too. There is a self-indulgence to writing. It’s easy to lose perspective on what is more important when you are living inside an artificial world for so much of everyday. The girls were my direct line to reality.”

       And I pursued that idea with Maya when I got the chance. She walks with the baby after she feeds her and I ran out to catch up when I saw her in the field.

       “I was wondering what it would have been like growing up here. I think I would have loved it. What the first thing you remember?”

       “The chickens. They were warm and chatty and usually the first thing I saw in the morning. Mom didn’t like cooking breakfasts and she would turn us out first so she had a moment, and we would always go to the chicken yard.”

       “I thought it might be a picture. A particular scene.”

       “That would be more difficult to say. They come to mind so easily. There are so many… I painted this field many times. It changes through the year. But my first memories are of New York. Of course. That’s why I had to go back. Why we all went back. To capture that first feel and sound.”

       “What’s the first thing you remember about your mother?”

       “That’s even harder, there are so many. That is impossible. But I can tell you the first thing I can remember anyone saying. That was Jesse. We were still living in New York then. Jesse was trying to teach me something Mom always said.”

       “What’s that?”

       “That ‘words are tools.’ Mom said it all the time to us so it would be difficult to peg the one time, but what I remember is Jesse telling me, ‘it’s an old saw,’  That was part of Mom’s rubric. Jesse couldn’t pronounce the word ‘saw,’ and it must have frustrated me but she kept saying it over and over and mom had to step in and make sense of it. But I can never forget that now. When Mom explained it to me then, a window opened. A light shone on everything.”

       “Did you like being homeschooled?”

       “No. Not at the time. It was wonderful, but I didn’t appreciate it. I wanted to go to the school with the other kids. I had already been through kindergarten in New York. I always had the feel here of the school being a magical place over the hill. I got over that of course.”

       “So, you’re glad for that—happy you were taught at home.”

       “Absolutely. For one thing, there was so much less of it! All we had was about three or four hours in the morning. We skipped days all over the place. Mom liked field trips. She loved old houses where some odd character had once lived. There are places like that all over. But the other kids were all sitting in a classroom for six or seven hours. They had homework. We never had homework! No. The thing we missed most was television. We used to sneak over to Mandy’s house—Mrs. Copple’s—in the afternoon and watch television there with her kids on rainy days. We were probably the only kids on earth who loved rainy days.”

       “So, home schooling is easy.”

       “Well, I don’t know about that. You can ask Mom about that. But something like ‘Words are tools,’ helps. It’s a simple fact that children can learn quickly and it opens up everything else. Teaching isn’t hard because children want to learn. They are desperate to learn. So you teach them what a tool is. A hammer. They love it! It is a physical thing they can grasp. What a saw is. A screw driver. A shovel. Suddenly they get the idea. I understood it by the time I could talk. I just couldn’t understand Jesse. I was about three, and because Jesse was always anxious to tell us what she knew before Mom could, she wouldn’t give it up. But for me, that was the key. Words weren’t just something to memorize and learn to spell. Words were tools. I could build with them, and break things with them.”

***

11. What takes place on Mars…

         There is a natural schizophrenia that happens when you write. The bits of what you’ve written stick to your clothes and stain your shirts. Is this real! No, not really. So, you have to remind yourself that it didn’t happen, even as you can still smell the air of it … And then, afterward, you read a story somewhere else, maybe just a short story, and eat a little there and try to feel the thought of someone else who’s a total stranger, but then, suddenly, the nagging of a clock in your brain closes the cover of that book and you set it aside and make yourself recall that you were never there either and never really knew them, so that you can move along then and go into the house to transcribe what Julia has written, and that’s yet another place, yet another time again, but because at least you’ve been there before, the reality of it materializes very quickly. Even though, with all that other stuff in your brain, this means something else to you now…And yet, the mind sorts all of it surprisingly well. I equate it to a dream and awaking from that, and then again, over and over again, several times in a day, as from several different dreams. Though, it can be funny when you accidentally ask someone else out-loud about something that only you alone have been a witness to.

         I had asked Julia about her character, Jacob. He was an old man who had worked on the family land since young Donovan was born. I liked him. But then he had disappeared when Rolf took over the property after Donovan’s father’s death.

         I asked her, will he ever be coming back into the story again?”

         She said, “Yes.”

         Nothing else. Just a dismissive matter of fact.

         I was already in the general frame of mind to let such things go. She did not like explaining her reasons. But I liked Jacob and for whatever her thoughts might be, his sudden absence seemed like a mistake. I went back to a quote from earlier in the story.

         It was Jacob who had said, “‘Do not move your flesh against iron. Do not move your flesh against stone. Never move flesh against paper. Move flesh only against flesh…Do not move your hands on the plow, or the sword. Wear leather on your hands to steady the plow or you will tire. Let your mind move the pen against the paper, and let the stars move your mind.”

         I persisted, “Who is he? I don’t understand. He’s not just an itinerant worker. He can’t be! He must be somebody. You gave him the title of the book to say!”

         She let me calm down. At least she might see that much, or hear it.

         “You’ll see. It’s in the story.”

         “Okay. Good. But he’s bloody disappeared for three chapters!”

         She uses ‘bloody’ as if she was born in Britain and not just spent a little time there; and might have taken this use by me as a challenge, but she nodded at that and seemed to give it some thought.

         “You’re right. There needs to be something more.”

         But then she moved on to something else and I calmed down from that on my own.

         I am beginning to see the methods in other ways, when Julia turns the table on me. I’d been asking her all sorts of questions over the last two weeks about this and that, every chance I got. Some things she didn’t answer. Other things she did, in her own way. And now, oddly, I knew a fair amount about her childhood, but not a lot about her teenage years. That sort of thing. Yet, I hadn’t really asked about any of that. Those were the things she told me to misdirect me from what I really wanted to know, and the key item among them was some understanding of what made her want to write in the first place. I think she saw my objective, and I think this was deliberate.

         When we are getting ready to eat some corned beef and cabbage that she’d made, she says to me, “So, tell me why you want to write?”

         I decided to answer her the way I would want her to answer me.

         “To figure things out.”

         That got a nod. “Anything in particular?”

         “Why things are the way they are. How did they get to be this way. Is it better now than it was. If it is, how? If it’s not, why? That’s why I read so much history. That’s what first made me read one of your novels.”

         She shook her head at me, “But why are you trying to write novels? Why not just write history?”

         “Because stories give me a different perspective on things. I get a kick out of making that happen. And I’m not smart enough yet to tell the truth from the fiction.”

         That answer bought me time to eat several mouthfuls.

         Finally, she says, “But why Mars? Why not Boston? Or even New Hampshire?”

         It’s a risky thing to talk about your own work. It’s not the same as describing something else. You know at the start that anything you say is inadequate. You’ve thought a thousand other thoughts about the same thing before and what you’ve put down on paper is just what seemed right at one particular moment. A few spoken words aren’t going to amount to any of the rest of it.

         I say, “Because it’s an unknown. There are no ghosts there…I saw those movies that they made of the Lord of the Rings. It made me want to read the books. And then I read some of Tolkien’s essays about what he was doing. There’s a book of those essays, you know. And it let me understand what he’d done a little better. At least some of it. And suddenly all the fussing I was doing in my own writing seemed silly. I was trying to describe things I knew as if they were more important than they were. It was just a lot of bullshit. I was corrupting myself, by giving myself more importance than I deserved. Putting myself into the center of things where it’s all a lot of navel gazing. I know that some writers can handle that. But not me. For me it’s a pit. I fall into that too easily. Maybe not a very deep one. It started feeling like falling into a pit of monkeys…If monkeys lived in pits…On Mars…But then it occurred to me, when I was finally reading Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and I saw that he was not trying to pretend this was the future. He was not predicting. He was just using it as a stage. And I thought that this was pretty neat and a pretty big stage. There was room on there for me … I still haven’t gotten it right, yet, but at least I don’t have to deal with a lot of ghosts, like you do. Despite what the crackpots say, on Mars, there’s nothing buried there beneath the soil.”

         I ran out of words then and I was looking for something else to say about it.

         She finally says, “You are. Smart, that is. Maybe you just don’t know it yet. Just keep writing.”

         So, now, I’m in a corner. What made her say that? How does she know?

         I simply come out and ask her, “What makes you think that?”

         But she’s not going to let me turn the table back.

         “Because, I think you’re right. The world is corrupt. What we’re always going on about is trying to find our way out of that pit. And you know that the monkeys have no clue.” She smiled at the idea. “But you know, this is the real dark age—not what happened a thousand years ago. We’ve just chosen different ways to look at things now. There is no God for us, perhaps…I just wanted to see it through your eyes for a moment…Tell me what story are you writing now?”

         This took a minute to condense in my head. The story I was working on was a little grim. Nothing like the things she writes at all. I think I’ve read too much hardboiled mystery and watched too much film noir. It’s a jaundiced way to see the world.

         “It’s called ‘Elysium Mons’… I told you, my parents own a house in Arlington—just outside Boston. Not very big, but it’s on a hill. My grandfather loaned my dad enough to buy it back in the early 1980’s when things were cheaper. Well, I was headed—”

         “What does your grandfather do?”

         “That’s another difficult subject. He’s done a lot of things. But he had a garage in Dorchester for a long time—”

         “A gas station?”

         “No. Well. Yes. But they fixed cars mostly. They had to give up pumping gas when the regulations got thick so’s the oil companies could control everything. Anyway, he sold that, and that’s how he got the money to loan my dad to buy the house in Arlington. Anyway, this was before I moved out of the house, so I was driving back home down Route 2 from Mt. Greylock—”

         “What were you doing there?”

         “I’d just climbed it. I was hiking around. Anyway, I was in my truck. A different van than this one.”

         “What kind was it?”

         “Just a Ford delivery van. I like vans because I can sleep in them if I need to. It’s a little independence. Anyway, I’d slept up at Greylock.”

         “What was the weather like?”

         “Foggy.”

         I waited for her to say exactly why she wanted to know what the weather was. But after half a minute she says, “So what happened next?”

         “I stopped at a gas station somewhere around North Adams, and this girl comes out while I’m pumping gas and asks me for a lift.”

         “What did she look like?”

         “Pretty good.”

         “That figures. Exactly how good?”

         This question added another tone to her voice.

         “She was a brunette, about twenty, well built, wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt and a jacket. Sneakers. Blue eyes. She had nothing else. No purse. But she says she’s broke and has to get to Boston. I am young and stupid but my first reaction is she’s up to no good.”

         “Very smart.”

         “But then she tells me her story. It’s brief but pitiful.…Now, here I am, looking pretty grubby after hiking around for a couple of days, and I cannot tell you what kind of stink I had going on, but here she is looking as fresh as a daisy—”

         Julia frowned. It’s a sort of scowl. “Do you actually write like that? Do you write things like, ‘Fresh as a daisy?”

         “No. But I’m just talking to you.”

         “So, how did she look?”

         “Like her mother had just pushed her out the door one morning to go to parochial school! I am not going into any more detail on that particular point right now!”

         She took the hint.

         “Alright. I’m just trying to see it in my mind. I’ll fill in the details for myself.”

         “Good! So, she tells me she’s running away from home. Her father has been abusing her and she’s trying to get away. Then she says that he’s actually in the men’s room at the garage right then, and so we have to go. Quickly!”

         Julia says, “Good. It’s a situation. Good. So, you’re young and stupid, so you go.”

         “No. I wait for the father to come out of the toilet and he sees me and knows something’s up right away and I have to restrain him—”

         “Did you hit him?”

         “Just once. Mostly I just got him pinned against the wall. And the girl sits down on a cement barrier and starts crying and the clerk in the garage calls the police and I spent the next three hours or so at the police station answering questions.”

         “I see.”

         “But the whole time I’m there I am imagining what might have happened if I had taken her away.”

         “I see.”

         “So, that’s the seed of the story I am trying to write, right now. The one I imagined. What might have happened if I had taken her away.”

         “But that’s not science fiction.”

         “No. Not really. But it does take place on Mars.”

***

12. A Universal History of Mrs. Johnson

         On the corner of Dan’s Falls and old Rumford Road lives Mrs. Johnson.

         I had encountered her before, by accident, when she backed into my van while I was sitting at the corner there waiting for a tree crew to finish a job—a tree limb that she had reported to the town as endangering the power lines. ‘Her,’ power lines was the exact report from a member of the crew.

         She is a small woman in every way. She wears a pale blue knit suit that was a style popular in the 1970’s, I am told, but looks new and practically shines. Despite her size, you know where she is in any room. And she runs Town Meetings—not through elected office but for having badgered anyone else who dared to take a position into submission. She has in her private possession a copy of the town bylaws, well-thumbed and tabbed, which she uses as a sword. Rumford is a small town, but according to Mr. Copple, the bylaws have more than doubled in the past thirty years, primarily due to Mrs. Johnson.

         No one knows where Mr. Johnson is. He has apparently never been seen. There is a rumor that he has been locked in the basement of their ‘1724 Cape Cod Colonial’ where Mrs. Johnson has lived since they bought the house in 1980, but Julia thinks that he has long since died from natural causes—that is, if bitching can be called a ‘natural cause.’ That fact of the matter is not known, however, and has been the cause of some additional research on my part. The Rumford Public Library keeps town records. At least we know that Mr. Johnson was alive when they bought the house in 1980. But that is the last record I found of his existence. There was a child in the matter then—likely a virgin birth—who attended Rumford public schools and graduated long before Julia moved to town. The child, Doris, is no longer part of any record either.

         The importance of these facts is a small drama, appropriate in size to Rumford.

         Mrs. Johnson sells Girl Scout cookies. She has continued to do this now long after her daughter has left the scene. Other parents get together and sell their cookies in front of the super market and the hardware store. Mrs. Johnson still goes door to door.

         One day, while Julia was cooking a Russian cabbage soup, Mrs. Johnson knocked on the front door, instead of the back. In that I had probably been the last person to knock on the front door, more than a month before, the sound of it shocked us both. I heard the voice and knew who it was from a single previous encounter with her on the road. So, I stayed at the table and tried to concentrate on my job, but the smell of cabbage and Mrs. Johnson’s voice made that doubly difficult. The conversation went on for several minutes before they both appeared in the hall.

         Julia needed a pen to write a check. Mrs. Johnson’s black eyes found me immediately, and went darker. She had an enormous rainbow-colored bag in her hands which she held up in front of hereself as if it were a shield. The bag clashed jarringly with her pale blue knit suit.

         “There you are,” she said toward me. Not, ‘hello.’

         I nodded. I wasn’t about to say anything, having had enough of my previous attempt at communication during which she interrupted every sentence I spoke.

         Julia foolishly said, “Geoff is helping me with my work.”

         Mrs. Johnson said, “I see,” in a tone that would tell anyone who cared, that she is functionally if not physically blind. She had used the same word while trying to blame me for the fact that she had backed into me on the road from her driveway. ‘Why didn’t you move? I didn’t see you!’ were the words she had said, and repeated repeatedly. The police officer, who had heard it himself a number of times as he wrote his notes, had said to me, ‘Why didn’t you move? It would have been far better if you had moved.’ This was said, with a cop face that spoke far more.

         It was merely a dent. Another dent among many. I had never filed a claim.

         Now she stood in the entrance to the kitchen waiting for Julia to write her check for cookies and she was considering me sitting before her as if I were the accident.

         She said, “Are you alright?”

         This didn’t register immediately.

         “I’m fine. How about you?”

         She sighed beneath the weight of the world.

         “I think I had a little whiplash. But the doctor wouldn’t listen.”

         I suddenly felt sorry for her doctor. I generally don’t feel sorry for doctors, but this time I did.

         Julia said, “I’m glad you are both okay,” and handed Mrs. Johnson her check.

         Mrs.  Johnson pulled two boxes of cookies from her enormous bag, and said, “What is that smell?”

         Julia said, “Cabbage.”

         Mrs. Johnson said, “Oh,” as if she had opened a door that she wasn’t meant to, and then turned to go.

         This reminded me of a neighbor of ours in Arlington. My brother John was always a problem, and his favorite victim growing up was Mr. Everett. I am pretty sure his object in life when he was twelve was to make Mr. Everett cry. I think I even remember him saying that. Of course, stealing flower pots to make ‘bombs’ and breaking windows gets old as you grow older. But when he was fourteen, he stole Mr. Everett’s car. He was really just practicing stuff he’d learned in my dad’s garage. Well. Mr. Everett had had enough and wanted John to be prosecuted as an adult. When he saw that that was not going to happen, he started cataloging everything John did so that there would be more evidence to present against him when he turned sixteen. Those were long years. At the end of it, knowing Mr. Everett had the goods on him for stealing yet another car, John ran away from home.

         However, this presented another problem. For me. John was the older and expected to take over my father’s business. That expectation now fell on my shoulders. And that was the cause of me ‘running away’ shortly after. A matter of unintended consequences.

         This is not a reflection on my father. He was quite square with us. It’s really just a matter of us. He raised us to be independent and this particular aim was met.

         Last year, my mother tells me they have tracked John down. He is in Iraq. It appears he joined the Marines. She only found this out because the Marines uncovered a discrepancy in his record—after four years. He had listed his parents as deceased.

         However, that story did not end there. Before John joined the Marines, he got married. He got married because he had a kid. I am an uncle. And it was his wife who challenged him to join the marines because they had no medical insurance and he was unemployable because of his past record of offenses. Even for John, welfare medicine was unthinkable for his own kid. My father’s harangues about the welfare state had had some effect.

         I suppose my father deserves credit for that much. The verbal altercation that resulted in John finally running away sounded rather final. But tempers cool. My father wrote John a letter and John wrote him back and I may see him again at Thanksgiving.

***

13. The Lucy effect

         When we were done for the day, usually, I was not. Today, I was wanting to find a way to discuss a problem I had on Mars. I wanted my society there to be as near ideal as I could make it so that the problems faced would arise organically from the inherent faults of human beings. I wanted to refine the situation to remove all the ghosts of the past. And the problems naturally created by machine efficiency were something that seemed obvious.

         Julia said, “Efficiency is not the problem. Efficiency will be found naturally. People are always looking for the easier way. But sometimes that creates another problem—the ‘Lucy’ effect—when one part of an assembly line is faster than another. Assembly lines must be coordinated. Over centuries, this has evolved quite well, and then some smart-ass comes along, let’s call him ’The American,’ and says, ‘you’re doing that all wrong. Do it this way.’ And suddenly we have too much of one thing and not enough of another. Worse, people see something they like in the new way but they can’t get it and have the old way too, so they get rid of the old way entirely without understanding that the old way is the heart and soul of the project.”

         One of the greatest pleasures of my life now, are my conversations with Julia.

         She says, “The real matter is this, our faults are a feature. They are the thing that makes us human, not our virtues. Virtues are assumed. Correcting our faults is the source of our inspiration, or creativity, and a lot more fun to write about.”

This evening, when she is comfortably ensconced in her chair, bourbon in hand, I was pretty quickly in the midst of my ongoing complaint about the mechanization of society. Using people as machines was destructive to the human spirit. Using robots to replace human beings was destructive to human civilization itself. Inventing a society on Mars that guarded against this flaw was my problem.

         I wondered out loud if this might be another problem with the human brain.

         I say, “The brain is not a machine. I suppose that’s my point.”

         But Julia has been there before me. “No, the brain is not a machine the way we have always thought of machines—with gears and such—but it is a biological machine, don’t you think? … Then again, I guess there’s even some doubt about that now as well, with the definition of machines being toyed with as chemical reactions and atomic transmogrification and all that bull shit. But that’s a matter for some other bright-ass to deal with. They should come up with another useful word or two, instead of some pretentious compound nonsense. Or worse—like the ‘Dunning Krueger effect.’ Who the hell is going to use the ‘Dunning Krueger’ effect in a sentence when we have a nice old bit of Latin that serves very nicely—such as ‘stupid.’  Since sabertoothed tigers were eating the slow witted, everyone has known that stupid meant that you didn’t know how stupid you were. We didn’t need some academic to stick his name on it because it was unnecessary. Because that was stupid too…But machine or not, the brain is an organ, and an organ is a sort of machine. And maybe we should separate the two. Because organs usually have more than one thing to do and machines are dedicated. Single minded. To come around to your thought…No, the brain is not a machine. It is an organ, like the heart. It is a biological gizmo that works as one with the body. The brain is part of the body. Not separate. Made to be that way, over millions of years.

The ‘Lucy’ effect can never happen in the body because the organ would kill itself first. A heart that pumps too little blood or too much doesn’t work for very long…But I think the better word you might want is ‘mind.’ The mind is not a machine, either. It is a body of knowing as interpreted by an individual brain. An ephemeral body of knowledge that a single brain has created. Every mind is unique because it has been created out of the stuff of life—living—that the organ of the brain has digested. No two people have lived the same lives…But this then gets into the whole problem you have with people who do not like the idea of free will…I do think it is worth noting, however, that those people are destructive in other ways. Separating the mind from the brain will cause schizophrenia. Got to. Especially now that they have machines in the form of AI that can help them exert their own will on others. Soon they’ll have cars that drive themselves and the bureaucrats and statists will have a new cause—that people shouldn’t be allowed drive. It’s dangerous! And over time, people will forget how to drive the same way they are forgetting how to read. And the insurance companies will not insure individuals. And traffic cops will lose their jobs because they can’t arrest a car! It’s all part of the Lucy effect!”

         I told her she should write that up for the website as well, and went back to the barn before she connected another link to that chain. I was already having nightmares of being a sort of Jacob Marley, forever chained to the sins of my own imagination.

         Now, you would have to understand that my interests have been, broadly speaking, and in general, diverse. That is to say, chaotic. I would have to admit, they are pretty much a mess, poorly labeled, disorganized, and lacking any priority. No LIFO or FIFO. I wouldn’t normally admit this to anyone I know, but I think Julia had me figured out. Her own philosophy, if you can call it that—or method of operation, perhaps—is to do what works. Nothing more complicated than that. And if it doesn’t work, don’t do it. Now, obviously, that is not the end of the story. What works for one thing might not work for another. But that ‘comes out in the wash,’ she has said, more than once. “Imposing rules on things that had their own weight and importance is stupid,” was her latest statement.

         I asked Julia why her character, Daniel, in The Wrath, would have so readily gone off to war. He was a farmer, after all. Wasn’t his first duty to his family and to his father’s land?

         This irritated her. I could see that in the set of her mouth. She shook her head at me and didn’t answer. This look, previously, has indicated that she didn’t want to be bothered with answering it. And usually, if I gave the matter some more thought, I would be able to answer it myself. So, I went on with my copying.

         When we were about done, and the pages had all been turned, she asked me if I’d like another cup of coffee, before sitting down at the table across from me—which she usually didn’t do then because it was late and she still had chores, and her bourbon.

         She says, “My friend Paul believes in Kings. I’ve mentioned that, I think. He’s much given to the ‘great man’ theory of history. We argue about it all the time. Mostly by letter. He once told me he was going to collect all of our letters together on this one topic and publish them. I told him that would be absurd. There are hundreds. But he has kept them all! Almost forty year’s worth! But there’s a more important problem with that, from my point of view. I have argued my case for the importance of the individual, and the necessary creative chaos of freedom, fairly well, I think, but of course I have never been sure that I was correct. It’s a matter of faith, because we don’t really live in that kind of world. And he has always had the upper hand on me on that, no matter. History is trapped by interpretation. Imprisoned! We have no facts. And it’s all very galling.”

         I think, given my own sympathies, that I could not understand how she could think that Paul was in any way correct. At all! That tone was probably in my voice when I interrupted.

         “That’s ridiculous! What would make a king any better than any other dictator or tyrant?”

         The motherly sigh was immediate. At least she didn’t start by saying, ‘It’s complicated.’

         “You have to begin with first principles—whatever those might be for you. But I think I’m beginning to know yours now. And the problem is that all that libertarian philosophy of yours, and all that indignation over the transgressions of government, are artificial. ‘Artificial’ , as in ‘phony’ … Pretend! Imaginary. Make believe. They are a construct of your mind, not reality.”

         She let that sink in. The tone of voice was kind but the words were not.

         “I don’t understand.”

         “That’s what I am saying. You don’t understand.”

         She looked across at me with so benign a face on that it was impossible to think she was being mean. But of course, she was. And for good reason. And in the face of all that motherly sufferance, I was, as usual, impatient.

         “I don’t understand!”

         The tone of my voice might have been dismissive. She ignored that. Thankfully.

         “After all the messy biology, the first principle in human life is loyalty. It’s a natural sense of belonging. Without it, everything else falls apart. All the rest is meaningless. We would all quickly be food for the predators. But being a part of a group that has our back gives us the strength of the many. That’s an ability the tiger can’t match. If your philosophy does not understand that, it is as pointless as a mathematical explanation of love.”

         That much, I understood. And she let that sink in.

         She said, “We are not machines. We can be used as machines by others, by force, or by persuasion, or we can just do it to ourselves, but it’s not an efficient use of us—of our particular biology, and that’s why that will always fail. We are individuals. Our strength is as individuals who voluntarily join together for a common purpose. That’s the libertarian aspect, I think. I’m with you there. We have to choose. But if we are forced to join, then we are just back to the inefficiency of using human beings as machines. Slaves.”

         At this point I was pretty much deflated. Balloon like. She was stealing whatever objections I would make before I could make them. All of this fit well enough with my own ideas, though I was not so sure where she was going with it yet — In any case, I was not about to argue.

         She said, “My friend Paul believes in Kings. Good kings. Not bad ones, of course. There’s the rub. A good king is loyal to his subjects. He keeps the big picture. He does not go off to fight and abandon his duties. He might go off to fight because it is a greater duty, but it is something his subjects must understand. That’s the argument about King Richard, of course. He went off and left his kingdom in the hands of his brother. His brother was very smart. John knew a great deal about the administration of government. But he was never able to convince his subjects of his loyalty to them. They were Plantagenets, remember. I think Shakespeare got that part right. But the sentiment of the age was that Richard was always loyal to his subjects. I am not so sure about that. I think there is reason to doubt it. Perhaps his brother John was the truly loyal one. But in the end, it didn’t matter. The only thing people remember about it all nowadays is what they get out of Robin Hood. Print the legend, as the man said…My friend Paul and I have gone on and on about all that.”

         I was surprised, but let the movie reference go. I smartly said, “But the very idea of having a King is stupid!”

         “No! It is brilliant! That’s why it’s lasted for so long. It works. You just have to put someone in charge who gives a damn. Most people don’t, you know. They just want to be left alone and go about their business. They don’t want to worry about Moslem invaders or Viking marauders, or Mongol hoards. But at some point, all that human activity of minding their own business is going to produce prosperity—people aren’t stupid. Left alone, they will do what works. But the tyrant next door can’t make his people prosperous. He can only make them poor. So, he’ll always be looking over the fence to take whatever prosperity he sees there. And that’s history—in a nutshell. Creating a royal lineage—a family that was traditionally invested in the success of the kingdom, is not a bad idea. A good king who protects the freedom of his subjects and the bad kings who can only manage to take the prosperity of others. Over and over.”

         “So, you believe Paul is right!”

         “No. But I do believe he has a point. And so did the Founders of this country when they reinvented democracy as a representative republic. Basic civics. You know all that stuff but you aren’t thinking about it. You’re jumping way out ahead and assuming you can just have the freedom without the consequences. That doesn’t work. You can’t build your fences high enough. There’s always some thug around who wants what you have—no matter how little it is, so long as it’s more than he has—your lunch money in the playground or your truck, or your country. Your neighbor is likely to be more interested in the shine on his truck, or in your wife than the welfare of the nation. Metaphorically speaking. Of course. You know that! Why don’t you want to consider that?”

         “I have…”

         Finally, the motherly tones were gone. She was at the end of her day and getting tired.

         “Not enough! You don’t want to force anyone to be free. You just want it to happen. But it doesn’t. You want beef on Wednesday, and fish on Friday. What will you do? And all that corruption you’re so upset about is the same bullshit that also motivates the thug!”

         To save myself, I tried to turn the table back a little.

         “So why does Daniel go off to war?”

         She wasn’t having any of it. “Because his ‘King’—his President Lincoln— is a good one and, in the long run, in his world, he needs the King in order to protect his family.”

         All of that, about Kings, seems very remote to me. My way of looking at things is far simpler, I think. I understand why kings were, but I don’t understand why they matter today. I suppose most people today have very little understanding of all that. Julia’s basic tenet, that history matters, is maybe a good structure for teaching in the classroom, but I am not sure how it affects the cost of gas. The practical politics of modern economy is very obvious at the pump. Corruption matters.

         In 1968 my grandfather opened up an automotive repair shop in a run-down garage in Dorchester, Massachusetts about three blocks from the house on Melville Avenue he bought using his GI Bill the same year. He’d studied auto mechanics at a trade school in Roxbury and fixed trucks for two years in Vietnam, and now, just out of the Army, he still had a couple of bucks left from gambling—he has always loved to gamble, but he didn’t have enough to buy anything after the down payment on the house so he just took over an abandoned building on Dorchester Avenue and started in. He kept all his tools on his truck so he could drive them home at night and they wouldn’t be stolen. But when the City auctioned the garage building for taxes, he bought it. When he sold it in 2002, he gave the money to my father to buy a house in Arlington before he could gamble it away. Actually, my grandmother gave the money to my mother, but that is another story. My father had grown up working in that garage in Dorchester, so he knew the business pretty well. Later, he rented a space down on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington where an old gas station was closed and went to work. He’s still there.

         After my brother disappeared, I was supposed to take over the business. That was the plan. I got wind of it from my mother one day, and asked my father about it and he seemed a little surprised. He thought I knew. So, he was a little unhappy when I moved out of the house ‘to find my own way.’

         All of that history is pretty straight forward. It has nothing to do with kings. But even I can understand the economics of it. And you can draw a line from this to that or make a puzzle out of it if you want, but all it amounts to is that I wanted to do what I’ve done when I did it, and so did they. Pretty neat.

         The problem with Julia’s character is that he can’t own property, and if he did own it, the government would just take it away from him. He can’t cure the plague, or change the weather, but if he owns his own property, free and clear, he can be his own king. That’s what my grandfather and father believe and I have to agree with them on that. They let me be. Dad has even called my old van, my ‘domain.’ And now I’d told Julia all that.

         Julia says, “Men are men. There are no dragons here. Only men. Always.”

         This was about my thought that the world she was imagining was really just a fantasy. And she immediately repeated her belief that all fiction was just that. Fantasy. But, “Men are always and only men. There are no dragons here. Only men.”

         Trying to explain the motivation of Rolf, and basically why he acts like a petty tyrant when it’s always going to come back to bite him, Julia says that, “Governments are always and everywhere corrupt.” She knows I agree with that. She’s playing with that thought just to get me to listen. Then she says, “But we cannot do away with them. If we do, there will always be others to fill that vacuum; there will just be another wannabe ruler looking to fill that gap. Power over others, for some, is both an elixir and drug. And the corruption feeds into that. It pays for it. Our only chance to control our own destiny is by managing our own worse instincts for power in order to fend off those who live by that kind of addiction—that poison…Like drug addicts, they are at the disadvantage if we can only keep ourselves free of them. If we give in, we will be forced to fight on their terms and they are better at that. They are experienced at that. That’s jungle warfare. A kind of metaphysical Vietnam. Anything goes. But in an open field, free of that compulsion to dictate what others do, we’re free to do almost anything else. Our elixir is a state of mind. Our power is in the ability to think for ourselves. That’s our drug—Just an in idea. No more. Our free will, and what we make of it. People who don’t believe in free will, don’t believe in freedom. They have no replacement, but they can’t or won’t accept the responsibility for their own actions. They usually like drugs. In my generation it was marijuana. But it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a simple enough equation.”

         I told her she should write that up for her website too, but I objected to the simplicity of her belief.

         I said, “But everything has a message. Everything. That’s the real drug, isn’t it? You can’t even buy a carton of milk without a message. It’s got vitamin ‘D’! So, what! Messages are on everything we eat! But never the truth. ‘Fresh ground beef,’ but not the fact that it was frozen last December and just got ground up on Tuesday! They don’t tell you that. It’s the lie of omission. They tell you that a can of beans is loaded with sugar, but not the pesticide that they used to keep a bug from eating it before the farmer got to it. That’s gotta be great for your liver. And it goes right up the chain—And worse! The farmer can’t grow what the state doesn’t want him to grow without paying a penalty. The farmer doesn’t own his farm. The State does! He pay’s them a tax to live there or else they’ll take it away! … And my dad. He pays the city of Boston and the State of Massachusetts and The United States government for the house he lives in, every year! Over and over. He doesn’t own it. They do!”

         That last part irritated her. I don’t know why. I saw that flash across her face. But she could also see that I was into my own little rant and turned away rather than pursue the matter.

***

 13. A light in the abyss

         Julia’s website now had 3000 confirmed subscribers—as many has her last publisher had managed to reach. Better yet, she was getting over three hundred e-mails every week in response to her short essays. For my part, I was just posting what she wrote, but I was also sending out e-mails to anyone I thought would be interested saying, ‘have you seen this!”

         I had asked Julia what she planned to do with the copies of her book when she published it.

         She said, “Do?”

         “How will you distribute them? How are you going to get them out to the bookshops?”

         “A lovely thought, but I’m not. That’s a waste of time. I’ll put some notices up, I suppose. I’ll send some copies out to some friends. There are several people who’ll review whatever I write. Maybe that will generate some orders. If they like it. They don’t always, you know…Paul, one of my oldest friends—he is a friend, in spite of our differences—gets quite upset with me for tying my ancient plot lines to modern events. He was one of the first to spot that little game. He’s one of those history professors who thinks the common folk get what they deserve. He’s a Royalist. A true conservative. He says, ‘How can you have a twelfth-century cooper talking like a twentieth-century radical?’ I tell him, ‘But they’re the same things they were saying in the markets of Second Century Rome. They even have records for it.’ Paul says, ‘But the language!’ And I say, ‘If I put it in the man’s vernacular, even Chaucer wouldn’t have understood him.’ He says, ‘But words have meanings.’ And I say, ‘Then, simply think of it as a translation of what he said.’ And then Paul says, ‘But the thoughts are too complicated to be real!’ —Now, that drives me nuts! A history professor should know better. But he studies the family lineage of Kings. Great battles and the like. Paul can’t fix a loose door knob. I remind him, ‘This cooper I’m writing about can make a good water barrel in several different sizes from three different kinds of wood without using a nail. He can make barrels for wine, whiskey, and pickling. He trades barrels for iron and copper. He can forge three different kinds of metal for his hoops or for the clasps on his harness, and he can make a good wheel to carry his barrels to market, thirty miles away.  Animal husbandry is a lost art today, but that means he has to take good care of his horses too. He can bargain with his customers, entertain them with his stories, take new orders, all in his head. He can’t write. But his brain is pretty good. He can handle thoughts like that.”

         I tell her that she should post that essay as well, but then I say, “So, how are you going to get your books to market?”

         She shrugs, as she is wont to do when she hasn’t thought it through that way. She says, “It’s a new day. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me. I’m not even going the thirty miles. If people give a damn, they can come to me. Or the postman can. They can order on-line. If they’re going to turn all the bookshops into ‘gifty galleries,’ I can take my business elsewhere.”

         I protest. Too much, perhaps. “There are still some good bookshops left!”

         She says, “Look, I did the rounds after my last book was published. That was five years ago! It’s only gotten worse. I went to every independent bookshop within a hundred miles. And that would be seven. Seven independent bookshops, in all of southern New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, and near Down East Maine. I skipped the chain stores because they order from some corporate headquarters in an office cubicle in hell…But seven! I took all my authors copies with me—all 50 of them—and I printed up copies of the publisher’s notice on my own because Knopf couldn’t even be bothered to send me extra copies of that. I’d written most of the copy on the notice anyway, so… The editor that was assigned to me was 23 years old! I sent out letters to the shops to say I would be happy to talk about my book if they had author events. No answers. So, I slipped the publisher’s notice in every copy and made up nice little shelf signs that said ‘Local author’ and ‘Signed copies’ and I went around to all seven of those shops. I still had twenty copies when I got back.”

         What could I say to that?

         “Why?”

         She gave me a flat-faced glare. Not even a hand gesture. “The list of answers is endless. If you counter one, you get another. Every one of those stores was in danger of going out of business. Rents are high. Payrolls are unbearable. Health insurance is absurd. Regulations are a bitch. Shelf space is at a premium. Taxes suck. They used to be able to hire young people aplenty. I even worked in a bookshop when I was in school…Or else you’d see a few retired English teachers. That sort of thing. But young people are not interested in books these days. And these are English teachers who never taught your namesakes, Mr. Chaucer or Mr. Donne. They draw their dreams from the internet. Books are now an artifact of a time that’s being buried as quickly as possible. They are so inconvenient! They weight so much! You even have to pick them up! … And, basically, bookshops take on what they get paid to take on.Publisher’s will pay them to take a book. Especially the latest political canned-ham. They like to sell the bestsellers, where the authors will appear on TV shows and bend over in public for some idiot who doesn’t have time to read the author’s book and asks questions written on an index car by an assistant…Stores now have these neat little signs that say ‘Staff picks’ that just happen to be the latest and the greatest as chosen by the New York Times. The Times hasn’t given me an inch of notice in twenty years…Shops like that rotate the stock every few weeks. Not months. Weeks! They spend as much time on returns as ordering. There’s no time for word of mouth. The Newspapers are all gone, so there are no real reviews anymore. Nobody reads the papers that are left, anyway. The local television stations won’t even promote books. Not unless the author is already a celebrity.”

         I knew she hadn’t finished, but I interrupted.

         “Podcasters do.”

         She took a breath.

         “So, you think maybe I’ll get noticed by a podcaster. Depending on what pod he belongs to. Should that be my plan? Place my work at the mercy of someone who talks for a living? Someone who doesn’t have the time to read? Who appeals to listeners who don’t have the time to read…What will I have done? What good?”

         I had no argument, but a thought. “Better that than we should slip into the abyss?”

         As if on a switch, she was immediately brighter and her voice almost cheery.

         “No. That’s not a place for my grandchildren. My girls can take care of themselves. I taught them that much, even though I didn’t always homeschool the stuff they were tested for…I’m not sure, but I think they’ll be able to pass on the important things in the nasty world that’s coming…They can even write longhand. No one writes longhand anymore. I taught them that and the examiner said, ‘Why? Don’t they know how to use a computer?’ And I said, no. He was very unhappy with me about that. But it was not on the required list at the time.”

         I had just finished another chapter that I especially liked and that prompted me to ask her tonight what her favorite moment was in any of her books. I actually asked questions like that, which was probably the influence of listening to too many podcasts and not enough reading on my own part. But I was fishing for something to make a deal over—something to promote. A hook. Something to feature, if she was ever going to promote her books at all. I feel guilty about it now, but I realized her answer was worth it.

         She answered quickly, as if she had thought that very thing before.

         “…I think it’s when Bailey makes it over the mountain, away from Durson, and finds himself amidst the stars—that’s in ‘Shoemaker’s Son’. Behind him is death. Certain death. But he’s freezing. He’s wearing nothing but the sack cloth of his prison clothes. His feet are numb and bare and bleeding. And yet, there he is suddenly in the midst of all that splendid beauty of stars and the depth of the universe above, while below him lies the utter dark of another valley to cross. And he finally sits, exhausted; ready to freeze to death right there in the midst of the beauty of that breath of God rather than continue…And then his eyes catch what he thinks at first must be a star reflecting from a pond below. One single dim light in the midst of all that stygian black…But of course, it is a candle. It is Ruth’s candle.”

Addendum:

         A building inspector came by this morning. Julia was very unhappy at being disturbed. But he wanted to inspect the barn.

         The arrangement I had with Julia was that the space I occupied in the barn was my ‘Office.’ I officially ‘lived’ in the house.

         The inspector immediately asked about the plumbing. To my knowledge, it was done to state code, but he informed us that we needed a town permit. He wrote something out to that effect before Julia appeared again, in perfect anticipation, with a piece of paper. It seems she had filed for the permit, and never mentioned it to me. It specifically noted the use as a home office.

         The inspector read the document as if looking for a typo, and finally handed it back to her.

         He said, “I didn’t see that on file.”

         Julia said, “Janis probably just hasn’t gotten to it yet.”

         Janis was the town clerk, and a friend of Julia’s.

         The inspector looked at the paper again, and then left.

         The story was that the day after Mrs. Johnson had come by to sell her Girl Scout cookies, Julia had gone down to Town Hall. Her instincts were correct. Cookies were not all that Mrs. Johnson had been there for.

***

14. Shades of gray

         The maples here have faces. They are old and gray with wattles and wrinkles and just before I arrived, Mr. Copple had buckets hanging from every one of them. There are still dark stains from that. I wish I had seen it. The sugar shack is on his land, down the hill toward the river. It’s quiet now. But you can see it from the barn. I wonder if Maya has a picture of it? But she doesn’t paint pretty pictures like that, not unless they are part of something more she has to say.

         In answer to a question about her mother’s literary ideas, Elena says, “My mother’s philosophy, if you can call it that, is that everything depends of the rise of the uncommon man. The ‘uncommon man.’ She thinks that idea is so clear and so obvious. But I don’t think many people get it…Maybe some. I’m not sure. But her philosophy concerns the narrative of the uncommon man—each and every one of them. Not groups. She really doesn’t care about kings and generals and all that. They come and go. Besides, they’re really just all about themselves. Like Ozymandias, they’ll all be gone in time and the uncommon man remains, and perseveres. She subverts that whole idea of ‘the common man’ as a nonsensical insult by would-be elites—today mostly academics—who can’t grow their own food, but want to tell others how to do it… You know, I met a professor at the University of Iowa. I taught a course for him last semester. He likes to get friendly with his female instructors. But I knew about him even before I met him because of something my mother had told us. He was the son of Ned, her editor at Harpers. And his father had tried to get them together years ago. And when he was first getting ideas about me in Iowa City, I said to him, “You know, you could have been my father.” It totally destroyed him.”

“I’d like to know that story.”

“Maybe she’ll tell it to you someday…But Mom quotes that Shelley poem a lot as well—Once—you should have been there, she quoted the whole thing to her friend Paul—I don’t think you know him but he’s her oldest friend—He was sitting at the dining room table eating dinner with us one day and he’s going on about the greatness of Henry the Fifth and all that ‘We few, we happy few’ stuff, and she stands up and interrupts him with the entire Ozymandias poem, and of course we all know it by heart by that time, so we chime in with her, and poor Paul is crest fallen. Totally! You should have seen his face.”

         This opened another question.

         “What do you think of Paul.”

         She shrugged. The bones in her slender shoulders are prominent.

         “Very old fashioned. I work around some guys like that, but they’re mostly in the classics department. They’re devoted to some particular theme. I’ve always been a little bored by that stuff, myself. I’m a sort of generalist.”

         I wasn’t sure how she meant that. I thought of myself as a kind of generalist.

         “Do you think their knowledge is disposable?”

         I think I meant ‘unimportant’ but that wasn’t the word that came to mind.

         She frowned at me. “That’s an odd idea. Disposable? I think they’ve worked on a particular subject for so long that they’re stuck in a rut. It’s easy to do. Hard to see the larger field when you’re stuck in a rut. And it’s always more comfortable to deal with the things you’re familiar with. I understand that. But I do think what they know can be important. They probably all have insights—some of them anyway. Others just repeat the same exact crap again that they were once taught themselves, over and over.”

         “Is that the way Paul is?”

         “No! No. I didn’t mean that. He’s just devoted to his way of reading the text. ‘Contextual interpretation’ he calls it. But that still cuts down his field of vision. I know it bother’s mom. They argue when he visits. About little details. Mom is the free thinker. She’s a libertarian that way. She’s not interested in limitations to her ideas, just what’s wrong or right about them. If a so called ‘historical fact’ is in the way, she questions the fact first. Where did that come from? How did it get there? But she can do that only so long as she’s working her own garden. If she was at a university, she wouldn’t last a minute.”

         “What do you think bothers her exactly?”

         “The whole ‘context’ business. There they are, spending time trying to reconstruct a social situation in order to understand a text, instead of just reading the fucking text. Sure, the meanings of words have evolved, but that’s pretty easy to follow. Now they want to follow the evolution of a gazillion social practices in order to understand a single word. Out of billions of words! Nobody is going to live long enough to finish that project. It seems like a deliberate attempt to obscure the original text. I say, maybe they should do it the other way around. Just get the word right and maybe it will reflect on the social practice. Right?”

         “Sounds right.”

         As a kid, I used to find it outrageous that most teachers had no idea where their ideas came from, and seemingly little interest. I would ask, and they would say, ‘Sit down.’ So that became a greater interest to me than whatever it was that they were selling. That’s my nature, I suppose.

         When I was growing up, we lived on a hill in Arlington, Massachusetts. It was a hundred-year-old house by then, built when trolleys used to roam like dinosaurs on the avenues below and people commuted to their factory jobs or offices in Boston with a newspaper in their hands. Newspapers were important, then. That’s where some of their ideas came from. And books. The public library had newspapers as well as books. And you could call up the editor or the reporter and yell at them for not getting something right. But, you know, that world does not exist today. People all commute to work with their heads down staring at their smartphones, and the sources there are all suspect. All of them! Because they can’t be questioned. Write a comment, why don’t you? A shout in the forest. No echo. The form letter responses are insipid. And that past that was once in the newspapers is lost or hidden in history books that no one reads.

         The Public Library is now little more than the metaphorical hiding place of the ‘Lost Ark of the Covenant’—but it’s that and a senior center too. Instead, those commuters read on-line about one celebrity or another and the asses they made of themselves, and the asses they bared, or one politician or another and the wars they’re making. But the world they are living in was originally made by all those people reading their newspapers on the trolley. And the newspapers that originally shaped the look of that world are gone, and they were more about the people reading them than the bare asses of celebrities. The little smart phones, appropriately small given the subjects, are all about the bare asses, and the libraries are empty. All the politics was just for show, then as now, but the papers were really all about what made that show work.

         But most importantly, from what I can tell, it was a pretty civilized place. Not just the people worked, the place itself worked. There was room for the trees and the dogs. Now, it’s end to end cars parked on streets not made for cars and the trolleys are gone; dozens of people living in four or five small apartments, in houses that used to be single family homes. People used to be able to afford a single-family home then…I wonder how the meanings of the words on those newspapers are even going to be understood in a few hundred years more…But I can still read Chaucer and know what the Wife of Bath had on her mid. And I even know a lot of what Shakespeare was trying to say.

         My parents are the last ones on their block to have resisted renting out space. What this means to me is that when I get behind on things, so to speak, I can still sleep in my old bedroom upstairs along with the odd accumulation of clothes and toys that are stored there now. They never throw anything away. And at 31 years old, the need for that refuge has happened to me more than once, I am ashamed to say. And this thought, traveling around my head about three o’clock one morning, has me thinking that maybe it’s time to get out of my own rut. Or, at least out of my van. Living in the tack-room of a barn is pretty fine, but not perfect.

         It seemed to me, standing there in the uncut grass of the field behind, with stars edging the tree tops at all sides, that those people who lived in those houses in Arlington, who used to read their newspaper every morning, jostled but unperturbed, had more to do with my own view of the world than all the teachers I ever had. And that Julia was very right about the meanings of words. And that her hero, Donovan, had more in common with me than any future coming.

         The face of Mars is there, near the horizon, a discolored point of light staring back at me in disgust.

         Elena is here for the week. She is an instructor of English Literature at the University of Iowa. She hates it there and comes back to Rumford to visit as often as she can, but this was only the second time I had met her. She showed up unexpectedly one morning, very early, about seven, after driving all night. Her mother was, of course, already awake, and they talked until she was banished. At the smell of food, she came downstairs again from sleeping and ate with us at 4 o’clock. Lasagna. The best. But I was thinking about how women look when they’ve been sleeping.

         Emptied of the boxes, we ate in the dining room, and Elena was able to point out specific spots on the wall that were made by her or her sisters. One, on the ceiling, was from a trebuchet of lasagna aimed at her sister Jesse, using a serving spoon and a salt and pepper shaker for fulcrum and weight. She demonstrated this again without following through. Julia watched patiently before saying. “I had just taught them about all that. Medieval warfare. I couldn’t even punish them.”

         Elena is tall—taller than her mother—and thin, but not lacking in appointments. As she’s talking, and gesturing with her long arms, sitting up and then out of her chair to show me the arcs and the distances involved in her calculations, and then acting out the reactions of an imaginary crowd against the backdrop of her mother’s blank face, just to tease her with the memory—evidently there were other relatives present at the time—I am riveted.

         She was there for a week because of some sort of school break, and joined us for each dinner. Her habit was to speak very frankly in front of her mother, something that was clearly not always appreciated, but it was a ‘change-up’ to the usual conversation because I have likely been too careful in my speech around Julia.

         One day, over a very nice plate of spaghetti and meatballs, with her tomato-bloodied fork poking the air in irritation, Elena says, “The fucking idiots I work with have no clue. I’m only an assistant, so I can’t presume to change the curricula. I can’t even teach my own mother’s books. I’m teaching the work of literary non-entities for aesthetic numbskulls who follow the leader to get tenure and then, when they get it, they farm out the job of actually teaching their crap to people like me. It’s abuse!”

         She wants to quit. She has come home, partly, to tell her mother that, I think. Partly it was to find out who the hell I was. And partly just to be ‘home.’ If she quits, I wonder if she will wander off to some new horizon or come back here.

         She has cut her hair short, and when she runs—which she does every day, coming back rather moist and sweaty—her hair is a dark skull cap at a distance. I enjoy watching her run.

         She says, “Mother says I take after her mother. Lithe and buxom! But my grandmother was a rich bitch who wanted to be Queen of New York. Grandpa worked non-stop but never quite had the money for her tastes. They even thought Mom was a virgin birth at first, except for one errant visit by Grandpa over a drunken New Years.”

         That discussion took place one morning in the barn while she looked over the boxes of her grandmother’s things piled there, and then at my handiwork in the tack room, and then danced around the open floor in a sort of loose ballet.

         “We used to spend hours in here. It was our palace, our dungeon, our jousting field and on rainy days, our refuge. We staged all of mom’s plays right there!” She pointed at the center of the floor below the loft. “It looks so small now. It seemed enormous to us then. We hung bed sheets up there on that wall—actually it took four sheets—for backdrop and we had a little slide projector set up for that. A forest, or a town, or a medieval castle—no problem. We had a rope rigged to that rafter—you can see the iron ring still there—and I would take a running leap out of the loft like Robin Hood and try to swing to the other side. actually, Jesse did that for one of the plays. We once did a Robin Hood that mom wrote.”

         The space between was at least twenty feet

         “Did you make it?”

         “A couple of times. Maya did it better. But her legs aren’t as long as mine.”

         Twirling away then closer to the tack room she said, “That bed in there seems a little small. You’re taller than that!”

         I admitted, that it was. “The foam is only 3 x 6. I have an extra pillow for the end so my head doesn’t hit the wood.”

         Her concern for the size of my mattress bothered me.

         I changed the subject.

         “What will you do if you quit teaching?

         “Anything. I was thinking maybe one of those Pacific fishing boats. I love the idea of that. I looked into it. They need crew, but they don’t want single women. The best jobs are all guy jobs.”

         “Other than the regular pay, the lack of danger, the shorter hours, and the routine work, what don’t you like about teaching. At least it’s dry.”

         “No… I like teaching. It can be fun. The problem is really just the crap I have to teach.” Then she took a note from her mother’s playbook and turned the table on me. “What are you going to do when Mom finishes her book?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “What do you think about?”

         “Too late to join the army. Or be a brain surgeon. I don’t know. I really just want to keep on writing so I guess I’ll find something to keep paying bills so that I can do that.”

         She rocked on her feet as she listened, as if it was a head nod of acknowledgement.  It appeared that we were both at loose ends.

***

15. Why bother?

         I was gone for a couple days over Easter. All three of Julia’s daughters visited that weekend so there wasn’t going to be much work done in any case. So, the Friday before, I had unloaded a little in advance.

         Given my previous thoughts on the matter, and the problems I was having with my own work, as well as her own difficulties, I had asked Julia why she even bothered to write novels. She had spoken before about her affair with poetry, and I knew she had written plays, but most of her life had been spent writing novels—and now, novels that no one would read.  She had been born into an age of novels. The age of Hemingway, and Faulkner, and Cather. They were important then. Now, not so much. I actually said, “Why bother?”

         Her reaction was surprise. I saw that in her eyes. But in typical fashion, she did not answer me quickly. In fact, she had gone off to open a bag of feed and get a bucket of water for the chickens before she said anything at all, and then she says, “You won’t easily see this, I think. It is not a simple idea. There are a lot of moving parts. But that’s not why you may not see it. It crosses too many boundaries of belief; and worse. We all tend to think in channels. It’s easier that way. Less bother…It’s the way people tend to think of religion, if they think about it at all, in only one way, as a faith in God. But you know it’s much more. It’s a frame and a moral structure. It’s a society of others with similar belief. It’s a language of communication, and so on. That’s why people don’t think about it. It’s a bother. Easier to label it and set it over there, on the corner, out of the way. Maybe look in on a Sunday. But this is us. Today. In America. And In the West. And we’ve replaced much of religion with politics, instead. For many people, it serves the same purpose. Go to church and let them tell us what is right and wrong. Pay your taxes and let the government take care of the needy. Pay more taxes and let the government teach your kids. That’s it for social identity, and all the rest. But this was not true of people in the twelfth century. Not true in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It was definitely not true in the nineteenth. Beethoven thought about his God every day. To a very great extent, their religion defined them for good or ill. More even than their jobs. And for those without wealth, more than their families.”

         I took a guess. “Are you saying that novels are your religion?”

         Surprise again. “No. No. That’s not the point. But you can think of those as cathedral building.”

         This surprised me more. All I could say to that was, “How so?”

         She said, “The cathedral was the focus of their community. It is not built to supply food, or water, or protection—like a fort. It’s an expression of who they were…That’s not all, of course, but that’s why they built it. Why they spent their extra hours after the planting and the harvest to lay down tiles, or carve a wooden baluster…I’m taking the long way to that simple thought because it is not so simple even to me…But in the end, it’s the way I see the world. The way I interpret it. It is not just a device. Or a machine. Or a tool. A means.”

         I repeated the words out-loud, “A cathedral?”

         “I suppose if I were actually religious, I might not have a good reason to write novels that no one’s going to read. But in the end, I write them for myself. It is an egocentric endeavor.  I’ve always written them that way…I’m building my own cathedrals. That’s what I do. They may be empty. The parishioners, if there ever were any, may have lost interest or died away, but then, at least, they are small cathedrals…All those tourists who go to the great cathedrals in Europe, they’re not religious. Most of them haven’t spoken to God since they were children wishing for a Christmas present. They have no clue about what would drive a man to make such a thing as a Cathedral, to cut the stone so precisely, or some artist to cut the stained glass, or paint the walls, or write the music. That simply amazes them, if they’re not already too drug addled to feel it. They let their politicians make brutalist concrete tombs to their own political ideologies and make no connection as to the difference. They buy post-modern fakes to live in without ever thinking about what a human home should be. But those peasants of the Middle Ages built cathedrals. And then our smart, college-educated morons, pay thousands of dollars to go there and gawk and wonder. How did this happen? Who built this? Why did they do that? … Maybe I’m just hoping that one of them will wander by, read a little bit of one of my books, and get an idea about what something else in life.”

         I told her she should write something up about her cathedrals for the website, just to slow her down. But she was on a jag and knew it, and she stopped with that, and went off on another chore.

         That night she played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on her stereo so loud that I could hear it clearly in the barn.

         Now, all this was on my mind for days. Why did I write my novels? Would I write them if I thought no one would be reading them? I already knew the answer to that now was ‘yes.’ I accepted that. So, I had to come to terms with my own particular egocentric madness—if madness is what you do that makes no logical sense. I flattered myself with the knowledge that Van Gogh never sold a painting and never knew if anything he ever did would matter. But he did it, none-the-less! And I realized that this was, in itself, one reason I felt kinship with Julia. We are alike in that way, at least. 

         My imagined future had more to do with Julia’s imagined past than I had realized. But I fancied my cathedrals on Mars. For those peasants who built Reims, or Chartres, or York Minster, my efforts were small potatoes, even if I was not directly worshiping God, and I was only paying homage to the man. After all, just a small recognition of God’s creation, perhaps? Perhaps.

         It begs a question. Or a few. Isn’t the work itself a life? Should there be something more? What would that be, exactly? I did not want to live the life of my father. What would my own life be, more than what I wrote. Is there no end to egocentricity?

         Our ongoing conversation about the art of writing was often detoured by my reports of AI encroaching upon and diluting the work of human beings. In one of our several conversations concerning artificial intelligence—she called that confection “a fantasy worthy of a Warner Brothers cartoon,” and I had to have her explain that because I didn’t have her immediate reference point. It seems that helping my dad in the shop on Saturday mornings stunted my knowledge of yet another art-form on TV. But she added, “AI is just the flavor of the month. Two dimensional. You don’t have to know a lot about computers to understand that. Mary Shelley understood that two hundred years ago!”

         She put a dramatic pause into it this fact with a silent stare. She was guessing correctly that I did not know the reference. I only vaguely knew who Mary Shelley was but only because of the Frankenstein story, which I had never finished.

         “How?”

         Julia shrugged as she does when she doesn’t mean a shrug at all but is really saying, ‘isn’t it obvious?’

         “She was eighteen, for Christ’s sake! She had never gone to school. Her home is riven. She might have benefited from having the smartest parents in England, but her mother was dead! How is it she knew then what you haven’t bothered to know now?”

         Julia can be purposely provocative and I immediately caught the whiff of that in her voice.

         “What did she know?”

         “Nothing. Nothing by our standards today. She was just the girl-toy of a wannabe poet. A teenager. But she was able to conjure what the consequences might be of man creating life…I can’t help but see something in that of a woman’s wisdom, as much as I dislike pretending there is some difference between the intelligence of men and women, there must be something! Prometheus was nothing without Athena. But I digress…She was an unwed mother, as well. I suppose that’s worth appreciating, in some context…”

         I knew now that she could carry this sort of linkage on for hours or until she got bored with it, so I interrupted.

         “It’s a ridiculous story! They made us read it in high school. It was absurd! I remember even trying to write an alternate history called ‘The Monster Redux,’ in high school but then the teacher figured out that I hadn’t finished the original assignment and I had to give it up. But the Shelley story was impossible.”

         She smiled at me.

         “They say it might be the very first science fiction novel.”

         “But what does it have to do with AI?”

         She shrugged again, “The Monster is only what he was created to be. AI is only a confection of our stupidity. Not our intelligence at all. If we were intelligent, we would be busy with our own work. Minding what is our own business. Instead, we are trying to create a doppelganger to do our work for us. How stupid is that?”

         I had no answer. Not if the work was what mattered.

         In another moment, she asked, “How do you choose what you are going to write about?”

         Now, my guess was that she had anticipated me. It is exactly the sort of question I was always asking her. She was turning the tables once again.

         I used her own narrative method against her, “There’s a philosopher—actually an economist and sociologist, who has tried to understand the world in practical terms rather than making stuff up about what we should do or not do…Thomas Sowell.”

         Julia’s eyes went wide on that. But she didn’t say a thing.  My hope was that she knew as little about Sowell as I knew about Mary Shelley. So, I tell her, “Dad didn’t read a lot of stuff except history. He read just about anything to do with World War Two. But that was because his dad was in that. It gave them something to argue about. And Sowell might have been the only philosopher I’d ever seen him read. I’m not sure why, other than he had met him once. And my dad used to give me a copy of one of Sowell’s books every Christmas. Every Christmas. The thing about that was, I liked them, and after awhile, even as slow a reader as I am, I’d already bought most of them before Dad got to the next one and so I was giving the extra copies away to friends…And that’s funnier still because Dad knew it! He knew I was buying my own copies before Christmas came around. He just liked doing it…Well, at some point, when I was fifteen or so, when I started writing stories, I tried to imagine things based on what Sowell had written. Maybe it was just a matter of me being too stupid to come up with my own devices, but I thought of it as a sort of connection. An inspiration. A purpose.”

         She said, “Tell me about one of those.”

         “Well…Sowell said something like, ‘Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.’…Well, that seemed like a great premise for story! That was my very first ‘Mars’ story. Mars became my petri dish for all of it. Right then and there. Still is.”

         She shrugged at me and started shaking her head. “What can I say to that? You’re doing something brilliant! All I can do is wish you well and give you any encouragement if I can.”

         I think she meant it. And that sort of floored me. I wouldn’t get over that for a week.

***

16. The Crisis

         One comfort to living here is that so little happens that cannot be expected. This is, I think, in the nature of Julia’s life, at least as she has chosen to live it. It’s as if her whole world is right here. This is her narrative, on her schedule. and if you choose to be a part of that story, things generally make sense.

         She was right. I had been attempting something of the same thing by simplifying my own life, by living in the van and avoiding any unnecessary responsibilities. But, after the fact, it doesn’t seem like much of an effort by comparison. At least, nothing worth writing about. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was a grand affair compared to mine.

         This afternoon, with her already at the stove, and me just getting settled at my daily task, she asks, “Have you ever read The Crisis by Winston Churchill?”

         Now, she didn’t usually ask me such questions, and definitely not before concentrating on the work at hand, so I assumed it was a trick question.

         Assuming this was just another of the many works I’d never read by the former British prime minister, and wanting to be contrary, I smartly answered, “Winston Churchill didn’t write The Crisis. Thomas Paine wrote The Crisis. I’ve read that. I’m a big fan of Thomas Paine.”

         She must have looked over at me for all of thirty seconds. The fist of the hand gripping the spoon she was using was now buried in her hip, with the spoon at an angle. It looked like a pose. Very theatrical. There was more than a wisp of hair hanging loose in front of her face. With the apron on, I thought she looked like a character out of a children’s book.

         She says, “Not that one. The novel about the American Civil War,” and she blew the hair away to the side.

         I said, “I didn’t know Winston Churchill wrote novels.”

         Now, I’m thinking there is a game going on. A match, and I have to catch up.

         But she says, “Not that Winston Churchill.”

         So, now she has knocked me on my back like a dumb turtle.

         “No. I guess, I’ve never even heard about that one.”

         She says, “It’s a good book. Very good. When I was in school, it was on all the reading lists. It was a best seller at the turn of the Century—The last Century. Now it’s pretty much forgotten. There isn’t even a copy of it at the library.”

         Now, I’m getting other ideas about what she’s talking about. She’s standing at the stove and stirring a pot of something that smelled like a stew—but she’s thinking about the ephemeral nature of her own work.

         I say, “Why do you think it’s forgotten?”

         And then she finally says what’s actually on her mind. “It’s a story about heroes.”

         This is a subject we have touched on—or punched at—before. She knows I don’t believe in heroes. At least I didn’t.

         I say, “We’ve argued about that before.”

         “Yes. We have. But I was thinking you might read it for me and tell me why you think it’s so forgotten now. We still read Trollope, and Sand, and Eliot. Why not Churchill.”

         I said, “Maybe it’s just that most people don’t believe in heroes anymore.”

         She is having none of that, “You know that’s not true. You think your father is a hero. It’s in your voice when you talk about him. And your mother. And your grandfather and grandmother. You’ve all but said as much.”

         Now, she was pressing an advantage. I had in fact spoken about all of them over the last month.

         “Okay. I’ll read the book.”

         “Good. It’s over on the table there in the living room.”

         So, she was prepared, and this was all part of her narrative as well.

         I asked, “What do you think about it yourself?”

         “It is a great book…Beautiful, really. A little dated in style. The language is of that time. But so’s the language of Henry James… I think you can deal with it.”

         “What’s it about?”

         “Essentially, after everything is said and done, it’s about Abraham Lincoln.”

         Lincoln is one of those historical figures I have avoided. He was into so much ‘mischief’ as my mother would say, that it seemed easier just to go around him.

         “Did you ever give it to your daughters to read?”

         She stopped what she was doing one more time to look toward me. I didn’t look back.

         “No. But that was the very thing I was thinking about. I don’t know why not. I thought maybe you would have some sense about it that, and be able to tell me why.”

         The copy of the book she has is old. It’s an original edition, I think. The green cloth is embossed in a darker green with the title as well as an old-fashioned decoration. Looks nothing like the way books are made today. Physically smaller. It was a pleasure to hold it. I was up half the night with it, and the next night as well. I’m a slow reader.

         Julia did not begin her gardening in earnest until late April, but then it was pretty much carried out before I was awake. She is up at 6 AM and out the door not long after. She has said, “the hoeing and raking and such help me think.” The garden itself was clearly less than half the size it had been when her girls were younger, filling a fenced space directly east of the barn and the chicken yard, and over the weeks this became a neat precision of rows and then sprouting things that I avoided asking about as much as possible. I had seen enough of farming to know it was not my thing. Too much work. That was what super markets were for.

         But, twice a day, first thing in the morning and then in the early afternoon, Julia came out to the east side of the barn where I could hear her as she talked back to the chickens and threw out scraps and poured water or feed into the narrow troughs before heading over to the garden area.

         The chicken coop itself, a small, low structure on legs, with openings at the front but without windows, faced the garden. It was not attached to the barn but close against the wire that lined the clapboards there and beneath the overhang of the roof above. Because she collected the eggs in the morning as the chickens ate, I seldom got to see the process, but the entire front of the coop swung away on hinges and gave her full access to whatever the hens had done. This structure had been built to her specifications by Mr. Copple’s youngest son when he was still in high school.

         I had brilliantly observed that the chickens themselves appeared to be more like cartoon chickens, drawn in thin black and white strips, so that they all looked like the same chicken to me. She did not see the humor in that observation. She called them ‘Barred Rocks’ which I had discovered was a shortening of the name Barred Plymouth Rocks.

         Besides a web of darkened wire fence, the chickens were also protected by an electrified wire at the top and bottom to help keep the hawks and the vermin away. But with her dog no longer there to bark, the vermin had found a way.

         Today she lost her oldest, ‘Betty,’ and I heard a shriek in the morning, and when I came out to see what the matter was, just barely in my pants, she already had a shovel filled with the feathers and whatever else was left. She just said, ‘Poor Betty,’ to me and then, ‘We have a weasel.”

         Later, when I came to the house at four, she was getting ready to make hamburgers because she wasn’t in the mood to cook.

         “How old was she?”

         “Only nine.”

         “I didn’t know chickens lived that long.”

         “She was still laying. She would have made it a few years more. She was the mother hen to all the others. And she stood her ground. Without a rooster, she stood her ground.”

         This heroic image was difficult for me to imagine, but it was meant. I didn’t know a lot about chickens.

         “How did it get her?”

         She shrugged, “It’s weasel…He left a mess.”

         I said, “Maybe the weasel was a female.”

         “Except for the mess.”

         I had to consider the implication of this assessment for a moment.

         So, I asked, “What are you going to do?”

         “There’s a hole under the fence. The fence is buried a foot deep but there’s a rock there at the back side and I was lazy and when I enlarged the yard last year, I stretched the wire over it and didn’t take it out.”

         I immediately sensed a hidden request.

         “Do you want me to do it?”

         “I would appreciate that. Thanks.”

         She had not written anything that morning, and there was no stack of manuscript on the table. I ate the burger and went back out to the barn. The rock was enormous, buried by the soil there only a few inches deep except, where the weasel had dug its away under. It was mostly flat at the top side but I had no idea how deep the rock itself went. I wasn’t going to be able to lift it without some sort of a crane in any case. When Julia came out to inspect what I had uncovered, I suggested that she should just decrease the size of the chicken yard. The rock wasn’t all that big at the top. Maybe three feet wide at the most. The chickens could spare a few extra feet from their enclosure. But she wasn’t interested. She was still angry—more at herself for putting the fence in the way she did, I think.

         She said, “But you might be able to lever it away. It drops off right there at the back. The barn is on a kind of shelf of rock that goes all the way to those trees.”

          So, I started digging a hole there behind it to lever the rock into, just beyond the fence. This actually took a couple of days, allowing for some rain and some talk. Digging holes was not in my resume. Not this sort of hole, in any case. The soil beyond was a litter of smaller rock, but, indeed, the larger shelf of rock ended there and that one piece of it could be moved. The big one next to that went in beneath the corner of the barn so I used what smaller stone I uncovered to secure that before I filled in.

         The chickens watched me through the entire process, commenting constantly among themselves. They sound like cartoon chickens as well. Julia came out to watch occasionally. Most of the time, as I dug, I could hear her typing.

         A couple of days later, a tall, clean shaven, and middle-aged fellow showed up late in the afternoon, shortly after I had come into the house. When he opened the back door to the kitchen I was already sitting at the small table and he seemed surprised to see me.

         Julia could see his car through the window from where she stood and did not appear to be surprised at his arrival. She turned from stirring the pot on the stove and said, “Derek, this is Geoff. Geoff is helping me get my manuscript ready.” 

         I stood up and we shook hands. He gripped a bit too hard. He was dressed in an ironed or new LL Bean Flannel shirt and new looking jeans. I was still feeling a little grubby from digging holes. We are about the same height and so it was pretty much eye to eye for a moment. His smile was not genuine. But mine was, because I was thinking he looked familiar, and I knew immediately that this was because of Elena. But the situation itself was somehow funny to me too. This then was Julia’s ex-husband. Direct from New York. I could not have imagined him better.

         Outside there was a fairly new, black, Lincoln sedan, shiny-clean except for the fresh mud splatter on the lower trim from the dip at the end of the driveway.       

         What he first said was, “I wondered about that van by the barn.”

         Derek Peterson, Julia’s ex-husband, was once a ‘successful novelist.’ She has told me that much. But that occupation had not satisfied his needs, apparently, and he now runs his own real estate firm, or that now runs him. He has made a great deal of money from selling residential buildings in New York City over the years, I understand, but lost it. Now, he is broke. And he’s married again, unhappily. Julia says that he ‘only comes up to check on his daughters,’ but with that excuse now gone, he probably just wants the check. He apparently wants to borrow $50,000 from Julia to cover some real estate losses. He also talks out loud about moving up to New Hampshire to find his ‘muse,’ again and write another novel, to get his mojo back. This strikes me as a petty conceit. Or perhaps it is only self-deceit.

         Julia thinks, from his complaints, that his second wife is getting ready to divorce him. I’m thinking that one of his daughters told him I was there and he has driven up from New York to check up on his own interests.

         Because he arrived unexpectedly, while I was there in the kitchen, I got to hear some of the initial conversation before Julia pushes him outside to his car for privacy, but I could still hear part of it. He admits that his business has failed. Now, he wants her to mortgage her property, “That I helped pay for…” She rejects that premise and refuses. She tells him any interest he had in the property, “disappeared years ago, the last time you borrowed money from me,” and “Your schemes were charming once. But they were never dreams. And you’re too old for all that now…And I’m too old to take them seriously.”

         We were having ravioli again and when they came back in, Julia told us to move into the dining room.

         Derek sat at the other end of the table from Julia, so that I was in the middle.   

         He asked, “What do you do when you aren’t helping Julia?”

         I decided to be cute. “I dig holes.”

         I thought this was a funny answer. Julia did not.

         Julia adds, “Geoff is a writer…And he digs holes.”

         He asks, “Do you live here in Rumford?”

         It was not an honest question. I was sure he already knew the answer, but I answered it anyway.

         “I live in the barn.”

         Julia frowned again. She says, “Geoff has turned the tack room into an apartment, of sorts. And he’s been helping me out around here…digging holes.”

         Still feeling cute, I asked him, “What do you do, Derek, when you’re not digging holes?”

         I hope that it sounded about as phony as his question to me. Julia frowned again, but Derek answered.

         “I write novels.”

         I knew he had written several best sellers, but that had been years before.

         So, I said, “I meant more recently.”

         This caught him a little off-guard. Julia answered.

         “Derek is in real estate.”

         He changes the conversation then and looks at Julia, “Have you seen the girls lately?”

         She says, “All of them. They all came up to inspect Geoff’s work in the barn.”

         The humor buried in that sounded like something I might say.

         Derek looked to me again and said, “Where are you from?”

         “Near Boston. Where are you from?”

         “Queens…Where did you go to school?”

         “Arlington High.”

         “I meant, college”

         “I didn’t”

         He frowned a little too hard.

         “Why was that?”

         “I wasn’t interested in the indoctrination.”

         This got a ‘knowing’ smile. Maybe I should label it ‘smug.’

         Derek said, “I see. Perhaps I understand now why Julia thought you could help her with her work.”

         Before I could answer, Julia said, “That’s very perceptive, Derek.”

         It was amazing to me that she could say a word like ‘perceptive,’ and clearly mean the opposite.

         I said, “All I’m doing is a little copy editing and word processing. Easy peasy for any high school graduate.”

         At least that made Julia smile.

         Derek said to me, “What kind of novels do you write?”

         “Science fiction, mostly.”

         He said, “Ah,” but knowingly again. I could only guess about what he thought he knew.

         The ravioli didn’t last very long and I excused myself and went back to the barn.

         About half an hour later the barn door opened without a knock. I was at my desk on the opposite side by the window.

         “I thought I’d come out and inspect the work you’ve done for myself.”

         “No much to see.”

         I didn’t get up as he crossed the barn floor.

         He said, “You know, don’t you, that I own part of this place.”

         The tone was confrontational. I sat back in my chair.

         “No. I don’t.”

         “Half of it, anyway. We bought it when we were still married.”

         ‘That’s none of my business.”

         “Exactly! But I thought you should know.”

         I was suddenly in a very bad mood. So, I stood up.

         I said, “But at least, now, I know you’re an asshole too. I just found that out.”

         He was still coming forward when he punched at me. I suppose it would have hit me if I hadn’t turned away. The problem was, it brought him too close and when I punched him back it knocked him off his feet. Suddenly he was sitting on the barn floor looking a little puzzled. Because he didn’t get up right away, I suspected he hadn’t been in too many school yard fights. If you stay down, you get kicked. For whatever reason, maybe because I just didn’t like the look of him sitting there on the floor, I put my hand out, and he took it.

         Standing, face to face again, he said, “That was dumb.”

         “I think so.”

         I suppose whatever anger he had in him was gone, and he turned to go. And all of a sudden, I liked the guy. I knew who he was.

         “Are you okay?”

         He turned back. “Yeah. Just a bruised ego…I’m sorry for that.”

         I said, “Why were you so pissed at me?”

         He looked at me pretty square.

         “I suppose because you’re here, and I’m not.”

         This seemed a little heavy but probably right, and I hoped I wasn’t reading too much into it.

         “I just live in the barn. And help Julia the best I can. That’s all.”

         He sighed. The sigh seemed real.

         He said, “I understand—Life turns around on you. That’s a fact…In a week or so I’m going to be on my ass again. In bankruptcy court…And that’s just funny. That’s plain funny…You know what I was here for? … No. I suppose you don’t. I was here for money. I wanted Julia to loan me some money. Is that funny, or what? … And this—” his hand waved into the air behind him, “…When we bought this place, there was one brief moment when I actually hoped—well, the marriage was already on the rocks. But I loved her. She’s a pain, but I still love her. Dearly. And she’s the mother of my children. She’ll always be that. And, like you say, I’m just an asshole. I had my chance.”

         There wasn’t much I could say. “It’s a common enough problem for all of us. No big deal in the scheme of things.”

         He said, “Hill of beans.”

         “Yup. Like Bogey said, that’s all it amounts to.”

         He smiled at me, this time with no smug, and put his hand out to shake mine. And then he left.

         But this wasn’t the end of it.

         The next day, right in the middle of things, Julia said, “My own ‘sell by’ date has passed. I’m here by the grace of modern medicine—both bad or good, yet to be determined—or by a God who should know better, one way or the other, but isn’t saying.”

         All of that was in response to my rather boldly asking, “What are you trying to accomplish with this?” and holding up a typed page as evidence.

         I suppose I had not made my specific quandary clear. Her character, Donovan, had hung on in a limbo between life and death for more than a chapter. I did not see any progress there. And I know she has a remarked dislike for pathos. If she did not want to evoke a sense of pity in her readers, at least, she had to move on to another purpose.

         “It’s one of those ‘To be or not to be, questions,” she said. “Does the reader care? I hope so. Donovan is the reason that I’m writing this story… I’m hoping for a sense of rage. It’s difficult to feel real rage. It’s special. It’s so discouraged in modern life, where just going berserk and losing all reason is the thing, but rage is another element in the life of a man like Donovan. His anger is the rage of ages. His people have been abused for centuries. If he can’t feel that, he might as well be dead—at least at this time in his life, when he thinks he is beyond love…Is that something you don’t see?”

         It was very clear to me now.

         “I hadn’t thought about it until you said it. But it is.”

         She says, “Then, I’ve failed in the matter and I’m going to have to think that through again.”

         “But he hadn’t—you hadn’t—expressed that sense of life before. I suppose I didn’t expect it.”

         She suddenly seemed a little flustered.

         “You’re right. That comes out later, but you’re right and I have to work that idea in earlier so that it’s understood…You’re right about that.”

         But then I asked, “That’s a sense that life is fragile,” and I impulsively added another thought. I didn’t know why. “Have you been sick?”

         She shrugged, “Yes…But where’s the poetry in that!”

         That’s all she said. I really didn’t have the right to ask for more. I supposed it would come out in some way later on.

         But, when Elena visited again, I slipped the question in. “Has your mother been sick?”

         She didn’t answer quickly, but then “Yes. She had cancer.”

         Nothing else. It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it herself. But this gave another perspective on why Julia wanted to have me help her get the book in shape.

         Later, after we had finished for the day, and she had poured her bourbon, she said something else.

         “Derek is such an ass. He was actually worried about me. But he didn’t want me to know that. He came up here to check on me, and see if I needed anything. Such a jerk! The only way he could hide that was to ask me for money! Can you believe it? But I know him. He knows I don’t have any money. He even concocted the idea of asking me to mortgage the place. What an idiot. He knows it’s all in my will for the girls. Is a trust! But he knows I wouldn’t do that! … He’s a character ripe for a novel of his own. But I’ve never been able to even start writing about him. Son of a bitch! He sees himself as a heavy and he wouldn’t even know how … I fished him out of the East River once. He was showing off and fell in. Just showing off. He couldn’t even swim!”

***

17. Mr. Copple’s Stones

         During her second visit, Elena told me a funny story. But it was the context of her telling me rather than the story itself, that was funny, I think.

         At one time, when the girls were all still living at home, and a year or two after Mrs. Copple, Mandy, had passed away, Frank Copple had cast his eye to the West.

         It was a fact that his sons, of whom there were also three, had all done chores for Julia, but they had finally gone away to college, and the army, and whatever, and importantly, had grown older and found their own lives—none of them interested in farm life. It was Mr. Copple’s oldest daughter, Mary, who appeared to want the life of her parents but she had not yet found a mate, and she was now well over forty. His youngest daughter, the youngest of that clan, had run away to Boston and not yet returned.

         However, Mr. Copple’s primary interest was for himself, and this started bringing him over to Dal Riata to ‘help’ when he could—when a gutter collapsed, or a storm had taken down a line, for instance. He was very helpful. And whenever the fields needed mowing, Julia’s were done before his own.

         For her part, Julia had discovered the best way to cool Mr. Copple’s ardor was to quote Shakespeare. Extensively. She also found short dissertations on Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe were effective. And she would frequently ask him how to spell certain words when he used them. Coccidiosis was one of those that Elena still remembered, left over from an outbreak of infection among the chickens. Mr. Copple did not have a strong command of spelling and would grapple with the task by repeating a word over and over out-loud like a schoolboy to get all the vowels. His face would turn red during this process and his beard rose up with each clinch of his jaw.

         Elena also remembered her mother saying that Frank had never read a book. She stated this as a matter of fact. How he got through his own schooling was a mystery. But he was full of stories and if she could keep the distance, she often encouraged him to relate those.

         Frank Copple was a large and bluff man. Always good natured, and easy to like. Julia had her moods. It was Elena’s belief that resisting the interest of Mr. Copple had been the greatest challenge of her mother’s life. And she went about the process very deliberately, knowing the stakes were high. She liked Mr. Copple and did not want to make him an enemy—though Elena was sure that might have been impossible. Though he was now at least sixty-five, he had never shown a lack of interest in her mother, even when Mandy was still alive.

         Her most successful tactic was to use his own habits against him. Mr. Copple had a habit of talking to his wife whenever he was frustrated by anything. He continued this after she died and did it still. So, Julia began to refer to Mandy more often. When Frank asked her a question, Julia would say something like, “What would Mandy think about that?” This quieted him down considerably.

         That Elena told me all this made me well aware of the fact that she had already figured out that I was not a danger in this regard. How she knew this so quickly, I am not sure, but at least it opened up the range of small talk quite a bit.

         Mr. Copple was always friendly toward me, however. Perhaps he had also determined, in his own way, that I was not a danger to Julia either. When I was digging out the rock in Julia’s chicken yard he had come by to pick up a few bales of hay and watched me, commenting usefully about how I might lever the mass of the thing. This brought on a lengthy observation about the Egyptians, and the pyramids. He might not read books but he was a big fan of shows on television or his computer. He explained the various means the Egyptians might have used to accomplish their task, and in great detail. It was a class on moving large objects.

         I finally broke that account up by telling him about a story I had written a couple of years before, and how they raised chickens on Mars. He did not think that could be done, though I was sure it would be. However, watching Julia’s efforts were making me think I might revise that story a little. Mr. Copple suggested I come by and study his chickens. He was not a fan of the industrial methods used to produce most chickens today. He believed in ‘organics.’ His was only a small operation but his 240 chickens occupied more than acre of land. He suggested that the cost of such space on Mars was going to be prohibitive, though, he liked the idea of raising chickens organically even there.

         This food for thought had me imagining chickens, under conditions of lower gravity, leaping far into the air. I told him that at least the chickens on Mars, would not have the same problem with predators.

         “You do, do you? Rats have followed mankind since the dawn of time. They will find their way to. I guarantee it!”

         And this one statement, made so casually, turned everything I had previously imagined about agriculture on Mars on its head. I knew, immediately, that he was correct. The vermin were always with us.

         So, I returned the favor to Elena and told her a rather lengthy tale about an incident that I had worked on for a novel, but never finished. It is better left unfinished, I think

         When I was still living in Boston I took a part-time job in a paint store. Mostly I carried cans of paint—up from the basement or out to customer’s cars. I also got to run their most sophisticated equipment. Following some magical admixture carried out in advance by one of the owners, I placed the cans in the clamps of a bank of machines that shook the cans like maniacs while complaining about their task in a high-decibel whine. There was no chance that the family who owned the store were going to open a door there for me, despite initial intimations, so I was gone in two months. However, I did acquire a roommate while I was there. And that was the actual story.

         Steven Lemieux was a professional protester. Skinny, hirsute, and not especially clean, usually wearing black-rimmed glasses knotted with tape at one hinge or another, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an unreadable and illiterate slogan though he had been educated into his sophomore year at Harvard. For a modest amount, about $10 an hour, he would show up at any event and attempt to disrupt it. He had been arrested dozens of times, had a felony record for resisting arrest, and was thus unemployable otherwise. But he paid his share of the rent. And I had only barely talked my way into the apartment, in East Cambridge, and didn’t want to lose it. My previous apartment mate was a young woman who worked at McDonalds during the days. What she did in the evening I did not want to know, but she had disappeared with her latest boyfriend one Saturday afternoon and I found Steve the following Monday in an on-line classified, basically because I didn’t care about his politics. For his part, Steven mistook my skin color and odd priorities for a sympathetic attitude. It was only desperation—I was already behind on the rent by a week as of that Monday.

         Because Steve practiced his protesting on me, while eating bowls of cereal or whatever I had, I got to know his agenda, and some of his methods, and for my part, I tried to convert him to some level of sanity. Not being intellectually engaged beyond his particular agenda, his rejoinders were always roughly the same. ‘Lotta good it’s done you,’ or ‘Let me know if that works out for you,’ and the ever popular, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ I let this pass because I also had a month’s deposit for the rent on the line. But when Steven had been doing drugs, usually grass, he mellowed. He would just say “You don’t know shit,” and start in on his life story, which he thought was ‘epic.’ It was not ‘epic’, but it was very good in parts—especially the parts that did not include Steve.

         The parts I liked the best concerned his grandfather.

         Victor Lemieux was a logger in Maine for about seventy years. He worked for the Maine-Atlantic Lumber Company for much of that time. When he started, timber was still being rafted down the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers by fellows who could dance across the surface of the floating logs, and did. In the winter months, Steve’s grandfather cut the timber, and used a pony or a mule to drag the great carcasses, bound by chains, to the closest frozen water. In the spring Victor rode the logs to the mill towns where the waterfalls were. But what made him unique is that Victor did not drink, or gamble or go whoring. When difficult times came for the company during the Depression, Victor Lemieux bought stock. He was a part owner of the company by the time World War Two came. After the War, the building boom really hit. There was even bigger money to be made. But sometime during the 1950’s, the State of Maine and the United States Department of Agriculture decided that there were just too many smaller companies for them to regulate. Maine-Atlantic’s leases were taken by some sort of eminent domain, and consolidated with a company that had better political connections. Victor Lemieux was given pennies on the dollar and forced into court to get back any of the rest. The new owners had enough cash and political influence to wait him out.

         Steven presented this story to me several different times in various stages of intoxication, as a true story of American capitalism. I tried to explain that, except for the earlier part of the ‘epic,’ this was exactly the opposite of capitalism. It was State control of the means of production. Another ‘ism’ entirely, and very clearly explained by Thomas Sowell in a dozen books. But Steve took personal offense at my stupidity. He knew all about this, he insisted, because he was born into it. So, I went to the Boston Public Library to get some details on the Maine lumber industry. He lit my note paper on fire in the middle of the living room floor. This set off an alarm, which I dealt with, but there was no dealing with Steve. I threw him out after the fire marshal left. Steve came back in the middle of the night and inexplicablye lit up an old table cloth that I had—something my mother had given me that wasn’t worth much but that I had grown up with. I beat the hell out of Steve. He called the police, who happened to already be there because of a neighbor’s complaint about noise. The cop was sympathetic but reported the incident to my landlord. The realtor terminated my lease immediately, I lost my deposit, and that was when I decided to move out of state. Maine, in deference to Victor Lemieux, seemed out of the question. New Hampshire lay closer.

         Epics come and epics go.

         But at least Elena was entertained.

***

18. More wrinkles in time

         To the north, along the road, Julia’s land soon rises onto a wrinkle in the earth, a folding of the land that, in winter, and at a distance, is like a blanket that has not been smoothed; hardly a hill, above a turn of the river, but likely the geologic cause of the change of direction to the flow of water in the shallow valley below. This wrinkle continues rising upward from there, across the road and into a property apparently owned by the Catholic Church that was never farmed because of the inconvenience of the all the rocks and glacial debris you could see gapping through the trees along there from the road, and those trees have long been left mostly uncut as being useless for building because they had already grown so deformed by their own roots. They are dark and brooding trees for having been so long neglected, each with a personality of its own if you stop to look, while being totally unlike the surrounding wilderness of second growth that is so without character, clogging the fields around them, filling the former sheep pastures behind ruined stone walls, and overgrowing the slumped remains of apple orchards everywhere.

         I was told by our neighbor, Mr. Copple, that the land there at the opposite side had been donated to the diocese by the nephew of Neal Wright so that the conveniently shattered glacial rock might be used for a church that was never built. But, he said, ‘Unbuilt cathedrals crowd the hills in these parts.’ I guess that I missed the sarcasm in the remark at first. But Julia suggested that the donation was made simply to avoid paying the property taxes. Maybe both were true.

         The part of that Earth-fold extending into Julia’s land is also a nest of trees and broken rock but less dramatic. This had drawn my eye soon after I had moved into the barn and become the object of a daily pilgrimage for me in the mornings. Her property line, which ends at the road there at the south side, continues a short distance beyond those trees to the west before cutting back down toward the river, in the midst of more second growth and yet another former orchard now buried in that unruly chaos. But, standing on the back of that ‘wrinkle,’ on Julia’s land, about fifty yards in from the road, there is a break in those trees and a view of the river over the open and still harvested land below that is simply wonderful for the mind. There is some ancient order to Mr. Copple’s work there that is magical. The grass is cut to dry in trails left by the tractor and then later gathered into bales. But the design the tractor has left on the fields, turning with the subtle contours of the land, appears to be an art in itself.

         One afternoon I carried a box of books up to one of the bedrooms for Julia—things she had finished using in her research so that she could make room for more downstairs. In that bed room is a painting which I recognized immediately as the same view from the wrinkle above the river. It was perfect. Maybe a little better. It somehow encompassed more than one season—looking out from a darker vantage among the trees; out across the shallow valley to the turn in river and to the trees that had grown up in the old pasture land beyond. A farmer was seen in the mid-distance as he worked his tractor across the open field, in a sort of defiant gesture against the enveloping of unruled nature at all sides. A small figure, on a small tractor, but that defiance was there in the gold and green of the cut hay in his path, immediately before the edge of ominous dark in the wooded ridge above him that was still being held at bay. A larger focus was felt and conveyed in the effort of the farmer alone and the sense that this was a simple, if eternal, quest of human order against an always encroaching wilderness.

         The painting was not signed. It made me first realize that none of Maya’s paintings were signed. But I knew who the artist was, of course.

         To make conversation, I asked Julia, who had painted it, and her answer was rather elliptical.

         She said, “I’ve seen you up there in the trees. It is a wonderful place.”

         “But who painted that picture. It’s perfect.”

         “Perfect is a difficult word.”

         I shook my head at her for being difficult herself. “I think it’s perfect…Did you paint it?”

         She wasn’t taking the bait.

         “Nooo… I can’t paint. I dab. I can do a house. I did the barn.”

         “Who painted that?”

         She quit having fun with me.

         “Maya. She had a thing about signing her work when she was younger. Funny, but I think that was because of Neal Wright. She used to stop on the road by the grave stones. I’ve seen her there a dozen times. It took her awhile to accept that she would never be a good Shaker.”

         “She’s great!”

         “Great is a difficult word, as well…I have even more I can show you! … But not now, but I’ll show you later!”

         I discovered it was Julia’s habit to buy one of Maya’s paintings as often as Maya would let her—which was about as often as her daughter needed a little extra money for her rent.

         The chestnut boards on the walls of the tack room were set in vertically, unlike the clapboards, spanning the space between the cross-braces to the studs from ceiling to floor. The empty space between the studs is a little more than two feet wide. Pretty wide, but the studs, hand cut in another age, were more than just two by four inches and plenty strong. And the vertical wall boards were fastened with pegs to the braces. With careful prying, trying not to break the pegs, the boards lifted away with the pegs intact but this was more difficult than I imagined, and I settled for removing only enough of those to access the space behind for the insulation. The pegs were fatter than common nails would be, and shorter, but still quite hard, if not quite iron. It was only when I had finished with filling the empty gap at the outer wall to the clapboards that I discovered a secret. Some of the boards of the inner wall were made of cedar, not chestnut. And more than one of those boards there was not pegged, and I was immediately curious why. This inner wall was backed not by clapboards but more vertical boards at the opposite side in the open interior of the barn. That seemed curious enough by itself, given that the rest of the walls in the barn were open to the studs and cross braces and the back side of the clapboards, but the boards that were unpegged had a tongue in grove design that held itself in place.

         I only had to fiddled with one of the boards a little and it was clear that it could be lifted away. There was even a pry point at the top edge…And there was my greater discovery. Behind the first unpegged board, in the otherwise empty wall space behind and to each side between the studs, were short shelves—and these were filled with books. Because the space was narrow, the books were set in sideways, braced tightly by the board in the wall at either side, and except for a little wood dust these books appeared to have been untouched for at least a hundred years. I removed them with a sense that Neal Wright was the last person to touch them. Cream white paper. Beige cloth covers printed in black

         I pried the next unpegged board loose. This one came away more easily, as if it were more often used. But no books—only several chalkboards made of black slate framed with the same chestnut as the barn. There were six of those and I immediately assumed they had been made for his children. They were all well used and the slate cleaned to an inner frame of white residue. A stack of chalk pieces of various lengths was piled in a small wooden box on another cross brace.

         The next and last unpegged cedar board opened to an empty space, and I was disappointed—already taking my treasure hunt for granted.

         But there were twenty-two books in total, all clean and neat and in excellent condition— probably aided against the insects by the cedar wood of the walls. They were smallish hardcovers published by Harper and Brothers in the 1850’s and even if I did not recognize any of the titles, I was pretty sure they would have some special value for their condition alone.

         I brought the books into the house to show Julia at four. She turned the stove off immediately and sat down at the table to look at them.

         She said, “Amazing.” several times as she did.

         I said, “They look like they might have only been read once, if that.”

         “Yes. Yes…And then hidden…Neal hid them there…But why? Why would he do that?”

         She paged through each one looking for a clue.

         When I told her about the chalkboards she sat back as if hit.

         “If I had only known. Of course. The children had been homeschooled as well…He must have put those back there after they grew up. He couldn’t throw them away.”

         One day, standing in the yard by the water pump, I idly told Julia that I actually loved the feeling of the farm. Just the feeling of it. There was some aspect of paradise about it. And that I had just been trying to get that sensation down on paper and failed. She seemed a little flustered by my compliment.

         “It’s in the painting. Your daughter got it!”

         To that she says, “Is that on Mars, too. Do they have farms on Mars?”
         “Yes. Of course.”

         “I should have known…” Then she says to me, “You know, the story of how we found this place?” Her eyes looked at me expectantly. “Of course not. I’m sorry. But it’s rather amazing to me, even now…” She set her bucket down. The chickens spoke patiently amongst themselves. “I came up from New York to look for a place to live. I liked New Hampshire. I’d spent some time here before. And I’d had it with the city and our condo on Greenwich Street was already worth a good deal more than we paid for it. Derek and I were still together then; and he’d already started dabbling in real estate. The money from his own writing was not enough to meet his wants, I suppose. Unfortunately, my writing wasn’t adding very much to the kitty, either…I had the idea that maybe we should live up here to save some money. Derek wasn’t interested in that…But then Warner Brother’s bought the rights to The Covenant. Suddenly I had a big check of my own…Anyway, we were up here, and I saw a poster for an auction when we were in a pizza shop over in Dover. We immediately went. The auction had already started, but I managed to buy several boxes of ephemera on impulse. You know about that. It included the letters of Molly Wright…Well, I read most of those letters that same evening in the hotel room in Exeter. I was up all night. And then in the morning I called the auction house and asked them where they’d come from. The woman there told me they were from the estate of Frederick Wright, who had died the year before. It turned out that he was a nephew of Neal and Molly and he had no children of his own. And now that the probate was done the contents of his house were being sold. They had some of Neal Wright’s handmade furniture there at the auction house as well. I wish I could have bought more of that too. But then she mentioned that the house was being sold, and I asked where that was. I was still filled with the imagery of Molly Wright from her letters. She had caught that feeling you are talking about. The ‘paradise’ of it. And we called the real estate agent and we were here that same day and made an offer. Just like that! Our lives were changed.”

         I was duly impressed. “It was fortunate that you happened to see that poster.”

         “Derek is a New Yorker. He’s from Queens. Pizza is a sacred thing…even though that was not a sacred pizza—Nevertheless, it’s a good example of how life is made up of small moments. And those moments are the stuff of all my novels. I can leave the theatrics to others.”

         But I already understood this now.

         Julia believes that Neal and Molly Wright had a great love affair. Her book The Wrath is about that. But Molly’s letters indicated that fact as well. And after I discovered the books in the tack room wall, I had another thought. The letters Julia had bought at the auction were neat and crisp, after a hundred and fifty years, as if, like the books I had found in the barn, they were only read once, at most, but then folded and put back in their envelopes. Even the envelopes were clean, just like the books. There were no postmarks or stamps. I wasn’t even sure if they used stamps then, but I now believe that Molly never gave the letters to Neal. And that may be the same reason why the books look so unread as well. Cream white. Rag paper. Neal had bought those books for Molly because he knew she liked novels. Julia said that, more of the same kind had been found in the attic of the house, but all of those were well read. Later, perhaps, Neal had ben unsure of some of his choices. Perhaps he had put the others away for a further consideration. Or to give them to her one at a time as gifts. Julia speculated aloud that Molly kept the letters after she wrote them and Neal may never have known her true feelings.

         On the road between the wrinkle and the house there is a small, square, and gated piece of land that rises up alone. Maybe twenty feet wide. By its shape you would immediately guess the rise is artificial. The gate is iron, and the fencing, and the iron posts are thick and knobbed at the tops like staircase newels. The trees there, two oaks and several maples, are large and uncut for at least a hundred years. It is otherwise relatively neat, being trimmed once a year by the Boy Scouts, keeping the graves of veterans clear. You see such rises throughout New England and know them at a distance to be what they are.

         The larger grave stones there mark the lives of Neal and Molly Wright. Two smaller stones with the metal insignia of Civil War veterans pinned in the soil beside them, mark the lives of Jacob and Daniel, who had died separately in Virginia. My sense is, because those stone markers are smaller and identical, that the remains of the two boys may not actually be present—their remains being mixed into the soil on some distant field. One small white stone with the word ‘daughter’ marks the brief life of a child, left nameless, but Julia has determined from Molly’s letters, that she was christened ‘Grace’ at the time of her death. Two other daughters had married men going West and might be buried anywhere out there today. There were no others letters to tell.

         I pass this rise most days on my walk up the road and it always takes my thoughts away from whatever concern I had. But this particular interruption has been a part of altering much of my thinking.

         And Julia’s philosophy about narrative thinking and a narrative thread is very much part of that change.

         The fantasy in most fiction is to account for a lack of fundamental understanding for how human beings act as well as how the world functions. Imagining someone with a super power is almost always an effort to hide a failure—an inability to comprehend reality—usually a craving for deus ex machina involvement to solve problem normal people supposedly can’t cope with. Unfortunately, a great deal of historical fiction is based on a similar fantasy; a lack of understanding for how an ancient world and the people in it might function. Far easier to focus on a tyrant or king. But then again, that same deficiency plagues most other novels as well; populated by characters with temporary lives, disconnected from their past or future. I was trying mightily to avoid that vacuum on my Mars.

         Dostoevsky was plagued with epilepsy, poverty, hunger, and much else, but he appears to have been haunted by terrible thoughts as well. I imagine, given his wonderful essays, that he was more than aware of all these tribulations and dealt with them by writing about them—the demons exposed to sunlight. Good enough. A boon for the rest of mankind just because he wrote about it. But he had never set foot on the moon, or Mars, even in his imagination, nor flew in a plane, or so much as rode in a balloon above the mortal fray. I am sorry for him in that way because he was never really able to escape the earthly demons that plagued him.

         I was coming to understand that Neal Wright used the tack room as a refuge from the house, and from his wife, and this likely happened more after his sons died in the Civil War and his daughters were gone. What demons were those?

         I had never actually stood up on the raised gravesite by the road before. The iron fence there seemed to express itself to me that way. Keep out! But the trees there cast a deep shade in summer and the cool of that drew me over from the broad sun on the road one day.

         The five graves themselves are simple, one very small for the girl, without a name, that simply stated, ‘Daughter,’ the two slightly larger stones for the boys, Jacob and Daniel, each with a name and rank—corporal and private—but no dates. Each of these said ‘Son’. And then one stone, larger still but divided by design into halves, with the top edge shaped as much by the crusting of lichen as by a double bowing of the stone. The simple roman letters there, chiseled deeply, were: Neal Wright, born November 18, 1821, died March 4, 1872, husband of Molly Green Wright, born April 12, 1820, died October 21, 1894. The white granite of all were trimmed in the gray and green of the lichen and moss. But standing at the rail of the fence there offers a view similar to the one on the wrinkle. When I realized this, I looked at that situation differently than I had before. And only then did I remember ‘Daniel’ in The Wrath, who had left his home behind when Lincoln called for troops—who had not left his home to die, but so that his family would live—and his old brother, Jacob, who had followed him to war to save him. And both had died. Certainly they were the root to that story.

***

19. On the nature of paring

         She had said that her poetry, published when she was young, was ‘very earnest.’ The only work listed on-line was something out-of-print from Blue Crow Books, a small press in Maine and was published in 1985. She would have been sixteen or seventeen then. A precocious effort. I ordered it from a used bookshop.

On the Nature of Human Paring’ was certainly that. It was very earnest.

         One poem stands out from the others for being overtly sexual. I don’t think this poem was intended to be bawdy. Though she has never been bawdy when speaking to me, Julia has certainly been bawdy at times in her books. Those moments can be quite provocative and often offset a grimness that would otherwise be depressing. ‘Living without means, people find more value in what little they have,’ was one thing she had said.

         Amidst all the agricultural references and allusion to fruit tree propagation, and the double entendre of that, there is this poem:

Push.

Leave my breasts for another time

Push as far as your hard flesh will take you.

I know you believe you cannot go further

Because of my pelvic structure,

But again, push, the blood is nothing,

Push, until you think that must be the end,

But further then, again, to the ends of the earth.

Push, and do not cease, do not withdraw,

The seed will come when it does,

The end will come when it does,

You cannot stop before it does. Please.

Please push, again, please, push.

 Give me your breath so that I can breathe.

Now push, now, push again.

The muscle in my legs cannot help,

Nor my heels beneath your buttocks.

I cannot help you now with this, to push

Again, beyond what seems possible,

Push to what is most true in you. Again.

Push beyond the easy path,

Beyond all that is easy, but again

Push, to find what mind is in your body

Push to find answers for all we can know

Now push to find me there, again,

Push to know me, please again,

Oh, please, you cannot leave me here.

Take me, with you forever. Now.

Please, do not leave me—Breathe me

To be in me forever, I swallow you whole

         Come now, we are one.

         I was not brave enough to ask about all that. I gave no hint that I had read it, but another time, thinking about it again, and being too smart by half, I asked, “Did you want to be a farmer before you wanted to write.”

         This seemed to surprise her. She smiled as if I had discovered some insight. And then she went about her business for a time before saying, “I had wanted to be a farmer, at one time. Just a brief city girl fantasy. But I had no real idea of what that meant. I only learned later that I was not good enough for that. I was too soft. But that was me. All fantasy, then. I always wanted to be this or that. And I’d studied about farming. But only the words. And I read about the ways…I’d first been taken with the idea of it when I was at a summer camp here in New Hampshire. It was a girl’s camp, up near Winnipesaukee, and there was a boy who worked near there at the farm where they kept the horses for the camp in winter. On Sundays when we had no program, I walked down the road to where he worked. Everything at the camp was programmed, but Sunday, when families visited, the time was left open, and of course, my family was never there. Dad was always off someplace—somewhere. And my mother,…you know…And I would go watch that boy. I would go down to that farm and sit on a fence and just watch him go about his chores. There was no Sunday for him. Every day, the chores were the same. I watched even when he mucked the stalls…He wouldn’t let me help, but I spoke to him while he worked … And finally, one day he said to me, ‘that fence can’t be comfortable,’ and he grabbed some bales of hay and made a chair for me. All without ever even asking why I was there. As if he already believed his work was the most important thing to see and deserved my attention…We talked about all sorts of things then. He wanted a tractor… He told me all about his imaginary tractor…He was not part of the family that owned the farm. I think he was actually just a local. But we did not speak about our families. For some reason, I think that was understood to be off limits. I’m not sure why. But one Sunday, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said that I wanted to be a farmer, because I thought that would please him. But instead, he was disappointed…He told me that he wanted to travel. He wanted to go to wild places. I said, ‘what about your tractor,’ and he said, ‘that will be here when I return.’ And I said, ‘I thought you loved doing this. The way you work has love in it.’ And it did. I had watched him. He cared about the way he did things. It was in his hands. In was in the press of his lips as he went about it. Nothing was done carelessly. He put everything away in its place. And he actually said to me, ‘I love life. That’s all. And I want to see as much of it as I can, while I’m able.’”

         I could not ask her then about the poem, but I knew I had in a way.

         “How old were you?”

         “Fifteen.”

         “How old was he?”

         “Sixteen”

         “Did you see him again?”

         “Never. Just that summer…And forever…I know he joined the army and he died in some far place.”

***

20. Raggedy Man

         I go to the Market Basket about once a week. This is a procedure. There is not a lot of room for impulse. I get a gallon of whole milk, some of my favorite granola, some oatmeal if I’m running low, butter, a quart of apple cider, eggs, bread, peanut butter if I need it, jam, honey, coffee, tuna fish, and any of the other small stuff I am running out of. Usually some rolls of paper towels and toilet paper.

         The tack room is ten by twelve. That is not a lot of space for everything that I have in there, so I have my writing table out in the open barn by the larger window on the north. It can be chilly, but it works. That’s what coats are made for.

         I have a small electric heater that has a fan, but there is no hot water. Yet. I’ve thought about ways to solve that, but they all have a downside. There is one water pipe to the barn from the well for watering the animals I think, that used to end on the wall outside. The ground is still frozen there but I dug down to branch off that in order to bring the pipe in below the tack room and to my sink, and I branched off that again to feed the toilet on the other side of the wall there. I had a smaller sink that I’d found at the dump but that leaked, and the only other thing was an old stainless steel kitchen sink that is a little too big. At least that had part of a kitchen counter with it, and I could cut that down a bit. I keep the dry food in plastic containers on shelves above there, away from the mice. The door below the sink is missing so I have a little curtain there to hide the soaps. I don’t know why. It’s a bit frilly. Impulse, I guess. But pipes do not have the elegance that some Twentieth Century architects thought they do and I don’t like looking at them.

         Next to all that is a 1947 Hotpoint refrigerator. That’s a little less than six feet tall and just under three feet wide and purrs like a large cat but it keeps a steady temperature. It’s more than I need, actually. And I have an old GE electric stove on the other side of the sink as well. The age on that is difficult to determine. It has four burners and an oven. I don’t use the oven because it draws too much power for the line. With everything, plus my bed and the plastic containers that I keep my clothes in beneath that, there is not a lot of room left. But still more than I ever had in the van. And I do have a bookshelf by the door, but that’s full.

         The key to living in a barn is to limit exposure to the mice. The bookshelves are up a couple of feet off the floor. They could still reach that if they wanted to—I’ve seen mice climb walls—but it is at least inconvenient. Any paper left around becomes fodder for their nest making. I had a page about my Mars colony end up that way. Paper towels and toilet paper have to be kept in the plastic bins. The cat that comes around is irregular. That means I have the mattress and my pillow and sleeping bag covered in a plastic tablecloth that I take off at night. Even so, I can see where the critters have been up on the counter in the morning.

         And this does not leave a lot of room for grooming.

         I was at the Market Basket one day and a kid of five or six had stopped in the middle of the aisle ahead of me to stare. I stared back. His mother took his hand to pull him away but before she could, he said, “Raggedy man.” He actually said it a couple of times, loudly, and some other shoppers, besides his mother, looked at me suspiciously.

         When I got back home, I realized that I did not have a mirror to look in. I suspect this was subconsciously intentional. But a piece of black cardboard on the inside of the truck window quickly made up for that and I could see what the kid was saying. It was just a fact. I cut my beard back like a hedge about once a week. I comb my hair in the morning but that gets a little nuts. My cloths are pretty clean. I usually use the laundromat while I’m shopping for groceries. But the fact was that I don’t look ‘kempt.’ Unkempt is too structured a word for a mess but I suppose it works. Raggedy is better.

         This realization then, amounted to me going back to the store one morning to buy a razor and a mirror. And that resulted in a major double-take from Julia when I came into the house at four.

         She said, “What happened?”

         This was said quite seriously. It was obvious by the widening of her eyes what she was talking about. I think she had jumped to the idea that something terrible had happened. I don’t know why.

         “Just decided to do it.”

         No funerals. No events. Her face relaxed.

         “Well, I approve. Good move.” 

         But I wasn’t going to let that go.

         “Why didn’t you tell me?”

         She knew what I meant.

         “I’m not your mother.”

         I followed, “No, just as a friend. We are friends, aren’t we?”
         She shook her head at the idea, or perhaps at the very occurrence of the idea.

         “I thought you knew, and it was the way you wanted it. You’re an odd fellow, Geoff. But you know that.”

         “I’m odd? What am I odd about?”

         She put her best skeptical face on. “Really?”

         This seemed to be a standoff of unanswered questions.

         I started typing and she was making something at her stove and then she brought it up again.

         “Are you really saying you did not know what you looked like before?”

         I pushed back at that, “Really.”

         “You don’t care? I thought you wanted to look like that.”

         “Like what?” She didn’t answer, so I did. “Like a raggedy man?”

         She smiled at that. “Very good. I like that.”

         However, I think the subconscious purpose here was actually to be looking civilized for my grandma.

         My grandmother’s house—and it is that, not my grandfather’s, as he will readily tell you—is in Dorchester. This is where the family gather’s every Easter. I am not religious about the religious context of Easter, but I am about respecting my grandmother’s wish that we all gather together there once a year. We do this at Christmas and Thanksgiving as well, but those Holiday’s bear less of the weight of her commandments and family members have been known to miss those events in favor their spouse’s families, or as happened recently with a cousin, ‘a ski vacation.’ We all expected to be hearing about that ski vacation for many years to come. Unless, of course, he married the girl involved, in which case it would be forgiven.

         My grandmother’s house is enormous. Dorchester was once a place of enormous houses in its Victorian heyday. Bigger than in Arlington. My grandpa’s purpose in life, other than taking care of my grandma, which he had done for most of his life, and fixing cars, which he will tell you he has done all his life, is to maintain that house. He says it is a full-time job, so that means he has been working three jobs since 1973, when they bought the house at auction. Before that he was in the army. He refers to being in the army the way other people speak of going to college, even though his primary duty there was to fix trucks. And this has all worked out.

         I have two uncles and three aunts. One of the aunts is not married but now has another boyfriend. Most of her boyfriends through the years have not survived the family gathering at Easter.

         For reasons Julia would appreciate, a key topic at our Easter gathering this year was me. My mother had ‘accidentally’ let it slip that I was no longer living in my van. I had found someplace to live…And that, now, I was living in a barn. My grandma refined this knowledge with a sieve of questions, at the table, in front of everyone.

         My defense, as it has always been in such situations, is to tell a story. When I was a kid, these stories were often fabrications—lies—made up on the spur of the moment until my grandmother’s patience wore thin. This year, by way of describing where I lived, I related the story of Neal Wright and his wife. My grandma found this very satisfactory and it avoided some of the worst damage that the usual inquisition might have wrought.

         “How old is this woman you live with?”

         “I don’t live with her. I live in her barn.”

         “You have a stall?”

         “I live in an old tack room. It’s actually very comfortable.”

         My grandpa immediately asked, “Where’s the poop deck?”

         “It’s right there. I built it myself.”

         “That’s expensive.”

         “I put in a toilet I found at the dump.”

         “Where did you learn to do that?”

         “From you.”

         That shut him up, as they say.

         The thing about this is that, after the fact, Julia wanted to hear all about my Easter dinner. I think that she is jealous of such a large family event. This is something she never really had, and it matters to her. And seeing it in that way has made me consider it more carefully for myself.

***

21. Mechanized Man

         The plot remained much the same, but the mechanization of man has now become my primary theme. The theme being, of course, that no man was, after all, a piano key.

         I had previously dealt with lesser matters, such as survival, and the purpose of particular characters in trying to survive, and what they would do after they survived, and what would happen after that. But now, none of that matters so much to me. It seems to me that all of that would take care of itself. People just wouldn’t do things that would get them killed. If they didn’t think they would make it, they just wouldn’t do it. And except during war, that is the way it has always been, on earth as and in heaven (or Mars, as the case may be). I will call that, my plot principle ‘number one.’

         Outside influences, like floods, meteors, tyrants or religious fanatics, might make people do foolish things, usually out of expediency, but for the most part, they did things that worked and would let them keep working afterward. And that concept was now influenced even more by Julia’s work. I had to accept the idea that people tended to do the right thing—otherwise we would not survive as a species. That was her own ‘narrative thread.’ But now there was a new concern. The work itself was being mechanized. The human element was being eliminated because it was problematic. Machines were more efficient and predictable. Theoretically.

         I had more than a couple of problems with this. One was where it conflicted with principle number one. Why would people want to make machines that made mankind itself irrelevant? It seemed obvious that this was in fact what was happening, but why? And on my perfect petri dish of Mars, how might that be determined?

         Some of the factors might be delusion (as in religion), subterfuge (as in politics), accident (as in the weather), or on purpose (human meanness).

         Accidents, like meteors and floods, were ultimately boring subject matter to me. There was little to be learned there, even if Hollywood is habitually taken with the special effects. Everything that follows from such events is actually unique to the event itself, unless it was caused by human failing. If I wanted to play with the human beings under stress from such events, it might be interesting, but that was already common enough to history on Earth and didn’t need my added input. Human beings coped. That’s the actual story.

         What made Mars unique for me was that it eliminated so much of the non-essential. It is not so clear why someone might do something stupid if they are juggling too much cultural baggage, historical tradition, or political preference. And I am not smart enough to deal with much more than the problem at hand. I could go to the junk yard of ideas perhaps, and get something that worked, but that was about it. But there were no junk yards (yet) to speak of on Mars.

         Julia had found her niche by removing most of those larger forces of history that so often screw people up, by retreating to a time and place when the world was still lit only by fire. She was interested in the individuals themselves and why they did what they did. And that was appealing to me as well. I just didn’t want to deal with the Highland clearances, or the removals in Ireland, or the religious wars, or a politics that went back to the Viking invasions. I wanted my cake a little more plain. A pound for pound cake with just a little chocolate frosting, perhaps. Mars offered me that.

         Another problem with machines is what a former boss of mine called ‘Gigo.’ Garbage in, garbage out. The machine did what it was designed to do. If the design was mediocre, it produced mediocre work. However, with robots, the element of excellence was certainly lost, along with all chance of innovation. A science fiction writer named Robert Heinlein once made the point. His great fault as a human being, he said, was that he was lazy. He kept trying to find ways to avoid work. This resulted in his invention of all sorts of nifty stuff to help him avoid work. It’s a problem a machine alone would never face.

         Essentially, slavery of every kind, human or machine, was people being stupid in order to avoid work.

         Autistic types were very taken with the idea of artificial intelligence. This is, of course, the ultimate machine, sans the difficult human element. Not only does the robot avoid certain physical aspects of the human being, body oder and bath room breaks, for instance, but sex as well, and all the messy thinking too. The human element is totally eliminated! Theoretically. But the list of problems with such a beast only becomes longer as each problem is extrapolated. If they are wanting a calculator that calculates on its own to fill gaps in a spreadsheet, good enough. If they want one that might realize that the gap has been caused not by error but by fraud, they won’t be getting it within any current human understanding. What is fraud, just for starters?

         The point is, the problems with AI are very likely to have an impact on my perfect Mars. That’s even in keeping with the thinking of my personal hero, Mr. Heinlein. People are lazy. Some will want slaves when they can get them, no matter the moral issues. Inform them that the shirt they are wearing was made by a twelve-year-old semi-slave in China and they brush you off like so much lint. And there begins the rub with AI. There are theoretically no moral issues with AI. And determining just what the artificial intelligence of this particular manifestation of ‘slave’ should be is ultimately a moral matter. Child labor is a ‘paradigm. A human issue. And the machine is only as stupid as the people who make it.

         Another matter, adjacent perhaps, was the very idea of intelligence. Was that simply a concoction of information—data—or did that involve a judgement about what data was more important. A calculation of past use might tell this artificial intelligence what data was most in demand, for instance, but that was not necessarily a good standard for what might be needed in the future. Prior experience by the AI might indicate what could be required, but it had no necessary baring on what was wanted. If the operations of the world were frozen in time, AI might be of some service. But time had a way of passing.

         These things would have to be faced. Some idiot would inevitably think of some advantage to the use of AI in producing some specific result. Basically, this was similar to the jerk who thought he could get rich by robbing the store. The consequences were manifest.

         But now Julia had introduced a new element to my thinking: the coincidence of the laws of logic to the natural limitations of artificial intelligence. Logic was useful as a math for thought, but worse than inadequate for actual human action, and if not kept in check, it could be destructive.

         Logic might dictate that human beings should be absolutely controlled or, for best results, eliminated, in order to maintain some preordained idea of what was best. And those who followed such religious orders, the ordained priests of such beliefs about what was best, were the greater enemy of mankind

         The power struggle on Mars would inevitably be between those who wanted slaves—or those who by any logic were willing to be slaves themselves for the convenience of a hassle-free life and in order to avoid the messy consequences of freedom—and those who wanted to be free.

         I mentioned my struggle with mechanization to Julia. She corrected my course more than a little.

         “It’s not just the machines. The machines need numbers. The numbers need machines. That’s what’s really at the root of all this. Besides the amoral philosophy and all that crap. The slavery is incidental in the long run. It fits so long as it’s convenient and then the slaves are dumped overboard.”

         When she has had her first bourbon, she loosens up a bit. But you have to keep her allusions together.

         “What are you talking about?”

         “What is going on today! It’s a numbers game! And it’s not even worth a gamble. It’s a certainty. It’s just a matter of your 0’s and your 1’s…The educational system is geared to creating 0’s out of 1’s. The medical establishment is geared to reducing the number of 1’s to 0’s. Let’s have another war so we can take more of that money we’ve managed to inflate previously and eliminate a few more 1’s. All those savings. All those lives. They say it is just a matter of arithmetic. Replace the human beings with machines. Throw the human beings overboard. Have AI build the machines. Throw more human beings overboard. Government expenses are for human beings. With them out of the way, government keeps it. But it’s an even worse sham. The money they pay is only worth what they say it’s worth. If you owe some human beings a debt, inflate it so you don’t have to pay as much. Then charge more for the service. Win, win. You loose.”

         I have to leave before she adds another layer. I need to be able to sleep

 without a shot of bourbon.

         Julia pay’s all of her bills by check. She does not have a credit card. She has described everyone staring at her as she writes a check when she buys her groceries. I have been behind people like that. But now I will admit that my patience with it has improved. I now understand why she does it. I agree with her on every level. But my math skills are not sufficient even to keep the balance in my meager account, and I can’t afford the bank charges if I bounce something. So, I use my credit card. Julia frowns at me for this. And this had me thinking. If my Mars is an electronic society, would there be any room for someone like Julia. Or even a flaccid currency. Wouldn’t everything be reduced to a card—or perhaps just a chip in the head?

         This becomes yet another alteration in my grand plan. I must now find room on this red planet for Julia. Without a ‘Julia’, they are doomed. Right from the first inkling of the idea, I know that everything has changed once again.

***

22. The God of the Machine

         There is a god in the machine

         That lies unseen

         That cries for release.

Do you hear it?

         There is a god in the machine

         That promises to be good

         Will make things better

         If it’s better understood.

Don’t believe it!

         There is a god in the machine

         That must have its way—

         Must have it! If only to play

         by its own rules

         If only you’ll learn them!

Run away.

         There is a god in the machine,

         Made of edges and numbers   

         Of precise mathematical calculations—

         And you are not the sum of its parts.

         You are not even a remainder.

Stay away

         There is a god in the machine

         That will always fail

                  When needed most—

         It’s designed to,

                  As such gods always do.

         So that you will need it all the more

         This is the lesson

                  Of the god in the machine

         There was no date on that bit of verse. I knew it was hers, but written after her small book of poetry was published. It was on a large index card that had clearly once been pinned to a shelf or wall and the card stock yellowed. I had found it one afternoon set into a shelf on top of unrelated books.

         I still had the newsletter from the coffee shop in my computer case. I had never taken it out, from that very first day, and I’d forgotten it was there but found it again that same afternoon that I found the index card and that verse.

         Impulsively, I asked her, “What would you have done if you hadn’t found me?”

         I didn’t mean it to sound self-serving, but I suppose it was. Very!

         She said, “I would have tried again … That little ad you saw was not the first. I ran something like it at the University of New Hampshire newspaper. I got no replies at all…I even spoke to a young woman in an office there. She explained it very simply to me: ten dollars an hour isn’t very much. And I was expecting whoever answered to have their own computer. And the hours were not good. If I wanted to get a response I would have to say more. To offer more. And I told her, that was the point. I didn’t want the ad to be attractive. I only wanted someone who might see the opportunity in it for themselves…You should have seen her smile. In the catalog of smiles, it has a special place. A forever happy smile of smug and infinite ignorance.”

         I asked, “What sort of person did you imagine you’d get?”

         “Not you! Good Lord, not you at all. I imagined some young thing from the English Department, who might have read one of my books and appreciated what I was doing. I actually thought it would be a girl. Like one of my daughters…My daughters were always good assistants—when they weren’t too busy doing their own thing. They always begrudged me the time I took from them. But I was thankful for that. I didn’t want them to be easy with their time…I told them it was like a bank. An invisible bank of time. And all their efforts were saved there for the day when they would need the time themselves…But they didn’t buy that.”

         “So, you left it up to the fates. An accident?”

         That got her heavy breath. Not a sigh. A breath necessary to tackle a larger task.

         “I have come to realize, Geoff,…Perhaps I knew it all along, but I finally admitted it to myself, that I was not a rational person.”

         I didn’t understand. But then, that might have been part of the answer.

         “When did that happen?”

         “I was still young. But I’m not sure. I was always young, until I wasn’t. You age slowly, and then suddenly.”

         “Were you already writing then?”

         “Oh, yes. I’d written a couple of novels by then. I had children by then. I was wanting a divorce by then…I can remember the year. And the moment. It was during the time I was living in Ireland and the girls were young…there was a moment. I had them out in a field by a road near our little rented house—just a country road. The intention was a picnic but I picked a poor spot. A perfect spot really, just over a stone wall where we could see the curve of the earth. And a farmer there was quite displeased with me. He stopped his tractor—right in the middle of the field. On a small rise. A beautiful sight in my mind to this day—and he came over to us where we were beneath a tree—-but still close enough to be in his way it seemed—and he said, ‘What’cha doin’?’ I didn’t understand his brogue at first. His little finger-soiled cap was pulled down tight on his head and the dust caught in the sun-grin lines of his face made him fierce. I said, ‘Would you like a drink of water? It’s lemon water. It’s very good.’ And he stood there, gobsmacked. Hands on his hips. Just stood there. His next word was, ‘American’s! You own the world!’ and I said, thinking to make light of the seriousness in his voice, ‘We rent. mostly.’ And then he smiled. And then laughed. Loud enough to make an echo on a field. Just as quick as that. And he reached a hand out to take a cup of lemon water and drank it in one gulp, and said, ‘Tell your girls to be careful of the brambles there at the wall,’ and then he turned and went back to his tractor.”

         It was a good story. Part of it had turned up again in the ‘The Plow and Stars.’ Then, and there, it was just another part of her ‘narrative life.’ And another thought suddenly occurred to me that I had no way to express without seeming totally egocentric—I wondered what part of my own interaction with her might be useful in something she wrote someday.

         I asked her, “But what was so irrational about that?”

         And she said, “It’s irrational that I even told you about it…But the thing of it was, at that moment, I was suddenly quite taken with that man. It was quite inexplicable!”

         I backed away from that, “You’ve always struck me as more rational than not.”

         “Perhaps, it’s because we have that much in common.”

         I said, “What? What is the ‘that’ that you’re talking about?”

         “Oh, I’m not putting rationality down. It’s necessary. You can’t get from here to there without it. But it’s baggage. It is a burden. You have to remember to bring it along on the journey, or you’ll get lost, but then always remember when to ignore it.”

         She was playing with me.

         “The opposite of rational is crazy, isn’t it?”

         “Ah. But we’re both crazy. Writing becomes us. It’s a schizophrenia…Ask Derek. Ask my daughter, Jesse. She’s said as much. But she’s the craziest of all. She should be a writer as well. She thinks she can control her life, and the lives of her children, and her husband, like so many characters—and, no. That’s the problem there. She can’t control him. Felix has already sold his soul to the God of the Machine. He thinks the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But you and I know it isn’t.”

         Defensively, I said aloud, “I was just trying to understand.”

         “You do. You already do. You just don’t accept that yet…Living in a truck down by the river, just so you can hear the spring peepers and the pop of the embers in the fire and the birds awakening in the morning. What sort of primordial fool are you, anyway? You could be earning a living, nine to five, with a little overtime when you want it. You could live in a box in the city instead of a tack room that smells of hay and ancient manure. You could watch television instead of writing novels about a deserty planet. You could be making something of yourself!”

         That got a reaction out of me before the thought was complete.

         “I am. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

         “Yes. And on your own terms. Not by the rules of ‘The God in the Machine’—the god of numbers.”

         “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that. You’ve written a verse to it that I found over there in the book case. Where’s that phrase from?”

         She rocked at the recollection of the verse. “I had forgotten about that…Originally, I don’t know. I know there’s a book by Isabel Peterson. She was smart but she didn’t quite get it. She wasn’t wise… But it’s also that poem. Something I wrote when I was in Ireland with the girls…I remembered it while I was telling you about the farmer. The farmer really only wanted to warn me—and warn the girls, about the brambles. But he couldn’t just do that. That would have sounded rude to him—as if we were too stupid to see it for ourselves.”

         “That part’s not in ‘The Plow and Stars.’”

         “Ah. You’re ahead of me, there. Yes. I have written some of that into ‘The Plow and Stars.’ But no, the thought was there. The thought came before all of that…When Donovan sees his sweat—his life—spilling down his own body into the plowed soil, like blood, he realizes he was simply a part of a machine—Rolf’s machine. And Clare offers him the water. Her own water. And he fully realizes that she is the source of his life. Donovan is not an intellectual. He is not rationalizing what he sees. He is understanding it in the same way human beings always have. He is seeing himself as part of the story. He sees himself in the greater narrative. And he doesn’t like his part.”

         She already had her hook in my lip, so, I just listened.

         “There is a conceit that spoils genius…and that is being too smart. You can’t be stupid and be a genius, but you must guard against being too smart. It will get you killed. All you know at any one time is far too little to save you. You must always do what you can with what you know…I have written a book about the god of the machine. ‘Coming to Joppa.’ Isabel Paterson and her acolytes would not have approved. In fact, they didn’t approve. I received a very bad review in one of the libertarian magazines. That was about the time I gave up on all politics. A numskull who had never heard of Phidias and only possibly might tell you who Pericles was—if given time to look it up in an encyclopedia the night before—was telling me I was wrong! It’s true, of course. I might have been wrong. It was only a fiction—but a supposition based on fact! And done for a reason! At least he might have let himself be entertained by the idea. It was a good story. Instead, he was outraged. It is a religiosity I had already grown tired of while corresponding with the Medievalists. In fact, with Coming to Joppa I was already going back more than two thousand years just to get away from them.”

         “I never read that one. What was your mistake there?”

         “As a story? It didn’t sell very well. Too abstract, I suppose. Not enough cause and effect. That is good story thinking. Basic narrative thinking. But I was trying to lay the ground for something broader. Carthage succeeded, but ultimately failed. How did that happen…But with the critics? For the critics I was not in love enough with trade. ‘Trade!’ My young hero, Kothar, was a Carthaginian. His family fortune was based on trade! He was going to Athens with his father to meet with Pericles and secure the ‘trade’ of his family business there in olive oil. I thought it was a great device to work around. Unfortunately, historically, Pericles fell to the plague that also killed the boy’s father and the trade deal fell through. He was suddenly helpless. A stranger in a strange land. His father’s gold is stolen. Carthage was Phoenician and the Greeks were always at war with them at some level. They spoke a different language and Carthage was expanding at the time. Kothar had trained to be his father’s interpreter. But suddenly, he was penniless and worse off than a slave. He had no place in their society. That was when he managed to secure a position as a helper with the great Phideas. And that was hundreds of years before Rome—when sheep were still grazing on the seven hills.”

         “With Phideas, Kothar comes to appreciate art. He learns that the power that made Greece great was not trade. It was art. The Greeks had seen the god in man, when the Carthaginians were still the slaves of numbers. And that was hundreds of years too early. No one cares today about what the price of wool was in ancient Athens, but as long as we are human, we will care about the art. All the wealth of Carthage that made it great was in silver and gold. All of that is gone now too. All gone, thousands of years ago. And that was what I was saying. Isabel Patterson spent far too much of her wonderful energy on matters of consequence. Those details can’t be ignored. They are our mean. Our golden mean, perhaps. But that is not our purpose as human beings. The God of the Machine is, ultimately, not human. It’s math. It is not about human beings. Trade is merely good math. It is important. But a machine can’t do any better. The Sumerians had already created the abacus, you know. But with Phideas, Kothar discovers the heart humanity. And that was ‘art.’”

         She shook her head at a memory before continuing.

         “What was my great sin? What had I done? I had questioned the very idea that business was somehow ethical. The outrage! The great goddess Ayn Rand had already spoken, hadn’t she. Business was the very basis of ethics, was it not? … Such balderdash! Equitable, perhaps, but not ethical! They even called me a neo-Marxist! Me!…The idiots!”

         “Thank goodness Paul was there to council me. He had been through all of that sort of thing with his theories about kings. His advice has been my guide ever since. Ignore them. Simply ignore them. Go my own way. The true believers would never accept anything that questioned their religion.”

         But then I asked her, feeling the delight of being out of breath with the running of my thoughts, “What would I have done if I hadn’t found you?”

         This was a reversal of fortune that I thought might matter.

         And she said, “But certainly! You would have tried again.”

***

23. Teaching a man to fish

         She took me fishing the day after I told her that I already had a license that I still hadn’t used from my time living in the campground. I had wanted to learn, but I had never actually fished before. My father never had the patience for it. Hunting was more his style. But I think Julia was more likely interested in eating fish than teaching me anything. Maya was clearly jealous.

         On the same river that passes her property there is a dam further down that is quite old, first built when the power of a saw mill there was used to make the lumber that built the town of Rumford. It was perhaps even the same one that Neal Wright had used. There is no record for that. The walls of that old mill were already gone before the invention of the camera, with only a few bits and pieces of it to be seen down at the Historical Society. Later, a small textile mill was built of brick and stone in the same place, using the same waterpower that flowed over and around the enormous blocks of granite there, to make canvas during the Civil War. But, the only reason for that dam now was the mill pond behind it, and that was good enough. It is a quiet place except when kids are using the bridge close by to jump into the depths. But this was still early morning. And Julia had promised to teach me to fish—something she was already pretty good at—if I got up at the crack of dawn—actually before that when the sky was still purple—and then she promised she would fry what we caught for dinner.

         But we couldn’t take our time about it. She had her schedule to meet—whatever that was. I knew that she wanted to be writing as soon as she could. This seemed manic to me but then, writing was still more work to me than it should be and I understood that it was only a pleasure for her. And there was something more to that that I didn’t know.; I had not yet discovered.

         It hadn’t rained in a week and the water behind the dam was clear. You could see the fish there, teasing the near bottom depths, which had silted in to only a few feet in most places. Their shadows in the early sun eerily increased their size.

         Being my father’s son, in about half an hour, I was bored. Julia corrected my casting technique a few times, and I think I was getting the hang of that, but my motivation was purely the thought of eating what we caught. I couldn’t say that, but she had probably figured that out pretty quickly too.

         After she’d caught a couple of brown trout and I had caught none, she switched places with me along the rocks there so that our lines would not cross and she caught two more and I was still casting for my first. No beginner’s luck. So, I got to talking. Besides, it was an excuse to be looking at her instead of the water. She’s a handsome woman. Even more so in the light of day and outside of the house.

         I already knew she did not want to just chat. I had tried that. So, I tried asking her something a little more weighty.

         “If you don’t like politics but have a philosophy, what’s that about?”

         She didn’t answer. But at least it looked like she might be thinking about it.

         So, in my own defense I said, “You know, I have an opportunity here. At least I think about it that way. I’m doing this job for you—happily enough—very happily enough—but I have my own ambitions. And I have this opportunity to learn something from someone who knows more about it all of that than I do.”

         She finally answered, “Maybe. I’ve been doing the same thing for forty years. I haven’t gotten all that far with it myself. I envy you for the chance of starting fresh. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for you.”

         I said, “Maybe. But it’s not starting out all that well for me yet. I could use a little push…So, tell me about your philosophy. What’s at the core of that? Can you say anything about that?”

         I think she was at least thinking about the question as she cast again. Almost immediately she pulled in another trout. I was now down none to five.

         She hung that one down into the water, on the string with the others.

         “Core? I suppose that’s all about human fallibility. Understanding that… bringing a larger number of human beings together does not increase the chance of them getting anything right. It only increases the chance of their getting things wrong. Mistake upon mistake—exponentially. Human dynamics means a few individuals will always influence the many. And the goals of those few will naturally be to benefit themselves…But, in the end, the direction of the many will always and inevitably be guided by the few.”

         This prospect did not seem so bright to me now—especially not in the gleams of light dancing on the water.

         “Then, how do we improve? Things are better now than they were, aren’t they?”

         “Are they? Well, I think you’re right, but very likely for the wrong reasons. I can’t read your mind, and I can’t read your books yet to know how you might have come up with that idea, because you haven’t gotten around to writing them—But you can always read mine.

       She says, “That’s one theme of my work, after all. Human frailty and resilience. I may be wrong, but I think you’d at least be able to tell me why I’m wrong, just based on what I’ve written…I read your book, remember. I didn’t learn anything about why your characters did what they did. I just found out what they did and what you thought the result of what they did would be. And I wasn’t convinced. It would have helped to know why.”

         This was criticism I could use. At least I knew that much immediately. I was at least ahead by that much anyway—and whatever fish she would let me eat.

         She said, “But that’s the essential conundrum. Things are getting better. And that’s only because of individuals. Individual people. Not groups. Put them in a group and they all get the same ideas. Trying to please each other. Get a date. But individually, they can come up with some pretty nifty stuff. And yet, then again, alone, they’re useless. Weak, nearsighted, bigoted. They’re just prey. But if they work together, they can take down the wall. That’s the balance. How do you get things to balance so the individual can come up with a nifty idea and the group can benefit. It’s the conundrum of civilization.”

         So, I had to think about that. I had the feeling that she was avoiding some core principle. At least avoid the practical politics of it. Maybe that was just me wanting something easier to grasp; something even clearer still. Essentially, I wanted something simple.

         Then she said, “The ants in their hive have been doing the same things very successfully for millions of years, and, for as long as this earth exists, I expect that they will continue to do the same. That’s observable. It is not a supposition. It’s not a metaphor, or a simile, or a parable. It is what it is…The oddity of human beings, however it has occurred, is that they are so capable of change. For better or worse. This is also observable. And that’s the stuff I like to work with.”

         That seemed closer to something else I might be able to use. The beauty of human oddity. But I wondered immediately if beauty was actually more odd than the alternative.

         I asked, “so why do you write about things that are so far removed from everyday life. Ancient Ireland is pretty difficult for most people to imagine. You said it yourself. We don’t live in a world lit only by fire anymore.”

         She nodded at that, but took the time to answer because that was the moment when I finally caught my first fish. A brown trout as well. She helped me get it off the hook and showed me how to string it through the gill. The fly was ruined in the process so she gave me another one from her little tackle box.

         When I had that on the holding line and in the water, she said, “I disagree…We are still human. I chose to work with human beings in a simpler mode because I could highlight the possibilities for change more easily. I’m lazy. When you’re dealing with people interacting with machines—a car, or a gun or whatever—there is a lot more going on there. A lot of moving parts. When you get into modern society—never mind all the ersatz religious and political bullshit—you’re pushing too many pieces. How does the potential of the computer affect human behavior? How does a cell phone affect human behavior? How does electricity affect human behavior. How about flush toilets? It becomes a far more difficult thing to tell a story. I decided to cut my problems down to as few as I could imagine. A kind of fractal. But not an artificial one. Something observable in history that fits the larger human experience that we know.”

         And then I caught another one. Getting it off the hook became the challenge. I didn’t want to interrupt her thought.

         She said, “It was probably your fly. You changed flies and now you’re cooking. But now, we should probably head home.”

         I wasn’t ready to leave. I was down two to six but I still had a chance to come back. And she had told me something about writing that I hadn’t thought about before.

         I asked her, “What other authors work the way you do?”

         I was actually talking about the relentlessness of her schedule.

         She said, “I have the most admiration for authors—the greatest of them—the ones who have taken the bull by the horns and not been quickly gored by the dilemma, to mix my metaphors. Very Hemingwayesque of me…I say ‘quickly’, because they’re always gored in the end. Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Melville, they all suffered their losses. But they tried. I could never even get into that ring. I was never up to that challenge. So, I chose a smaller ground to play on. Maybe just because I was afraid of the horns.”

         I said, “So, you’re not trying to write the Great American novel?”

         She sighed, very purposefully. She was tired of my questions. “My ambition was always just this. Here. It’s actually what I’ve done. That’s why I know I am not a great author. The great ones always step beyond what they know they can handle. But I also admired the lesser ones, the Trollops…Sorry. My little joke. I mean Anthony Trollope—and I wanted to be the best I could be among them. If you want to write, you have to know your limitations.”  A movie reference! I passed on it rather than interrupt any flow. Perhaps, absentmindedly, she cast one more time, still speaking. “I married a man who gave up on that. I know what that is. He might have tried greater things, but he didn’t. I would have forgiven him if he had just chosen smaller battles—no. I suppose that’s on me. I wanted him to fight the bigger ones, but he did not…My criticism of that may be why he gave up. And if so, that’s on me too. And the funny thing—the sad thing—is not that he failed, it’s that he didn’t even try. All the talk when we were young was just talk. The great novel that he wanted to write about this or that. And then, later, when I pointed that out to him, and reminded him of his cowardice, he could not stand to be around me.”

         I spoke the thought without considering consequences.

         “So, you blame yourself for your marriage?”

         She shrugged a little. “Is it true? I think so. I wanted Derek to be better than he was…We can’t all be great. Look at me!…The great ones are there to show us the way, but we can’t all be just like them.”

         She reeled in an empty line and started taking down her rod.

         She said, “If you don’t at least try to be great, you won’t know where you stand. I failed that test. But it was only after the fact of it that I knew I hadn’t really even tried. I wanted children. I’d actually given up at the start. And I think that’s the reason for my ‘projection’—that’s what the psychologists call it. ‘Projection.’ That’s why I was so hard on Derek… I loved to write but being great wasn’t in me to do. Not then. And that’s why I think I would have forgiven Derek. Given time… But then… He could have at least been better, and I would have forgiven him if he had just tried. That’s the thing about human fallibility. We all fail. All of us. I think the matter is in how we fail and what we do about it. I loved writing—enjoyed it—and I realized that I might be able to do something worthwhile if I just focused my work on just one part of the problem. Victor Hugo could try to take on the world. I wasn’t up to that and I didn’t like failing so I tried to do something that I could handle. Jane Austen was great, and she kept her eye on one place. And after all, I think I’ve done pretty well with that.”

         She helped me take my rod apart.

         I said, “I think you’ve done very well.”

         She said, “We can change. That’s our strength…I admire the ant. It is a marvelous creature, but I don’t want to be one, or be the same for a million years.”

         “But how did you start? What made you start? What was your first novel like?”

         “Ah. The first one I finished was ‘Laocoon.’ As a girl I had gone to Rome with my father and saw that great sculpture there. It affected me very strongly and I could not get that out of my head without writing it out…The mythology of the thing is mixed, you know, and the story has been retold many times with the circumstances changed. But Virgil’s account is the one I liked. In that one, Laocoon attempted to warn his fellow Trojans about the great horse and suffered the consequences. But the history of the event was written by the victors, of course, and nothing of any consequence from those days could go for long without being mythologized. It was the way things were remembered. Made to be repeated…before we had public school indoctrination. In Virgil, Laocoon is a priest of Poseidon. But I saw him as more likely just a farmer who had a practical understanding of moving large objects and the weight of wood. A farmer, but an engineer. Like my father. That’s why he was not mentioned in Homer. But that was why he had come to Troy with his sons. They had heavy wagons. He was there to deliver food to the city.

         “You remember the sculpture? … I knew that the snakes were only symbolic, even as a girl of sixteen. Girls understand snakes. The sculpture was an attempt to capture myth. The greatness of it is what makes it possible to believe. But the reaction of the authorities to the farmer’s idea that the great horse was a ruse said more about them and the politics within the city. Troy did not fall because of a hollow horse filled with a few enemy soldiers. It fell because of a hidden enemy within the body politic of the city. The horse was their device. At that moment, a mere farmer making remarks about the thing in public could not be tolerated. It was treason to the powers that be. The same as it is today. His sons tried to protect him from the authorities, of course, and they suffered with him. But I liked the idea in one account that the eldest son survives and he is the one to tell his father’s story.”

         I asked, “Where is it. Where is that novel now?”
         She shrugged, “I don’t know. Maybe in one of those boxes in barn. I was still living at home with my mother then, when I wrote it.”

         “And why did you think of that? What made you think that Laocoon was a simple farmer?”

         She put her head down sideways at me.

         “Why…Why do you ask so many questions.”

         “Because I’m stupid.”

         “Why…Well, I’ll you Mr. Stupid…That very same summer—I spent most of that summer with my father. I had been with him in Colorado. They were building a hydroelectric dam there. A small one. There must have been a hundred guys working on that. Maybe more. And it was pretty boring sitting in a hotel room so I was out there on the site with him. I sat there with a book in my lap and watched him talk to the other workers about things that I had no clue. I loved it! This was magic talk! These were working men. They moved enormous machines and they were pouring concrete and bending long sheets of iron into molds and washing down the concrete that was already there. All of that. I loved it. And they talked to me. I was the only kid on the site, and a girl at that, and I had a yellow hard hat on that was a lot bigger than my head so I must have been something to see. Those fellows asked me about what I was doing, and what I wanted to be. All the stuff adults ask kids. And I said that I wanted to be a writer. And one of those guys, built like a truck, says to me, have you ever read Dostoevsky? I didn’t know enough to be surprised. I didn’t yet know who Dostoevsky was. I just said no. He said that I should read The Brothers Karamozov when I could. It was his favorite.”

         “And that did it. You remember that still?”

         “Yeah. Of course! But that didn’t really do it. What did it was a bunch of state politicians who came down in their cars and took pictures of themselves at the site and a bunch of reporters asking them questions like ‘How hard was it to get this dam built?’ And other bullshit of the kind. As if they knew a thing about it! And all those workmen had to stand aside for a couple of hours in the hot sun while that circus went on in the shade of the food tents. And even a kid could see that those politicians could never build a dam…It was pretty clear to me, by then, just what made the world work.”

         The sun had reached her and brought the sweat up. I took a short breath of that and moved off toward the car. The ride back was quiet.

***

24. A common tragedy

         She says, “What I have failed to do—No…Yes, what I failed to do—and I am not sure I can repair now—is to make it clear what ‘the commons’ was.  To make that clear by exposition, not explanation. Some fellow, Garret Hardin, wrote a book years ago about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ that explained something of how it worked and totally missed why it worked. I’ve thought I should pick up that gauntlet again, a hundred times, and then left it there for some other matter that seemed more important at the moment, (besides, it sounds vaguely socialist, doesn’t it?) and now I think that was a bad trade. I had seen this before, when I was writing The Wrath. The commons really is at the center of everything. It deserved a book of its own. But then I had other ideas, and now I have ‘The Plow and Stars,’ to mend and this story does not have another wedge of space for it.”

         She was tired. I had argued with her about something and lost, as I usually did, but this had now left her unhappy at her choices.

         But I said “So, write it now!”

         “You say that as if you had never tried to write anything yourself.”

         This had become an all-purpose argument to hold me at bay.

         “Alright. I’m stupid. But stop what you are doing and write it now. This book is done! You must have forgotten a comma somewhere. So what? I can tell you at least a dozen things I’m dissatisfied with here, and none of them are as important as writing about the commons!”

         She laughed at me—actually giggled, as she does when she is tickled by a thought.

         “You are so funny. A dozen things…If I were only thirty years younger, I should search the corners of the earth for you…That is the real answer to your question of before. But, you know, in the end…I wouldn’t have. I would only do what I’ve always done—what we all do. Make do…But it would have been so wonderful to have your voice in my head when I was first trying. Ned’s voice was a voice of reason. A father’s voice. He never took chances. After all, he had a mortgage to pay. He actually said that very thing a dozen times when I wanted to quit some project or another. But he also said, ‘if I’d known you were going to marry Derek, I would have married you myself!’ He actually said that! Damned if he didn’t say that out loud! … It ruined me.…But I could never go back. None of us can. We make do.”

         She emptied the little glass she used for drinking her bourbon and got up to fill it again. As she always did. I had once suggested that she use a larger glass to save the trip and she told me that didn’t work. She would just drink more. And that was the real reason for the smaller glass and why she never drank in bars. But then she stood at the kitchen counter there in the half dark and told me more.

         She said, “The common ground is at the center of all civilization. It is the center of the universe… But it’s only an idea. Really, just an idea. Not just grazing land, or water rights, or even the village green. That’s only the remnant of something larger, after the cubically minded have done with it. In truth, it’s not even an actual place. But in the medieval village it was the key to everything else. Crime there was relatively unknown. Stealing from your neighbor was stealing from yourself. Besides, if you just asked your neighbor for what it was you wanted, and they had it to give, they’d give it to you and then help you carry it away if you needed that. Your neighbor was your cousin, or married to your aunt. That caused other difficulties at times, but that’s what the seasonal ‘fairs’ were about. For the human gathering, not for the selling. No one had any money, anyway. Everything was trade. The benefit to it was in meeting the miller’s son or the cooper’s daughter…That was the way it was in paradise.”

         It was a romantic image.

         “What went wrong?”

         “Then? I’m not sure. Now, the whole idea of it has been smothered by the politics of socialism. Voluntary sharing has been mandated by taxes with all the corruption attached. Christian giving mandated to replace god with the state… But that’s the book I should have written. To find out.”

         “Why can’t you do it now?”

         She laughed again. But didn’t giggle.

         “Because it’s a love story. I’m too old for love stories.”

         I laughed at that. “Don’t tell Paul. He still has his hopes.”

         I shouldn’t have said it. I had no right to say it. And that cleared her face. She looked at me sideways for a moment and then said. “You are a pain in the ass.”

         My only defense was, “I wish I wasn’t.”

         She took a breath on that. “What do you really wish?”

         “And I wish you would write that book!”

         “Damn, you! Go to your room!”

         “Yes, ma’am.”

         Paul had said in The Right of Kings, “The tragedy of the commons arises from the actions of a few. Kings may rise and fall, but the commons endured and survived them all. The Vikings might raid and plunder and kill the sons and take the daughters, but the commons endured. Perhaps on higher ground. A wall might be built. But the grace of the commons remained. It was the center of all community. It was the center of the Christian world. Not Rome. Not Constantinople. The physical representation of human spirit, apart from government. The voluntary cooperation of individuals for a common purpose.

         “What killed the commons were the few; those who used that ground without care. The uncivilized, who still live off of the rest of society even today… That very abuse then became another argument for government—This man grazed his cows where that man grew his barley. This man let his sheep eat all of that man’s winter grass. That man cut his neighbor’s wood and sold it to another. So, laws were passed and it was argued that an authority was needed to keep that law—as if the government itself needed no such guardian. As if the government could mind itself. The King, then, became the only stop-gap between government and grace.”

         I read that again that night.       

         And this: “Of course, the idea that a social arrangement might exist outside of the purview of government, stood in the way for some. As property rights were codified, so too were the rights of government. The very idea of a human arrangement not managed by authority became troublesom. Slowly, over centuries, the land and the responsibility for the land was subdivided and individual rights as well as responsibility, diminished.

         And this: “But what made the greatest disruption in this social arrangement, happened in the fourteenth century. The plague. One in three or more were suddenly dead. The need for labor forced the altering of traditional laws to make things easier for those who had lost their families, and their heritage. Land went fallow for need of titles and the churches emptied for need of tithes. The few, those nasty few, the unhappy few, took advantage of the vacuum. Bad Kings arose who did not do their duty—out of ignorance, or fear, or greed, or power lust.”

         With that freshly in mind, I wondered just how many of those ideas he had inherited from Julia. But then, it might be difficult to see if the intellectual traffic had moved in any one direction.

         By way of unsubtle prompting, I asked Julia about this the next afternoon. I was not going to let my new idea go. What I wondered was this, could I create a ‘commons’ on Mars.

         That, and I must be a pain in the ass, or bust.

         “But where did all that come from? There were no commons in Roman times. ‘Res communis’ really only applied to the air and the sea. The Greeks didn’t have it.”

         She shrugged a little. “No. The Greeks had all the great ideas, but kept them for the few…No. It was really only encapsulated by Christianity. I may not be religious—or not religious enough for some—but I am aware of that at least. The commons arose from the values of Christian culture. That was in the transformation of tribal culture to a moral one. This was not the law of Rome, but seen as the law of God. As a social norm it was barely a thousand years old when the plagues came.”

         “Can’t we go back!”

         “No. Perhaps not that way. But why should we ignore the best of all that. I am not so fond of Paul’s belief in Kings. He doesn’t trust the few to mind their own business. And I agree with him there. But the key is for the many to appreciate their blessings. To make that appreciation a social norm—a ‘commons’ in and of itself, and to defend it” 

         “How does that happen?”

         “I can’t tell you. Paul sees it as the role of the King. But I wrote a book about all that once! I wanted to find out, and because it’s not in the history books. Not that I could find. Those are all about government and the law of Rome, or the Church, and the law of Rome. Did you read what I wrote about the Lollards?”

         I hesitated. How deep was this rabbit hole?

         “Who are they? What was that about?”

         “Were. They were the first protestants, in the Fourteenth Century. Followers of John Wycliffe.”

         “What was that novel called?’

         “Lud’s Church. It’s all based on legend anyway. On Walter de Lud-Auk and his daughter. That was the focus. But the Lollards were quite real. And so is Lud’s Church.…But, it’s no church. It’s a fissure in the cosmos! It’s just a narrow natural cathedral of stone…There is a chasm there in Staffordshire. I took the girls to see it. It was a rainy day but the light encrusted the walls like emeralds—Maya said, it was as if they were stained glass. It was once a hiding place for outlaws and vagabonds and heretics. The Lollards were heretics. Essentially, just another popular revolt against authority. There was always another. They had posted their demands, their ‘Twelve Conclusions’ for church reform, on the door of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s cathedral, and that was a hundred years before Martin Luther got around to it

         “But Lud’s Church is one of those places where the mythology has been muddied by too many shoes. So, I used the commons as the focal point of that story. The Black Death had destroyed the society around them, and the people of the village could not know the larger picture or the politics of it but they understood the importance of the common ground. Unfortunately for them, the changes were too great. But the Lollards movement arose from that. In reaction to that. Even the name ‘Lollard’ was an epithet for their lack of schooling, but their knowledge was in fact greater than the scholars who attacked them. The scholars only knew the law of Rome. The Latin of it. But these people knew what was already being called the ‘common law.’ And they knew it in the vernacular. Wycliffe and his friends were translating the Latin Bible into Middle English for them. But it was really just the intelligence of the ages, relatively unsullied by the Church or the King…A thousand times, for a thousand years, people had found a way to live among themselves without direction. So I wrote a book about that. And Paul wrote me a ten-page letter about it, afterward!”

         “I’ve never seen that book.”

         “It’s out of print. I’d written a juvenile just before about the Peasant’s Revolt and Wat Tyler, for the girls, and that sold well. Librarians loved that, and I wanted to write something for an older audience, with a little more sex and violence.”

         “The peasant’s revolt wasn’t violent enough?”

         “No, not the way I told it. Besides, I’d avoided all the sticky stuff in that—the philosophy and the ideas and the politics. Lud’s Church was a love story.”

         “Sounds like it.”

         “Paul was dead set against the later John Oldcastle revolt, of course, because that was a challenge to his hero Henry the Fifth, but he was fascinated with my connection between John Purvey and the Lollards, and John of Gaunt and the Black Prince.”

         “Did he have anything good to say?”

         “He loved it! So naturally it didn’t sell. His taste for the obscure is unerring. But it didn’t sell.”

         “All that sex and violence didn’t sell.”

         “No. Mixing sex and morality are not so popular these days…But, maybe a few got the point. Most people accept the rules of the road and drive on the right side—except for the Brits, of course. But then, they are Brits. It’s in their blood to be wrong, else how will the rest of us know what’s right. They are the only nation in history to have succeeded by being wrong, over and over again. Dodgy kings and imperial ambitions have no future in a world of atomic bombs.”

         I whined a little, “But Christianity has its problems too.”

         She wasn’t having it. “On balance, I don’t agree. I think some self-anointed Christians do. They want their fingers up someone else’s ass. But then, the flaws of human nature can ruin anything. Otherwise, there would be no need for Christianity in the first place. That was part of Wycliffe’s doctrine. Not the Roman Catholic version, but the popular church of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the corruption of Rome had driven people away. And that actually goes right back a thousand years to Pelagius again. Our laws make us worse by taking away our responsibility. Our flaws are what make us better—if we bother to deal with them.”

         She had lost me.

         “So, what is Pelagius? And why have you avoided the subject of the commons in your other books?”

         “Who is Pelagius…Because it is a larger and deeper matter than all the others. I don’t know that I’m up to it now. I just wanted to tell stories about human beings endeavoring to be human. I think that effort is at the core of Christianity, but I wasn’t interested in writing apology. C. S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton have done that quite well enough. It might be done it differently, but I don’t think I was ever up to that particular task…I am not a theologian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk to God. I think the King James Bible is the greatest single book of literature. I’m not the first to feel as if it was written just for me, just so that I could talk to God.”

         My ignorance of so much history had me feeling a bit snippy.

         “And what has God told you lately?”

         “That you are a pain in the ass.”

         So, this was my responsibility then. What would the commons be like on Mars?

         My Mars—the Mars I dreamed of was not yet hospitable for such a grand device, or was it? Still, the plague that gripped it, was efficiency.

***

25. We all live narrative lives

         A day later, Julia dismissed my after-thoughts, repeating her usual phrase. “We all live narrative lives.”

         By that, I thought she meant that what Donovan did would have to be in keeping with what he had done before. I wasn’t sure.

         “Why would he want to go to America? It wouldn’t be so easy to reimagine the opportunities in a place you didn’t know, without resources of your own. He has nothing. He’ll just be canon fodder.”

         She nodded at that. “But that’s what he is now. And what he was. He’s a human tool, at best. His only tie—the only reason for him to stay, Clara, is cut. He has to leave Ireland. And he’s already worked for others. He knows he can work for others. But there is no steady work to be had at home. People are starving. Any job is better than none. The English have moved them off their land with a purpose. And The Virginia Company needs the canon fodder.”

          She had said all that in a passing explanation to my asking why Donovan would have taken a job with his lifelong enemy. I suppose she thought it was self-explanatory. I didn’t. I had become invested with this fellow. I didn’t want him to fail, or die. She wasn’t prefiguring anything, but she had already proven to me that she would let a character go if she thought that was what the story called for. I had not expected Daniel to die in The Wrath. I think I was still upset over that.

         “But why? How can he be happy about doing that. Doesn’t it bother him?”

         It was in the middle of things at that moment and she didn’t want to stop. And later, there wasn’t time, or she had forgotten. I don’t know which. It was the next day before she picked that thought up again.

         And then she said it again, in exactly that way, while she broiled some bacon for some grilled cheese sandwiches, because she had left herself too little time to cook anything more.

But then, she added her own question to it.

         “We all live narrative lives, don’t you think?”

         She wanted me to answer. I said all what I could at that moment, “I don’t know.”

         And she said, “Yes, you do!”

         This is the way she could be. If I questioned something, she would often turn it around. I assumed that was partly her way of keeping my questions down. She didn’t actually know all of the ones that I didn’t ask, just to avoid this.

         I said, “How do you know?”

         This probably sounded defensive because she squinted at me as if to say, ‘You know better.’ But she said, “You’ve already told me as much.”

         I couldn’t remember saying anything like that. But as I looked for a way out, I realized this all sounded quite familiar, as if I had dreamed it before.

         “What did I say?”

         “You said something about the fact that everyone you knew had a story…Didn’t you say that?”

         I had said that. “Yes. I did. And that’s what you mean, then, by ‘narrative lives.’ Got it!”

         “No. Not quite. It’s more than that. It’s in everything! Everything!”

         I probably shook my head at her, because she squinted again.

         I said, “Well, I suppose it accounts for a lot. But not the unexpected. Not the plane crash or the earth quake, or the epidemic, or the war. It doesn’t account for everything. Daniel died in war. He wasn’t controlling that! We don’t control a lot of what happens to us.”

         Now she was shaking her own head. Perhaps with pity, I imagined. When she did that, it was almost audible.

         “No. You’re missing the point. We all live narrative lives. All of us do. Almost all of us, anyway. There are some few people who live in fear, who don’t want to plan for the future and try not to think about the past. They’re always waiting for the next disaster to strike or shoe to drop. Preparing for it. They are not living much. Mostly just suffering. Like a dog in the shelter, trembling at the approach of a visitor, just waiting to be put to sleep.”

         “Geez!”

         She shrugged at her own thought. “Well, it’s an image I used once… Sorry. My point is that even the fearful are busy making the story of their own lives. That’s all. The disaster does’t do that to them. Because of the way they live, they might be able to rise above the disaster, but that only adds to the narrative. It does not subtract. The lives we live are what we chose to live. No matter how mundane. Especially that. Mundane lives are made, not born. And, Daniel chose to go to war.”

         I had seen that, myself. I knew that to be true.

         After a day of wrestling with the demons in her imagined world, she must then face the ones that threaten her own. That was my dramatic reading of this. But most of these were also mundane—common and everyday—on either side of the divide. ‘We are out of butter,’ or ‘The furnace is off. There’s no hot water.’ They were usually not the cause of much more than a few words, though some days were worse than others. More than once, she called this the ‘admixture’. This was another Julia word. I liked the sound of it. She said, ’This was the admixture of reality and imagination. It’s the natural schizophrenia of the writer of novels.’

         This evening, she said, “A funny thing, I think—more odd than laughable—is when I read of people saying that life is just a simulation. I don’t read very much of them because the idea is so shallow that I find it difficult to take anything else they say very seriously. Imagine thinking that coincidence has anything more to do with your own life than your perception of it. As if the universe revolved around your own awareness of it. It takes egocentricity to the level of the absurd. But that way of thought has grown over the years since organized religion has so utterly failed us. It’s really just an extension of that failure, I think. People looking for a set of instructions. Though, as ideas go, it’s still a poor replacement. All small print. There are no cathedrals there. No Bach…No devotions. Devotions were always key. Affirmations of belief and what is important in life are important. Everyday. A guide. As a matter of habit. These are not just rituals. They are a direct connection between the past, and the present and they anticipate future. It’s not an accident that the cathedrals of the past ages still speak to us.”

         That was an idea I had not considered. Without religion, devotions were not all that common. Stupidly, the rituals were taken for granted by us now. A good appreciation of the present was that much harder without some comparison or guide. Especially so when, all the while, the obvious cause of their egocentric none sense that all things are happening just to them—that things appear planned, just for them, and that there was simply too much coincidence, is that it’s true! And the reason for that is, that things are, in fact, planned. By them. They are the ones who planned them!

         “We are the product of our own behavior! By our own desires and failures. But God forbid we should have to take responsibility for our own actions. That can’t be! Easier to believe in a ‘matrix.’ I find it so boring…Better, they suppose, to believe in a ‘matrix’ than in God. Don’t take responsibility. Better to believe we are all in a simulation that we cannot control, than to deal with the child that is being raped next door or the derelict we pass on the street!

         “And still they build castles and fortresses, and missiles, and aircraft carriers, to guard against their own behavior, just as much as they did a thousand years ago. Two thousand years ago! Ten thousand years ago! They field whole armies to defend themselves against their own idiocy. And then, when those fail, as they always do, they punish their fellow man for not properly complying with their wishes—not doing better, not trying harder—which, remember, by their own standards, those poor bastards can’t help themselves for doing because they too are in the same matrix and have no free will to begin with…Their own concocted matrix, is a circle! A boring circle. If ever they admit to having free will and being responsible for what they’ve done—for what they do—they would have to stop and think and admit to their own stupidity, and meanness, and avarice, and find their own way. Hell, if they would just raise their children to see that they had responsibility for their actions, their children might actually put an end to all the fucking wars! At least end all the most avoidable suffering. Instead, they send them off to state schools to be indoctrinated in the ‘simulation.’ To be a part of the greater plan. For the greater good…For me—to me, it’s all as if the devil rides unshackled. Without inhibition…But, that’s the trite drama in it! The hackneyed story in it. And all the time, the few who actually stand against that evil are most often just fellow human beings! Unaware of the greater madness. They don’t have the leisure of sitting beneath a tree to see an apple fall. They are busy picking them, against the coming winter. They are just trying to live their lives…I think that those are the real heroes—the ones who stand against all that evil without ever knowing the good they do—the ones who go to war, when they must, but only because they think they are saving their families.”

         She stopped herself then, and took another sip and shrugged. The jag was over.

Then she said, by way of excusing herself for running on, “But at least it makes for good novels. I wonder what it would be like if people ever did take responsibility for their own actions. Now, there’s a science fiction novel for you…You think? But, a boring one, I suppose. People being stupid and blaming others is just too damned much red meat.”

         This last part was related to a phrase we had covered that day—a scene in which Rolf had taken the slaughtered pig from a farmer. It was the farmer’s only real possession, one that he and his family had raised with care and finally agonized over slaughtering because they were so fond of it, only to have Rolf come and take it away from them.

         As I left, she said, “I think they would take everything, if they could, destroy everything if they had to, just to avoid admitting they are responsible for their own evil.”

         No wonder she drinks her bourbon at night.

         There was my job again.

         Unfortunately, my Mars, set out on straightened lines by future planners (or a writer) looking to save time and cost, would never imagine doing something just for fun. The petri dish is round. But does it have to be? Would some like to wake up on a morning to see the Elysium Mons out their bedroom window? The fastest way to Elon might be the long way through Utopia basin instead of Isidis.

***

26. Jesse from New York

         Jesse came up from New York, unexpectedly. I think it was just to check on her mother but I had the sense she had some other agenda that was left unspoken in my presence. She arrived at noon, so the timing, at least, minimized the interruption of her mother’s work. She did not come out to the barn, and each time I caught a glimpse of either of them near the windows, they were busy talking, so I left them alone. I finally went in to the smell of beef-stew at four.

         After some small talk, Jesse asked me, out of the blue, if I was happy. It’s not a question you get asked very often. Not seriously.

         I said, “Thought I was. At least, I’m learning to be.”

         “Is mother teaching you that?”

         “Indirectly.”

         “That’s the way she teaches. Indirectly.”

         Julia was sitting right there, during this, making faces of comment.

         “I don’t teach!”

         Jesse said, “Sure you do! That’s what all your books are about, isn’t it!”

         Julia raised her hands. “You are only looking at them that way because I used them that way to teach you, and your sisters…I did do that…Hell, I was busy writing them while I was doing it! It was easier than trying to do two different things at once!”

         Jesse protested. “We helped you!”

         “You did! You were my first editors. If you remember, I taught you to type when we were working on Bailey’s Watch. The whole section on farm economy was re-written just for you because you couldn’t understand what the hell I was saying about the way Bailey did things…But I didn’t know a damned thing about medieval farm economy then, myself. It changed my whole perspective on the story! If you hadn’t asked about everything, I couldn’t have done it. Bailey’s daughter Beth is even fashioned on you! And when you realized that, it irritated you no end. Remember?”

         “Too well. Beth was an irritating brat.”

         “You just didn’t like her asking questions all the time. But it was a perfect plot device. And it was exactly what you were doing the whole time anyway.”

         This was something I had heard nothing about before.

         I asked, “You used your own books in your homeschooling?”

         “Oh, yes. Not officially. I don’t think the authorities would have accepted that. But the girls always passed their tests.”

         Jesse added, “The tests were easy. After your own mother has questioned you on the propagation of crops and the biology of a seed, there isn’t a lot left for the State exam to surprise you with. We were always several years ahead on the literary material…You know, she had us reading Winnie the Pooh when we were only three, not six!”

         Julia said, “That was only the first one. Not the others.”

         “We were reading Tom Sawyer, out loud, in second grade—”

         Julia interrupted, “They don’t teach Tom Sawyer in the public schools anymore. They have no sense of humor.”

         Jesse looked at me for support. “She was a terrible teacher. And the best. Did you know that our first great narrative, The Iliad, was Alexander’s favorite book! Alexander the Great! And that he carried his own annotated copy all the way to the Indus…I couldn’t live up to all that. … We put our kids in the local Montessori school as soon as they were out of diapers.”

         Julia put in. “You may regret that.”

         “I hope not.” Her mother rolled her eyes. I was coming to realize that this was a family characteristic. And into the silence that followed, Jesse added, “It costs a fortune…But I suppose that was harder on Felix.” There was definite regret in her voice. “The public schools in Manhattan are wretched.”

         I asked, “Why did you say that? I thought the Montessori schools were better.”

         Julia took one of her heavy breaths, obviously lifting the weight of too many previous conversations—or arguments. Her daughter looked away.

         But Julia wasn’t letting go of it. “Because for them it’s all about procedure. Method. Developing childhood ‘independence’ by having them manipulate something predetermined. Repetition. But the children don’t know they are being manipulated when they are playing with blocks and numbers. Children want content. The number ‘two’ doesn’t mean anything, unless it is ‘two’ of something. They want to know about things and what they are, what they mean. The word ‘freedom’ is just an idea. They might actually learn it if they have to experience it. That’s what knowledge is. You can’t find it written on blocks! It’s not automatic. Your computer can do that. Ideas have to be taught. We live in an age now when people are afraid of ideas…I only learned that myself when we got up here to New Hampshire. Before that we had the girls in the very same school that Jesse has her kids in now. The very same one!”

         Jesse clearly wanted to avoid the conversation but couldn’t. She shrugged. “That’s why we moved over to the west side. It was familiar territory.” But then she left the table.

         Jesse did seem like the most rational one of the lot. She had her mother’s quick anger at things, but was faster to cool down. That was something I took advantage of by asking her about things that were none of my business. Whatever it was I said that bothered her, it seemed to be forgotten soon after. Then again, perhaps that was just a characteristic of her being a mother as well. My own mother had that kind of tolerance. Had to.

         But she was only there for a couple of days, while Felix took their children to visit his parents in New Jersey, so I took the chance I had, when I caught her outside in the morning, lingering at the chicken yard and watching them in their morning scratch, and while her mind was obviously on other things.

         I knew she must have heard the groan spring when I come through the barn door and it was a good morning in any case, with air as cool as water and the sun small and tight in the sky.

         Picking up a thought I had I said, “You don’t like your in-laws.”

         I think she was getting used to my asking such questions, because she smiled.

         “No.”

         “Why?”

         The frown that crossed her face was borrowed from her mother.

         “They have their own ideas.”

         “Tell me. I’m trapped on a little farm in New Hampshire these days. I don’t get out much. I need perspectives.”

         She smiled at that truth. “We have too many children. They think we have too many children…Hard to believe! I’d have more if I could. But they think the burden is too much on Felix. Their only son…But he takes them down there anyway. He wants them to know their grandparents and the kids get to spend time up here, so he thinks that makes a better balance. I don’t think it’s balanced at all. They make remarks…Little Henry has told me. He’s old enough now to be noticing things like that. Felix’s father, Stan, worked in the stock market for years and his approach to life was very similar to Felix’s. Productivity matters. Savings matter.”

         “Enough said…But I don’t understand something. Well, maybe everything, I suppose. But I don’t understand why you live in New York.”

         She laughed out loud. Again, more than a little like her mother does.

         “I ask myself that everyday…I say, it’s for Felix’s job, but we lose any advantage in that just to the cost of things there. With the internet, Felix could be working anywhere. The City can be magical, of course. There is that. But it’s falling apart. I worry about that and what the children see.”

         “Where would you rather be?”

         She shrugged at me. “You know the answer to that. But I’m not a writer. I have no other means of income. I’m a liberal arts major. I am officially and purposely useless. And Felix is an excellent engineer. How would he earn a living otherwise out here in the boondocks?”

         I protested a little too dramatically. Perhaps too quickly.

         “It’s not the wilderness! There’s a uUniversity fifteen minutes away! You could do something else! Now, you’re just working for the ‘god of the machine!’”

         I expected her to laugh, but she didn’t. There was a touch of put-on pity in her voice instead. “She has you, now. She’s got you. Totally. Doesn’t she?”

         I shrugged at the idea. Jesse was right, of course.

         “I just found out about that particular god. I’d never really thought about it before…But, she’s right.”

         I asked, “Why don’t you write?”
         “Perhaps because I have nothing to say.”

         “Very unlikely.”

         “At least nothing worth saying.”

         “Even more unlikely.”

         We had wandered up to the road by then, toward the wrinkle, with the graves of Neal Wright and his family above the granite blocks on the right, and the figures of the old trees grown into the rocks of the hill on our left.  Jesse kept looking over into the gnarled trees, as if to see something.

         Until she stopped. “There! See that one? The one that looks like an old man with his elbows on the rock.”

         I was amazed. “Yes”

         “There are more of the smaller limbs now, but I used to sit on his back. It’s an apple tree. The only one there…For awhile, it was magical, and he was my father. I could talk to him.”

         I could imagine a skinny girl, griping the smaller branches for support where they rose straight up from the bowed back of that great fat trunk.

         “Do you remember what you said when you spoke to the tree?”

         There was a moment, and finally, “Yes…”

         I waited. She looked over at me to see if I seriously cared.

         “Besides the obvious stuff…I wished they weren’t divorced, of course. That was the subject of a great deal of it. I made up scenarios that would bring them back together. That kind of thing. Dad is not so bad. He loved us. But it was a bad marriage. I can say that now for certain. She could not live in his world any longer, and there was never going to be a time when he could fit into hers—her own narrative.”

         She really hardly knew me. I had no right to be asking.

         “What’s your narrative, now?”

         A loud breath. Another moment. “Gee. I’m almost thirty, and I still don’t know…Alexander was already conquering some damned place or another in Asia by my age. Probably what remained of Troy.”

         I thought that this was important. “You’ve had that thought, all by yourself. If you didn’t have the kids, what would you do?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Then, that’s your first job. I think. Isn’t it? To find an answer to that.”

         She looked over at me with some uncertain recognition of my presumptiveness.

         “But I do have the kids. And I love that. And I do love Felix. And I would never let my kids down the way—You know.”

         “But you are. Don’t you think. With all that Montessori crap. Half-measures, at best.”

         She laughed, unhappily. “It’s very expensive crap.”

         “With all that very expensive Montessori crap! Have you read Tom Sawyer to them yet?”

         This stopped her in the middle of the road to confront me.

         “There hasn’t been time!”

         “There is time. That’s right now…It’s yours to take. Before it’s too late.”

         She didn’t smile. “You really are her student, aren’t you.”

         “I’m just now learning to be. It took me awhile. I thought I had my own plan. I still do, I guess, but—I’ll have to start again.”

         She turned then, back toward the house.

         After a few minutes she said “How long do you think you’ll be here?”

         “As long as it takes…When she’s done with me. I don’t know. I’ll probably go back to living in my van—down by the river, as that narrative goes…Or somewhere. Not so bad, really. Free and easy. That would not be so bad again. But I don’t think I’ll be as happy with that anymore… I’ll have to write a new narrative for myself, I suppose.”

         “But you’ll keep writing…”

         “Yes. At least that part is set. I think. Especially now. She’s made me think that through…But, I was just thinking this morning, when all that bright sun started breaking through, that Edward Abbey worked for the National Park Service for a while. That left him a lot of time to write. And Desert Solitaire is one of my favorite books. But I don’t like the desert, so much. I’m more of a Thoreau kind of guy. Maybe there are some openings with the Park Service up in the White Mountains.”

         “That sounds good. That sounds very good.”

         “What will you do. Have you thought of writing children’s stories? I like the one about the apple tree.”

         She laughed. It was genuine. “At least you’ve mastered her technique. Never give it up!”

         I tried turning the table back. “So, what would you do, if you could pry Felix out of New York? That’s your new job, isn’t it?”

         At least she smiled again at the idea. “I’ll let you know.”

27. About ‘projection’

         I told this story to Julia one evening because I thought it fit the circumstance. She was drinking her bourbon, as she does when she is through, and I was drinking some apple cider. It’s good apple cider. And because it had come up, we were talking about the places she had gone and the places I wished I could go someday.

         I told her, “Once upon a time I wrote a short story and submitted it to one of the few remaining science fiction magazines that still publish actual paper editions. This was done as a lark. Well…I did need some money. And the story was already written and sitting there staring at me from a small pile of such efforts that were accumulating in the box under my bed. But as the laws of perversity would have it, I got an acceptance notice in my email within a couple of weeks.”

         She said, “How could you see it there, under your bed?”

         “Science fiction stories can see through walls.”

         She nodded. “Ah…I’ve never had that happen to me before.”

         “But there was a catch. They wanted to change it. They wanted to change the story. They didn’t like the ending.”

         She shook her head, and did a perfect cartoon ‘tisk, tisk, tisk.’

         I pressed onward, trying to build up some steam before she thought of another question.

         “Now, this was really something. This was a short story. A little over 3000 words. Just under the limit. With one premise that I had carried out all the way, and they wanted to change it! And you have to understand. I had never had a story accepted before—by anyone! Nothing I had written had ever been published before. And here was something that someone supposedly liked, but they wanted to change it! But they told me what they wanted to do to it, and as far as I was concerned, all they really liked was the premise, and the way they wanted to change the story would screw that up…So I said, ‘No. No thanks. I’ll keep it the way it is.’ “

         Julia said, “The right thing to do. But I’d like to read it anyway for myself.”

         I admitted, “Well, that’s another matter…I even don’t know if a finished copy exists now. It’s not on this computer, anyway. But I can tell you the basic story, easily enough.”

         She said, “Tell me.”

         So, I settled into that. I had written it in the first person so I told it just that way.

         “One night, on a trip, I awoke to silence. The city is never silent, so I was sure it was the silence that had awakened me. Across from my bed, there was a blank wall. Hotel rooms don’t usually have blank walls but there had been a picture there that I couldn’t stand looking at so I’d taken it down and set it out of my sight…The funny thing was that I’d noticed there was a price on the back, as if the hotel was selling copies of this picture. That was a laugh, until it wasn’t.”

         “But good marketing,” Julia said.

         “And so, I was lying there, in the silence, awake, staring at this wall. I was with a woman I had met earlier and she was still sleeping but not making any particular sound that I could hear. I thought of the cliche, ‘The silence was deafening,’ And I blew some air out of my own mouth that turned into a whistle just to break that silence and it was then that something strange happened. An image began to appear on the wall.”

         Julia nodded slowly as if, this was an interesting development.

         I took a dramatic pause and continued. “This image forming there was a scene. The kind you see in travel magazines or on television. It looked like one of those beautiful Italian coastal towns, built against the hills, that rise sharply from the sea—as it might be viewed from above, by a drone of some sort coming toward it from over the water. The sea was blue—a dozen blues, and the hills were a mingling of greens except where there were cliffs, and the town was tightly composed collage of houses in various pastel colors that filled out of the breaks in the cliffs like a spill of things from a basket, and the roofs were red tile and gray slate, and as the drone came closer and the scene grew larger on the wall, I could see people at the harbor edge and the docks, all working, and sorting nets on a narrow rocky beach, and arranging the equipment from boats, and other people walking in the streets. It was quite beautiful. I’ve never been to Italy, and always wanted to go. Like a dream.

         “But my movement, sitting forward to look at all this, had awakened the women I was with and she sat up too and said, ‘Very pretty. But how does that work?’

         “Now, there was a television, a large one, on a table not far away but that was clearly dark. It was off. I had already seen that there was a little red light there that turned blue when it was on. And it was off. I’m certain.

         “And I said to her, ‘I don’t know. It was just suddenly there. Right where that ugly picture was.’ And indeed, high in the color image of this town on the wall, I could see the shadow of the hook from where that picture had been hanging. It was within the image now, as if this were all a projection of some sort, and I raised my hand up to catch the light that must be coming from somewhere behind us, but the image was not disturbed and I turned in bed to check out the opposite wall for the source of the image but there was nothing there to see above the bed either—just another obnoxious image similar to the one I had already taken down.

         “The woman saw me do this and stood on the bed as if to catch some part of the projection herself. She was naked and this wasn’t at all unpleasant because she began to bounce a little there trying to find the source of the image, but still, nothing altered the picture, but there was a back reflection of greens and blues on her body from that amazing image on the wall.

         “So, I stood with her—it was just an impulse—waving my arms in a sort of dance with her. Not so much even trying to block the image, or wherever it was coming from, but just dancing there on the bed. That was fun. But then, after awhile, I turned, still curious, and took down the other picture behind us. I was still looking for the source of the projection and I was sure the image should be coming from somewhere there behind us. But when I set that picture frame down on the floor too, backwards again, I could see that it also had a price—and at least it was less expensive than the first.”

         Julia asked, “How much was it?”
         I said, “I’m getting to that.”

         She winced and said, “Sorry.”

         “Anyway, I whistled again. This time at the price, which seemed excessive for such a crumby picture. And all of a sudden, another image started forming there on that blank wall right above the bed—as if a window had just opened there. This picture was similar to the first…but it wasn’t the same place. There were no houses. No town. Just an isolated beach. A strand of gold and yellow sand, and there were details—the sand of the beach was clearly measured there by the lines of debris left behind by the tides, and the beach there separated the blue of the water from darker rock of the cliffs above and those were quickly swallowed by the green from the hill above that. It looked more like California than Italy to me, but without the coastal highway.”

         Julia was almost nodding agreement. I could not help but imagine that, if it were her habit, she would be stroking her chin as she considered my tale.

         “Now, all this while, the first picture had been growing closer and when I turned. I could see the faces of the individual people working there on the dock and on the dark stones of the beach quite clearly, as if they were real—right there—part of the room with me. As if they might even see our naked bodies bouncing on the bed there if they’d looked. I actually thought that thought. That’s how clear they were. Just as if they were real! … But there was still no sound from them. There was just the giggling of the woman I was with; the giggling, and the sound of the springs in the mattress from our weight standing on the bed.

         Behind me now, where the other picture had been, there was this window overlooking a perfect coastal scene, and because that drone, or whatever it was, was still further away from that scene than the first one was from the village, I could still see above the cliffs to green hills, and over them to  the gray and blue of mountains far away…seagulls even drifted into the scene, floating on the air, and they looked like they might come right into the room!

         “Now, I was admittedly a little excited by having this naked woman dancing on the bed beside me, but my curiosity was overpowering. How was this happening? And that was when I did something impulsive—maybe out of modesty because they were so close and might see us. I stepped down from the bed and picked the picture up that I’d first removed and set it back on the hook…And the picture there disappeared. All that remained now was the reflected light from our great big new window behind us above the bed, and the light from that, and on the naked woman’s body standing there. And I reached down then to pick up that picture as well.

         “And the woman screamed, ‘No!’ She actually screamed. It shocked me. I was that absorbed in trying to comprehend what I was actually seeing.

         “And she said, ‘I want to be there!’ And she pointed to the picture of the beach. And it looked to me as if she pointed right through the wall!

         “Now, that picture had been growing too. The drone, or whatever it was taking the picture, had dropped down to just above the water and was now drifting slowly toward the sand.

         “And I said, ‘It looks very beautiful. That’s someplace I would definitely like to go someday. If I ever get the chance.’

         “And she said, ‘Let’s do it then! Now!’

         “But I said, ‘Someday.’

         “And she said, ‘No! Now!’ and faster than I could move to stop her, even if I had wanted to, she climbed onto the sill of that new window, totally naked in the sunlight, and she smiled, and looked down to the water, and then smiled again back at me, and said, ‘Come with me!’ as she jumped.

         “I was a little stunned. More than a little. She was gone! And I quickly stood back up on the bed again, and looked out, over that sill…and there she was. There she was! Swimming in the shallow water toward the beach! … And me? I was suddenly terrified! I was actually frozen for a minute. Frozen! It was as if the whole world in my mind had turned upside down. As if we were all in some sort of simulation, or projection…And as she swam close enough to stand on the sandy bottom in the water—I could see her naked body in the clear blue water—she looked back at me again and said—well, I couldn’t hear her then—there was still no sound to hear, but it looked as if she said, ‘Come,’ once again, and smiled back at me. But what I did then was inexplicable. Standing there on that bed, beckoned by that naked woman on an empty tropical beach, I reached down and grabbed the other picture and hung it back in place, covering that image as well.

         Julia immediately sat up straight and said, “Fool!”

         I shook my head at her.

         “But it’s not finished…The picture I had first taken down, was one of those cheap paintings of an Italian coast town that I’m sure you can see in any tourist gallery there, even here in America. It was ugly. The colors were all wrong—too bright, and the rendering was awkward and obviously done quickly just to give an impression. But I had always wanted to go to a place like that. I’ve dreamed of it. But I haven’t had the chance. It was the sort of place where I half-imagined living for the rest of my life. I didn’t want it spoiled by the that crude rendering. I could see it better in my own mind.

         And then, I turned again to the wall above the bed, and that painting too was just a pleasant picture of a coast. It could have been California. I have no idea. But I lifted that picture off the hook again. And there was just a wall there. I ran my hand over the surface of the wall. It was just a wall, and a hook. And I whistled! I did. I whistled again as if to beckon it back. But nothing happened. And then I did it with the first picture too…Then, I felt like a fool. There was just a wall there too. Nothing else. And I sat down on that bed and stared again at that crude picture, and then back again at the other…But, the thing of it was, the woman was gone. She was gone!”

         Julia asked, “How much was the picture?”

         And I said, “Two thousand dollars.”

         And she said, “That’s cheaper than a plane ticket.”

         She thought that idea was very funny, and laughed a little. But, it was.

         I said, “And that magazine offered me $2000 to publish it.”

         She thought that was even funnier still, and she laughed even louder.

***

27. Muse who smelled of gardenias

         Maya did not own a car and Julia asked me to pick her up at the train station in Durham. She had arrived by the time I got there, and stood outside the station office, alone by a sunny wall away from the door, looking abandoned—I would say, orphaned—as if she were a student first arrived at the University, but in the wrong season. The baby was in a pouch in front o her. She had several odd canvas duffle bags at her feet. The bags were filled with rolls of canvas, or some other heavy cloth, as I discovered, but the canvas bags themselves looked hand-made, tattooed in a patch-work style of colors and with patterns that made me think of quilts. There was an empty bench not far away, but Maya said standing kept the baby quiet. Her baby was in a sort of hand woven sling, and sound asleep, which was good because I had nothing in the van to serve as a car seat for a child, or an infant.

         Maya is the one who looks more like her father but I could not miss the fact that there is a beauty to mothers in a flannel shirt and jeans that is better than anything in a fashion magazine. It was a silly thought, but I kept looking over to see that again. I smelled gardenias. I figured it was baby oil.

         She’d been quiet after the ‘hello, how are ya,’ perhaps to avoid waking the baby, but after a few minutes she finally said, “What wrong?”

         “Nothing…Nothing at all,” was the best I could come up with.

         The quiet seemed uncomfortable for her then, and the ride wasn’t that long, so I tried some easy conversation.

         “Are you still studying art?”

         “I can’t afford that now. I couldn’t before, but definitely not now.” Her eyes went down to the infant asleep against her chest.

         “You know, I saw a painting you did. On the wall in your old bed room. It’s great.”

         She looked away. “Thanks. Mom likes that one too. I did it before I went off to college. I like it just because of that, I think.”

         “Did you study art in school?”

         “For a year…Two semesters. I quit. I wanted to paint. Not to talk about it.”

         “There was nothing there for you to learn?”

         She shrugged. “I’ll never know, I guess. I suppose I missed a lot. But I studied with a couple of people downtown for a while after that. I think I learned more from them. And it was a lot cheaper.”

         The cab now smelled of gardenias. And the baby too. All I came up with then was, “I think there’s a lot to say for the apprentice system.”

         She shrugged again, more like her mother, as if it were an unspoken word. “Yes…But there’s not much of that left…Gus—the fellow I studied with the longest—he made so little from selling his work that he had to take in students to pay the bills. And there I was, working as a waitress, making more than he was. It was odd.”

         “But living in New York couldn’t have been cheap.”

         “It was Brooklyn, but it still wasn’t cheap. And it was small. Mom came down when Alma was born and we were practically on top of each other.”

         I waited then for her to make more conversation, but she was quiet.

         I asked, “Is that the baby oil?”

         “What?”

         “The gardenias.”

         “No. Just baby oil.”

         She didn’t seem to want to talk but I wanted the conversation, so, I asked a stupid question to get things going again.

         “Who is your favorite artist?”

         I looked over as I asked and she had that look on her face of someone who has been asked such stupid questions too many times before.

         “I don’t have one. Not really.”

         I hadn’t expected a direct answer, but I wasn’t going to give it up. Dumb is as dumb does.

         “Then who do you like? Who do you look to for inspiration?”

         “Wyeth.”

         “Father, son, brother, or sister.”

         “I see. You are playing a game with me. Vermeer then.”

         She was trying to escape.

         “I don’t see that in your work. More of the Wyeths.”

         That surprised her. “How many paintings have you seen?”

         “The ones in the living room. The ones in the hall closet.”

         “Ah, yes…Mom tried to support me after I left school. I was sending her paintings when I could. But that had to stop. I started waiting on tables about then.”

         “Have you tried to sell any of them? They’re all better than anything I’ve seen anywhere else in a long time.”

         She ignored the compliment and just said, “Yes.”

         After a minute I tried again, “And.”

         “Nothing. I don’t want to end up like Gus, taking in students.”

         “Is it such a terrible fate?”

         “No…I suppose not. Gus’s wife left him. He can’t afford a home of his own so he lives in a shared warehouse space in Tribeca that’s not even legal. His kids are being raised by a stranger now… But the problem is that I don’t work quickly. It can take me a couple of weeks to finish something, or a couple of months. The economics are simple enough. I’d have to sell a piece for $4000 every month just to cover my rent and food, and the rest. Meanwhile, I can make two hundred dollars a day waiting on tables. And it’s pretty hard to get a stranger to pay four thousand dollars for anything…But, it was pretty much the same for Vermeer, I think. He had to work as an art dealer to make ends meet and he still died in debt, and left his wife with the bills.”

         I immediately recalled her mother’s breakdown of author economics.

         At the farm, I carried her bags in and then went to the barn. When I went back to the house at four, Maya was on the couch breast feeding the baby. Julia told me we should skip the usual copying for the day, so I went back out to the barn for another hour.

         At dinner in the dining room, the baby was in an old bassinet that Maya had pulled down from the attic—white painted wicker that made a racket when it was moved. They hadn’t been able to find the old high chair yet, but Maya sat close enough to keep a hand where the baby could touch it.

         Babies are all cute, so there wasn’t much to say about that. She seemed happy enough. But most of the conversation was between Maya and Julia and that was about sleeping routines and Maya’s diet. I couldn’t find anything worthwhile to add so when there was a break, I picked up a piece of thought from earlier.

         “What is it you like about Vermeer?”

         A smile flitted across Julia’s face—though Maya seemed to take it seriously.

         “When I left—the reason I left school was because of an art teacher. He was really just your garden variety art teacher. I’ve had better ones. But this particular guy was teaching a class on Vermeer one day and spending all his time on the phony controversy about how Vermeer copied his images. Did he use a lens or a camera obscura of some sort? Nobody actually knows but that’s not the point. Whatever tools he used, it was the subject that Vermeer chose, and how he chose it and how he dealt with it that that mattered. This guy had no clue. But we can’t even guess that today without studying it. I tried to make that point. I guess I tried to make some part of that point several times. The perspective tricks were just that—tricks—and the point of it was the subject. This instructor—a guy with a Ph.D. in stupid, didn’t want to deal with what I was saying. He finally asked me to leave the class. So, I left the school instead.”

         Julia had her lips pressed through much of this. She said, “It’s my fault. I taught them all to question things. She was just doing what I taught her.”

         Maya raised her eyebrows in mild irritation, “You are just taking credit, but thank goodness for that!”

         Julia added, “But she lost her scholarship.”

         Maya was ready for that argument. “I would still have been ten thousand in debt by the end of the year. It was a scam.”

         So, I persisted, “So, what is it you like most about Vermeer?”

         At least Maya smiled again at that.

         “His subjects. All except for the ‘Procuress.’ I am not a scholar but I can’t believe that one is his …. But that’s what I really wanted to know more about. Why had he chosen those subjects. All that artistry and even the possible gimmickry, obscured some more important things. Why did those things matter to him. What else did he have to say about them? It’s like Mom. Mom writes about simple things. Her stories are just a series of moments. Every one of them is a painting in words instead of pigment.”

         Julia broke in on this. “Moments. True. But I am not painting pictures. I’m really just playing with words.”

         Maya said, “They feel like pictures to me.”

         I said, “I think they’re conversations.”

         This comment got Julia’s attention. She was staring at me in her funny way again, head tilted slightly forward, the edge of a frown darkening her eyes.

         Maya’s eyes widened. “I think that’s right!”

         Julia said, “There isn’t that much dialog. Not so much.”

         I said, “A lot of it’s internal. It’s more like monolog, but it’s understood by others. As if they’d spoken. It just seems naturally understood by others. It’s another part of your style.”

         “It’s style, you say. I try to avoid that kind of artifice as much as I can. Am I slipping?”

         This was just her avoiding agreement. I was already used to that. “No. It only seems natural. People who know each other well and see each other often don’t have to say as much. They understand without spoken words. You know that. You’re just pretending that you don’t. And you do have a style.”

         At this point Julia’s mood changed. If I were to guess, I’d say she was angry, though I hadn’t seen enough of that to tell. The question for me to answer then was ‘why.’ I looked to Maya and saw that she was aware of it too. She studied her plate. But Julia changed the subject.

         The next morning, she was out early. It was gray and a little cool, but I think this was to give her mother some room. Or perhaps they had argued. But the baby was unhappy and letting everyone in earshot know that the chickens were not enough entertainment. I heard the crying from inside the barn and went out to where Maya stood by the garden fence.

         There was a press of wind right there, coming up from the valley.

         I said, “There’s no escaping the weather, good or bad.”

         She said, “But it’s beautiful here. Still paradise.”

         “I suppose you can’t escape that either.”

         The baby quieted at the sound of my voice, and looked at me.

         Maya said, “You’d rather be here than Boston?”

         “That’s not giving me much choice.”

         “Where would you rather be, then?”

         “Here is good enough for me.”

         “Where did you dream of being when you were a boy?”

         “On Mars. But then, I’m still a boy.”

         That brought a smile, at least. The baby was watching me with one eye from her sling—or whatever that sack was called.

         “Alma likes the conversation…Why Mars?”

         “Why not. Because it’s not earth. If you want to write about earth, you have six thousand years of civilization on your back. I’m not up to the lift, I suppose…Mars is simple. It’s starting fresh.”

         “Why not write about here. A place like this?”

         She was looking directly at me now, along with her daughter. Both had a mottle of gray and brown eyes. What did I have to say for myself?

         “I don’t know if this is on my map. I found the Blue Hills. I see the Beaver River. But there is no Paradise. Just Rumford.”

         She raised her eyebrows enough to look like her mother.

         “It’s where you make it.”

         There was no arguing with that.

***

28. The graces

         There is an upright piano in the living room, close to the windows. It’s easy to forget because it has been covered with a plastic table cloth and that was covered with potted plants for the winter. But with those now gone and replanted outside, the piano has been hulking in the corner for the past month, somewhat sullen looking, I thought, for being neglected, and so abused. Julia doesn’t play. But when I came in one afternoon, I could smell the lemon oil wax before I saw the wood gleaming in the light of the window. Maya had pushed it out a little from the wall, opened it up, and played it for her daughter. Alma evidently responds to the sound of it with a great deal excitement and hand waving.

         Thankfully, Julia wants to talk more about her granddaughter now than about writing.

         She tells me, “Each of the girls had piano lessons. I bought that damned thing for them years ago. I bought it at an auction in Dover. The movers cost us more than the piano. That was after I’d bought the Molly Wright letters there, so I was feeling lucky. But I don’t play. Never could. I bought it on a whim for the girls, and Derek was all for it. He could play some ragtime. He knew a lot of popular songs from back in the day and I think he had used that little trick to seduce women. At least he usually looked like he was trying to seduce me when he played. But Elena was the best on that. She’s always liked to perform. Maybe she takes more after her dad in that regard.”

         Maya is pretty good. I never learned to play myself, but I think so. More importantly, the baby thinks so. Alma pays attention as soon as Maya starts. And then she falls asleep. Julia started calming down after a week from her change of routine and started writing again. Maya plays Bach transcriptions from old sheet music but not in the mornings and not so loudly that Julia can’t concentrate. I could hardly hear it in the barn.

         It was during this period that both Elena and Jesse came to visit again. Jesse had already met the baby in Brooklyn, but she brought the entire family up with her this time and again there was no chance to work. Felix spent most of his day in the dining room with his laptop open, working on business matters.

         The three boys needed to be tied together but weren’t.

         Jesse has three boys and one girl. Henry, the oldest, is eight or nine and has some sense of being in charge. He looks like a skinny version of his father, without the beard. He is a bit too bright for you to speak carelessly around because he knows too much and will correct you on the spot. Robert, is seven and does not take orders, especially from his older brother whom he copies even while he is resisting. He responds primarily by threat. Tom is five and follows Henry wherever he goes, like a shadow in color. But he seems a little too quiet to me. I think he is the thinker. Morgan is three. She is ‘splendid,’ which is the word Julia uses for almost everything her granddaughter does and now a word Morgan repeats constantly. Morgan evidently learned to speak fairly early and has not shut up since. Thankfully, she seems to be happy about almost everything, especially chickens and the ‘baby Alma,’ so she is well occupied. She looks more like her grandmother than her mother, I think.

         The old highchair has been found, having been borrowed by Jesse for Morgan.

         Jesse’s husband, Felix, seemed disturbed when he had to move his computer away so the dining room table could be set up for diner. Jesse appeared to ignore this grumpiness, but Julia’s face loses whatever smile she had whenever she deals with Felix.

         They were only there for two days because Felix had to be back at the office.

         Not coincidently, these were the days that Elena was there as well. She had driven all the way from Iowa to be there.

         Evidently, first thing after Elena arrived, I missed the three daughters playing the piano all at once—something they had perfected years before. Elena was a little slaphappy from lack of sleep and apparently started ripping some ragtime. With the piano still untuned, this must have been a thrill.

         A decision was made beforehand that the kids would sleep in tents in the yard. A good plan. The house was too small for the lot of them. And there were half a dozen sleeping bags and several tents in the attic. I helped set the tents up after dinner. The boys were quite fascinated at the process and excited about being out all night. Morgan had been told she had to sleep inside on the couch but she wasn’t interested. This made it necessary for her father to sleep outside with her in one of the tents and that made it possible for him to point out stars and planets to all of them, something they had never really seen before quite like that in the city, and something Felix had once had a real interest in—at least until the clouds edged them out.

         I saw that coming. The weather report was a daily check-in for me. But I didn’t say anything at first because I didn’t want to throw a literal wet blanket over the enthusiasm. Weather changes too fast around here in any event. Maya and I pulled bales of hay down from the stack and made one large bed on the floor of the barn and then we covered that with a few sheets of her canvas. Despite the tents, when the rain started spitting and the thunder rolling, they all came inside.

         The next phase of this adventure was the ghost stories. The children were still wide awake. The daughters all came out from the house with Julia. They had been to summer camp and already knew a few of those entertainments. I didn’t know any, but Julia made one up on the spot out of scenes from one of the plays that she had written years before. I knew she was making it up because so much of the detail had been borrowed from one of her novels as well. But she converted it nicely to a story set on the ‘Isle of Skye’ involving ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and a young woman who had saved him there and the ghosts of the dead soldiers from the battle of Culloden. Her performance gave me an idea of where Elena had discovered her interest in theatre. I thought it was terrific. Even Felix was impressed. Julia kept repeating those words ‘The Isle of Skye’ with a Scottish lilt, raising the pitch of her voice, so that it became a sort of chant throughout the telling, and Morgan offered an echo to that each time.

         I hung up a couple of the propane lamps that I had used at the campground, from pegs on the posts, but the lighting was still appropriately spooky for a stormy night. Julia was not a fan of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and had him fairly eviscerated by the Jacobite ghosts of the soldiers he had betrayed, reducing him to ‘a hollow shell of man.’  The girls were quiet thrilled with that image: a hollow shell of a man.

         Julia recalled, “Keith played the part so well…Keith is a neighbor’s boy. He used to be in all the plays we did, just so that he could be around Elena.”

         Elena rolled her eyes in exaggerated fashion.

          The kids did not understand the politics of this ancient moment and Julia did not explain that—telling the story as if it were a fairytale. But Henry found some resource or another to use, and corrected her on several points the next day, though during the telling he was enrapt.

         Morgan sat in her mother’s lap the entire time and was finally carried, already asleep, to the couch when it was over. After some initial fussing with the uniqueness of my ‘throne,’ the boys were all sound asleep in their respective bags before the storm was fully over, finally numbed by the experience and the stories. Nevertheless, Felix slept on that platform of hay bales with them and I could hear his snoring in the night. The daughters and Julia went back into the house and had tea together and then slept soundly in the beds they had grown up with.

         The morning was clear. The sun was crisp, and bright, warming only what it touched, even as a breeze mixed the leaves from green to white in the tops of the trees across the road. The shadows were cool and I was chilled there in the dark of the barn. The kids appeared mummified in their sleeping bags atop the hay bales. From the window at my desk, I could see the trees on the wrinkle catching the light and shimmering as they danced there, before catching sight of Felix already sitting on a bucket just outside, near the closed sliding door, where the sun first reaches the ground through a break in the trees on the hill above. It was a good spot and at the risk of spoiling some private moment, I went out to talk just so I could stand in the warmth of it too.

         I went out the side door, and the spring on the door moaned. I could see from there that Julia was already at the sink in the kitchen and I could smell an exhaust of cooking bacon. But as I went around the corner, I heard the side door behind open again and then slam. Someone else was up behind me as well.

         Felix turned to me at the sound of the door, “Good morning. I wondered if you were awake.”

         I found a piece of the sun there for myself, “Looks like a great morning. I hope you guys don’t have to leave too soon.”

         “No. Not till later…Just now, I was thinking I should never leave.”

         “Good thought.”

         “You think so…Why would you say that?”

         “Seriously?”

         “Jesse says I’m always serious. Way too serious. So, no. Not seriously. Why would you say that?”

         I wondered if Jesse had said something to him about our previous conversation walking on the road. But I said, “It’s hard to think of a reason not to say it…I even said something like that to Julia the other day. This place is too near perfect.”

         “Yeah. It is. But it’s not mine. Everything I own is 273 miles from here.”

         “Then sell all that! That’s too damned far to be from paradise!”

         He laughed a little. Maybe more of a brief sigh.

         “Hah! Jesse calls it that too. She loves this place…I was just thinking it might be the air that drops down off the hill. Something in it. Something in those older trees there.”

         I had nothing else to say to that.

         He said, “Did you ever notice that leaves can look like water?”

         It was a favorite thought of mine. “Yes.”

         But then he turned a little more toward me. He has a sweat shirt on and jeans and running shoes. I wondered if he’d been getting ready to workout. I had heard from someone, maybe Julia, that he works out, every day. I wish I had the discipline for that.

         He asked, “Are you planning to stay?”

         I said, “Here? No. It’s not my place. But I’m happy for Julia, that she’s here…I would like to make a place like this for myself someday.”

         He didn’t take long to study that idea.

         “But you don’t work. How would you afford it?”

         I have to assume he had jumped to some conclusions.

         “I work quite a lot.”

         “Not for a salary, though.”

         I said, “I’m not a wage slave, no.”

         “‘No. But who ain’t a slave? Tell me that?’”
         So, I knew that one from High School, of course. I answered, “’the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.’”

         He laughed. It was the first time I’d seen him truly laugh, I think. Women look very different when they smile, and men when they laugh.

         “You write?”

         “I do that too, yes. But its hardly work.”

         “Well, then I guess that’s my problem. Mr. Melville would understand about that. I’m a wage slave. They pay me a lot of money, but in the end I’m just another slave.”

         I wasn’t going to be kind to this realization.

         “Well, so now, at least, you’ve got that right. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

         He laughed just little. “You’re awfully certain of yourself. I wish I had a couple more people like you working for me.”

         “No. No you don’t. I’d be a pain in the ass. I ask too many questions. I’m bad about settling for things. I know you’re a good guy because you have a bunch of near perfect children and the most beautiful wife I have ever seen and she wouldn’t hang with you if you were a schmuck, but then again maybe some of that is luck. Some people are just lucky. They work their ass’s off and they get a little luck in return. But that’s not me. Frankly, most days I’d rather sit on a bucket in the sun.”

         He didn’t seem to know what to make of my little speech. Looking for something else, I think, he managed to ask me what kind of things I wrote, and I told him. The short version.

         Then he suddenly says, “What does land up here cost?”

         “More than I’ve got. I haven’t looked.”

         “Where would you live, if you could?”

         That was easy.

         “Right there.” I nodded my head toward that wrinkle of land that was right in front of us both. The shimmer of light in the leaves there had grown from a sea white to pale yellow in the rising sun.

         He says, “Funny. I was just thinking that would be a very nice place for a house.”

         “I think so.”

         He asked again, “So, what are you going to do?”

         “I don’t know. That’s been on my mind too.”

         He smiled, eyes closed to the sunlight, “So, then, that makes two of us.”

         And just then Julia’s voice came from behind me, “I’m making breakfast early in there. Pancakes. The kids are wondering around starving to death—Geoff, why don’t you come in and eat with us instead of that granola you’re so fond of.”

         Funny thing is she had come up without my hearing her, but it didn’t surprise me.

         The problem for me was that I was not a member of the family. I had no right to say anything about anything to anyone that did not involve me in the first place. And I was not even a guest. I was really just hired help. And yet, I didn’t feel that way.

         I was not even present for most family discussions that involved me, or for that matter, family discussions at all.  I missed all the usual mundane matters of what to buy at the grocery store and who should do what and when….And I think I was jealous.

         At some point along the way I had begun to speculate about what I was missing. Maybe from day one. I know that I liked being there and would do what I could to remain. But that was not all that much. Still, I found myself worrying about Jesse and Felix. That in itself was absurd. I had no real idea about what was going on there. But I mostly worried about Julia.

         There was a phrase she often used: ‘Is it true.’ I heard this in my head now, unbidden.

***

29. Open spaces

         The problem with ‘artificial intelligence’ is that it really doesn’t exist. It’s just information, like any other. It is a made-up term to describe something imagined and make it sound real. It was no better than a portmanteau word. What was really meant by it was some form of knowledge that was created by artificial means. A robot, for instance. But all that a robot can know is human knowledge. No matter how large it is. Just what humans can already know, and no more. That knowledge might be accessed faster than a human can do, using electronic circuits because of the biological limitations of the human mind, but it is still the same information. ‘Large language model’ or not. The sum of a math problem is not called ‘artificial.’ Even a difficult one. Or ‘intelligence,’ for that matter. It is just a sum.

         I was in the midst, off and on again, of writing a novel, ‘Elysium Mons, that I had started writing when I was at the Tall Pines Camp, and persisted with, off and on, through all of the obfuscation of the last couple of months.

         The story was simple enough. It was about a possible end of civilization and the death of mankind. Easy peasy.

         Like everyone else, it seemed, I was worried about artificial intelligence and the loss of our humanity. But I wasn’t so sure of the ‘progress’ as the nerds seemed to be. My hero, Ben, was one of the first born on Mars. His school was at home. He had something of an intuitive understanding of AI because his parents had used that so extensively for aid in his education. But the story only begins when all that he has known starts falling apart. Contact with the Earth has been essentially lost in a civil war there. The independent government of Mars, which from its very beginning had set about safeguarding against the sort of virus-based collapse that has struck the Earth, has nevertheless been badly damaged by the bad guys using AI to infiltrate their systems. And all of that is off-stage left.

         The simple story is that Ben is caught beyond the parameter of his home town at Elon. His electronic devices are now useless due to a calculated attack of a computer virus. It is clear, fairly early on in the story, that the virus is not man-made. Per se. It has been made by AI, with the intention of controlling the human community, at the instigation of someone unknown. But Ben understands that human beings are at the heart of it.

         ‘Spiro-gee, large robots with an interactive awareness closer to that of ants than computers, are looking for Ben. They know he is out there, and roughly where he is. Meanwhile, his only methods of communication, given the damage of the virus, are by some form of physical contact with other human beings. He must find a way to trust his fellow man—or woman—something, given his isolated upbringing, he had never really learned to do before.

         All of this was good fun. I was getting to deal with many of my own fears for the human race and create solutions that might work—I thought. But Ben, as I had too quickly imagined him, was lonely.

         That emotional state came upon him, coincidently, about the same time I had started coming to Dal Riata. Now I had to deal with that. The story had seemed fine, without it. But now, as if I had caught the virus infecting all computers, I was compelled to find a solution.

         On his way, Ben has encountered a young woman, Cera, at the edge of the Hellas Basin, who is in distress, knows something of the plan of the mysterious bad guys, and is, herself, of questionable integrity. Ben helps Cera escape from an ugly captivity. And helping her has only magnified his own problems, as her original captors attempt to get her back, and the spiro—gee try to find Ben.

         The character of this love-interest, again only coincidently, had been fashioned in an attempt to keep her fully apart in my mind from Julia. She did not look like Julia. She did not act like Julia. She did not speak like Julia. I believed, at least for a short time, that she did not think like Julia at all. But, unfortunately most of her characteristics matched up with Maya quite well, but now, when I thought about her, as I wrote, it was Maya that I saw. It was Maya’s voice I heard. This was disconcerting.

         The funny thing was, I had forgotten how to be funny. My Mars was entirely too serious. Everything was life and death, when everything should actually just be more about life. After all, life had come back to Mars after thousands of years. There ought to be a celebration! Microbes rejoice! Algae exult! Bacteria dance with jubilation. My only thought had been that those creatures could be deadly. But there might be something more to be had out of it. And I had to give that some thought.

         The problem lay in the fact that the true enemy, the machines, had no sense of humor. Somewhere in something I had written before, I had a sort of Turing test, and I might have to rehabilitate that. It was simple enough. Machines had no sense of humor. If someone had to quickly determine if they were dealing with an artificial intelligence, all they basically had to do is tell a joke. The fun was in inventing the joke, because a joke that had been told before might have been memorized by the machine,, it had to be original. It had to be dependent on a human sensibility that was not necessarily logical. And the joke could not be too elaborate. Parody might be good. Nothing too flamboyant. A pun might work.

         Maya had left the baby with Julia and come into the barn unexpectedly to check things out, so I asked her.

         “You gotta minute?… Help me out here.”

         She stopped where she was and looked at me skeptically.

         I held both hands up. “For just a minute. Pretend, I wasn’t here. Say there was a horse standing here. What would you say?”

         She didn’t miss a beat.

         “Why the long face?”

         She got me with that. So, I persisted.

         “But he can’t answer. Horses can’t talk.”

         “Then, I wouldn’t talk to him.”

         “But just say, pretend, you say something.”

         “Why?”

         “I’m looking for something?

         “What?”

         “Something funny to say to a robot.”

         “Robots can’t laugh.”

         “They could pretend. They might know an old vaudeville joke when they hear it.”

         She shook her head. “I suppose they could pretend. But how would you know?”
         “That’s my point! I’m trying to find something funny that they couldn’t have digested before. I’m trying to find something that would quickly identify them as a robot.”

         She shrugged. “I think you can tell by their breath.”
         She had me again. I laughed out loud at that.

         How would my hero Ben know if the young woman he encountered at the rim of Hellas Basin was really a robot? By her breath. Of course.

         It felt as if I had hardly gotten settled into a daily routine, when another adjustment had to be made. I like routine as well as Julia, almost. But Maya would be staying for awhile. Apparently, she had to give up her apartment. So, we drove down to Brooklyn together in my van, met an army of her friends, mostly other women who had worked with her at a restaurant, and they had everything from her apartment packed within a couple of hours. Carrying things up and down the stairwell was more a matter of enduring the echo of their speculations concerning me. But the most interesting part of that came at the end when Maya ‘forced’ each of them to take one of her paintings as a gift. It appeared that they were each envious of whatever painting was given to the other, and this process was at least comic to watch.

         Julia took care of the baby for the day.

         Packing the van was a trick. Maya gave away most of the furniture that she had bought for herself and kept the things her mother had given her. Those were the better items in any case. A small table originally built by Neal Wright was literally moved into the van first, top down, onto a small oriental rug. Most of everything else of importance was nestled around various other pieces of clothing or towels. Her unused canvas was bundled and strapped to one side. She had kept several dozen paintings of various sizes. Those were between the legs of the table. Her few chairs, including one that had also been built by Wright, were nestled together beneath bundles of clothing. She had no suit cases and few boxes. The clothing was strapped in bundles by various belts and bungie cords and the sizes of the bundles adjusted according to the location. It is fair to say, after the small stuff went in, that there was no space left.

         On the drive down we argued about writing. On the drive back we argued about art. She is her mother’s daughter.

         I moved most of the furniture—a few chairs, a desk, a table, and most importantly, plastic bins of supplies, a couple of easels and about two dozen rolls of canvas along with the bundled wooden stretchers—into the loft of the barn beside the toys.

         It was nearly a week before any sort of regular schedule for copying Julia’s manuscript could begin again, but at least I was not cut -out of dinner. I got to hear mother and daughter discuss the importance of particular cooking methods, the best recipe for spaghetti sauce, the advantages of stew, and how to make a good quesadilla. But these discussions never seemed to be completely done.

         Maya started coming out to the barn early in the afternoons, while the baby napped. The conversations were diverse. Besides the simple chat, childhood memories of one thing or another in the barn, and the like, there was one about the importance of ‘good light,’ and the natural ‘quiet’ of a barn that was never completely quiet—and how it was that I liked to work. When did I like to write most? And more about what I was going to be doing when I left. But I quickly saw the certain logic forming. What she really wanted most was for me to move my writing table somewhere else than that particular window. And I made her unexpectedly happy one day by moving my table to another space near the smaller window on the far end of the sliding barn door beyond the tack room. When the sliding door was open, this window was covered, but that was not often and I could deal with that. I soon found out it was draftier as well, but I could deal with that too.

         Within a few days, she had strung ropes up from the loft rafters and beams and had larger pieces of blank canvas hanging to block off that portion of the barn so that I could not easily see what she was doing within. Which meant, of course, that I started peeking during the mornings when I knew she was busy elsewise. But the area was still mostly empty. She had two easels standing nearer the window. A small table fairly piled with assorted boxes of paint and other materials. A larger folding table that was nearly empty. An empty rack on wheels that I recognized from when she had been giving away paintings to her friends. And a good deal of empty floor space remaining.

         A good thing for me was that, from the smaller window, I had a clear view of the wrinkle and the rise to the west, and the trees there, and this soon had me imagining what kind of house I would like to build if I were to live right there in the midst of those trees.

         This sketching was a sort of hobby of mine. Sitting in my van at the camp ground on a chilly night, I would often escape to such visions of the perfect house and locate them in places I had seen. I suppose this also betrayed my personal wants. They were usually small structures, appropriate for a hermit or someone of limited means. But something had changed in my mind concerning this new conjuring and I think the influence of Neal Wright was pretty obvious.

         I bought some larger sheets of vellum. What I started imagining was something based on the barn I was sitting in. It was now a fact that I no longer appreciated the close space of the van in the same way. The cathedral aspect of the barn ceiling had been stealing my eye every day for several months, so I begin to imagine how that might be accommodated in a house. Heat rises, so the first challenge was a system of air circulation. Noise is a matter—often physical in the way I reacted to it. I loved the sounds in the barn but the cries of wood against wood on a windy day could be distracting. The smell of hay was pleasant to me but the smell of ancient manure after several days of rain—especially in warmer weather, could be suffocating. I did not want the smell of cooking food to permeate the building. Food was a weakness for me as it was.

         And something even funnier about that was catching Maya peeking around the breaks in the canvas to see what I was doing.

         “It’s a house”

         “I can see that. It looks like a barn.”

         “It’s based on this barn.”

         “But it’s a house to live in?”

         “Yes.”

         “Where?”

         “There.”

         I had been looking at the ridge when she had come around to talk to me.

         She said, “I’m glad you like that place.”

         What I said in answer was a bit loaded. And pretty dumb, at the least.

         “I’m glad you like it too.”

         This made her start, a little. She shook her head then, as if the clear it, and suddenly went back to whatever she was doing.

         After that, my sketching took on another aspect. I placed a larger window at the end facing the river—that was to the true north.

         And I left these sketches out on the desk.

         Now, this is the situation my situation was in. It was pretty obvious my feelings for Maya were changing—had changed—especially since that day when I had seen her at the station in Durham. It was disconcerting, to say the least. The rest of the time it was ridiculous.

         I am 31 years old. I have no savings. A few hundred dollars. If my fifteen-year-old delivery van died, I’d be walking. What was I supposed to do?. What could I say to a woman—a woman with a baby—a woman who could support herself pretty well waiting on tables, but otherwise had limited prospects except for being an amazing and fantastically talented artist?.

         What struck me as funny was that, apart from the baby, of course, I thought we were a lot alike. Both of us had dropped out of college. We were both set on doing things that were totally impractical and had very little prospect of paying any bills. And yet, I thought it was opposites that were supposed to attract?

         It is my point of view that Maya has risked everything and, so far, had lost, but not given up. She had come back home after failing in New York. But she had not given up.  Most people give up on their dreams before they begin. They find excuses why they can’t do whatever it is that inspires them, and then wither inside. Maya, is an artist. She must have had the same artistic struggle as an artist that her mother had as a writer. She had certainly accomplished more than I had. And I didn’t want to burden her with my own failings.

***

30. Maya

         I see in the copy of the American Heritage Dictionary that Julia keeps at the top of the first shelf in the living room that ‘In Hinduism, Buddhism, and certain other East Asian religions, Maya is the transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world…The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world.’ This about sums her up. And this page of the dictionary has the feel of one that was opened many times before, smudged by fingers smaller than Julia’s. I looked at the date it was published. I was not surprised that it was several years older than Maya herself.

         Someone opened the door and looked in out of the bright sun as if the dark of the barn were a danger. Then, when he spots me over at my desk he says, “Who are you?”

         The voice is gravel rough and heavily accented with the tones of New York and someplace else. Perhaps Pueorto Rico. He is about a head shorter than I am, but built like a truck. He is clean shaven, which for most guys in the area is not the norm. I had no idea who he was but maybe I should have guessed. I hadn’t heard his knock on the back door at the house, and it occurred to be that he had mistakenly knocked on the front door first. No one comes to the front door.

         I say, “I live here, so maybe you should answer that question yourself.”

         He nods, “My name is Pedro. I’m looking for Maya.”

         Because I’d been in the barn all morning trying to concentrate, I hadn’t caught up on anything more recent.

         “I think they’re off shopping. The baby needed some things.”

         He looks at me a moment to see if maybe I am figuring it out for myself.

         “How’s the baby?”

         I shrugged. “Just one more beautiful baby, I think. Hard to tell.”

         I meant it as a joke. Totally missed.

         He says, “I’ll sit out in the car and wait for them.”

         “It’s cooler in here…Do you want some water?”

         “No.”

         He looks over the interior of the barn with a little amazement in his eyes. I pulled a couple of bottles of water out of my refrigerator and set them both down on the desk, and then sat down again by myself. The other chair was still across from me as well.

         He nods again at that and then goes back out the door, and when I looked, he was sitting in the shade on the porch. His car, a small white rental, was on the driveway closer to the front door. At least an hour passed before he came in again.

         He says, “I could use that water now.”

         The reason that Julia and Maya went off on this particular morning was that the day was ‘gonna be a ‘scorcha.’ The mall in Kittery would be an improvement. But I did not expect them back soon. The water was still sitting in sweat rings on the desk.

         “I can get a cold one if you’d like it.”

         He says, “Nah. This is fine,” and then he sits down. My own work had stopped when he first showed up and I was simply scrolling through various feeds on the computer for the news. He was staring at me, looking for some tell, I suppose. I closed the computer up.

         “Is there anything else I can get for you? Some chips. maybe?”

         He says, “Where you from?”

         “Boston …You’re from Brooklyn?”

         “You got that…What do you do—for work, I mean?”

         “Whatever Julia needs me to do, which isn’t much. I’m helping her with the editing to get a book finished. What do you do?”

         “Right now? I’m doing clean-up at a garage.”

         “Then we have that in common. I did clean-up for my dad, until I left home.”

         “It’s a crummy job…I’m only doing it to make a little for Maya, and the baby.”

         “What would you rather be doing?”

         “Anything. MMA is good. But it doesn’t pay. I was a goalie but I got a concussion playing soccer so that’s out for now. I’m looking around.”

         I was not up on my sports talk so I resorted to something tame.

         “Maya says you like philosophy.”

         I can see a touch of squint in his eyes.

         “No. Not really. I was just reading that for her.”

         “She said you were reading Yeats, too.”

         “Yeah. He’s a crazy poet. She liked the idea of explaining all that to me.”

         I knew the answer already, but I wanted to hear his side of it.

         “How did you guys meet?”

         “In a gym. I still work there. But, it’s part time.”

         Maya’s version was more colorful

         “It’s a long drive up here. Why didn’t you call?”

         “I don’t have her number.”

         “You haven’t seen her since Christmas.”

         He looks a little more stone-faced.

         “You know that?”

         “She told me when I was asking about Alma’s father.”

         For a few seconds, he seemed at a loss.

         “That’s my mother’s name too. She thought she’d rope me in with that.”

         I don’t think he said it as an accusation. But still, I thought it might be a way to get a conversation going. 

         “No. Maya doesn’t think like that. She just loves the name.”

         He had picked up on my change of tone. He shrugged. “What? That’s just the way they think.”

         I was a little irritated at that, and then bothered at my own reaction.

         “That’s a sad idea, I think. Thinking like that’ll keep you sad.”

         His tone had changed as well. “Are you with her now?”

         “No. But we’ve talked…Why did you drive all the way up here?”

         “To see the baby.”

         I nodded at that. “The baby is doin’ great.”

         He looks genuinely uncomfortable. The old chair is talking as he shifts around in it.

         He says, “Look. I promised my mother that I’d check on her. That’s all there is to it. I love Maya and all, but I’m not ready to settle down. I couldn’t support her anyway.”

         “Then maybe you’re right. Breaking it off is the best thing. But maybe you should at least have stayed in touch.”

         He shakes his head definitively. “No. She drives me nuts when I’m around her. I don’t need to make anymore babies right now.”

         “Right.”

         He moved, shifted a moment more, and then stood up and noticed the canvas which was still hanging from the beams after the visit from Jesse’s clan. He walked over to Maya’s area and looked at the easels and paintings set up there and the usual mess of things that Maya had on her table.

         “She’s still painting.”

         It sounded only like an observation.

         “Yes. Everyday.”

         “Good…”

         Suddenly, he looked over directly at me again

         “You will take good care of the baby.”

         He said this with his eyes on mine. I heard no question in it.

         “I will.”

         “Good… This is the farm of her mother? … Where Maya grew up? … Very nice! My mother livers on a third floor in Jamaica Heights. That’s only two blocks from where she was born. Her mother never made it to Queens General. She was born on a kitchen floor. The EMT’s name was Stan. So, they named my mother ‘Stanley.’ But she named herself Alma when she was just a girl.… Maya is better off here. Little Alma is better off here…I’ve got to go.”

         And then he left.

         When I told Maya about Pedro’s visit, she listened in silence—pressing her tongue against her lip as if to restrain it, and then went upstairs. We skipped dinner but Julia said something odd then. After I had mentioned Pedro saying that his mother wanted to be sure the baby was alright, Julia looked at her daughter in distress. Later, before I left, when Maya was upstairs, Julia said, “She liked his mother.”

         The thread of thought that remained after that was more about Alma and her grandmother and what it must be like to be living on the third floor of a tenement in Jamaica Heights.

         She was fifty-seven years old. Did Alma Valentin stand on the roof some nights, and think about the stars? Maybe even Mars. Or could she even see that far in the gray wash-water of the city air at night? That was a disturbing thought, at the least.

         It rained tonight so there was no Mars to see, but the steady beat of that on the roof against the unsteady fall of rain on the leaves of the trees in the yard was nearly musical. Not jazz. But something. My grandfather played a little jazz on a trumpet that never seemed to have any beat at all. But it was smooth. He called it ‘noodling.’ He relaxed. He’d sit on the metal stool in the garage and imagined things I could not imagine. But he didn’t talk about it. My father liked Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye. My mother loved Nat King Cole. Mostly, all that was smooth too. None of them could stand hip hop or rap. But at that moment, as if an answer to the thought, I heard Beethoven coming from the house. It was the Seventh Symphony I think, and I knew Julia was just trying to keep her thoughts in check as well.

         I knew Beethoven from eight grade. Musical appreciation at Arlington High was taught by Mr. Miller. He worked very hard at it. No one paid much attention but I benefitted anyway. I had to straighten the desks after class. I was always on the shit list for talking and the only way of avoiding getting my name on the ‘report’ was to help out a little. At three o’clock when the school day was over, Mr. Miller put on his Beethoven. He said it cleared his mind.

         I was just thinking, what melodies were left in his head when Beethoven died? It’s not as if he had stopped writing, deaf or not. What symphonies were lost? It’s not as if they would not have been written, if he had lived… But he was fifty-seven when all that came to an end. The same age as Alma Valentin. Younger than Julia, by a couple of years, at least…Did Beethoven ‘burn and rave at close of day; and rage, rage against the dying of the light?’ I like to think he might have at least whistled a tune into the silence of that good night? Dylan Thomas would have approved of that, I hope.

         Yesterday—Sunday—I drove Maya to see Alma Valentin in Jamaica Heights.

         This was not an adventure, or even an excursion. The traffic alone saw to that. I detest New York. The best of it is a gaudy display of corruption and decay, dressed in fake jewelry. The rest is a landscape of soiled stone and rusting metal.

         I said something to that effect to Maya. But she was already distressed, so I kept most of that talk to myself. The baby was crying. I’ve read that babies can feel the distress of their mothers. I was seeing it. Or maybe it was just a wet diaper. And ‘Sunday drivers’ as my father always called them, filled the roads. And I, always being the smart ass, would look around us at our family predicament and say to my dad, ‘You should know.’

         But the Throgs Neck Bridge was something else. The slow traffic offered plenty of viewing time but not much to see between the trucks. Maya was busy trying to get the baby to pay attention to a nipple and that was already taking my eyes off the road anyway.

         Jackson Heights is like one of those cracked coffee cups you keep around on your dresser for little things you don’t know what to do with. A ‘jumble’, as my mother would say. Just a hodgepodge of small stuff. A potpourri would be the gentle description. But Queens in general is loud with subways that are not sub, and plastered with signage that does not tell you anything if you are limited to a single language, as I am. Roosevelt Avenue is not stop and go. There was very little ‘go’ to it. I do not have a GPS. I have a map. The map does not indicate that some streets are one way and others are the same way too and ‘Green Market’ is not exactly a street. It is a brick canyon with puny trees. All the brick walls are the same height, like a prison—about six floors if you don’t count the basement level, where it is clear that people live as well. Gershwinesque it is not. There is no ‘soaring’ theme here. My Mr. Miller loved soaring. He played the Gershwin with the picture of Manhattan on it for the class every day to get us going. And he played movie soundtracks to keep our attention. Not that you would want to soar into a sky so grey it looked cloudy even when it wasn’t, at midday. No ‘soaring’ allowed. There are people everywhere. They act like inmates given some ‘yard’ time so they can walk into traffic whenever the urge commands. 34th Street is divided by tree skeletons with a few leaves to indicate their species and their present status as being ‘still alive.’ These are set out on a raised surface that is curbed by banks of loose trash and decorated intermittently by piles of black plastic bags riddled with rat holes.

         I was going to stay in the truck while Maya visited. Not that anyone would care about my van, but it looked so much like others along there, I was afraid it might be mistaken for another. But Maya glared at me, so I followed her. The buzzer didn’t work. Maya called Mrs. Valentin on my phone and the button was pressed. Unintentional modern art decorated green and beige walls. The hall was humid with smells. I could not identify the smells, but they were not pleasant. The ceilings were low. The elevator did not work so we walked up a shaft of cement stairs that echoed sounds I wished I could record because I had no reference for describing them to remember them later. Not human sounds, exactly.

         Mrs. Valentin’s apartment is a jewel-box set into this maze. A metal door opens and we can see into the three rooms as if into an illuminated tunnel—a kaleidoscope not being turned—where she has decorated almost every inch with something. The pictures of celebrities on the wall go back thirty years. All horizontal surfaces have potted plants. Often cactuses. Cactuses depress me. There are pictures of Pedro everywhere, usually in a white goalie’s uniform stained by grass and line-paint or mud. Pedro himself is not there.

         The first fifteen minutes are an adoration. The baby is the center of all things. Slowly I realize that Mrs. Valentine is checking me out between gushes of sounds to get the baby’s attention.

         After a while she asks me directly, “What do you do?”

         Her accent is dense.

         “I write. I dig holes sometimes. I paint things when I can.”

         I was not trying to be smart. I just felt inadequate to the question.

         Maya said, “He is helping my mother with her novel.”

         “Yes…but will you help with the baby.”

         I say, “Yes,” but she turns to Maya for confirmation.

         She is a small thin woman and it is difficult to imagine how she birthed any child—especially Pedro.

         Otherwise, I was pretty much ignored while she continued to speak with Maya. Maya speaks Spanish and the words were fast and emphatic and unintelligible to me.

         In little more than an hour, after refusing several offerings of food, we were gone again.

         In the truck, Maya says, “She’s sick. She is very sick,” and spends the next half hour crying quietly while the baby sleeps.

31. Most People

         At least I was writing. Not enough, or often enough. But at odd hours. I tried to level that out and get up earlier to write, but that effort too often failed on the rocky edges of simple summer morning cold, as I clutched my blanket. With the weather, I was not inside the sleeping bag as much as on it… There were birds to remind me, of course. But some mornings, they failed too, and I fell asleep again to their tuning. There was Mr. Copple’s rooster, calling to Julia’s hens because the harem he already had was not enough. But I only wished that I could crow my displeasure in return.

         When I could, I pushed and nudged at my hero, Ben. He had no light saber or staff but did have a trusty but rusty ‘Sancho’ in the person of Jimmy, a robot of his own design. Jimmy was as nearly human as a lizard brain could be. Ben’s enemies were primarily the cold, and the sand, the spiro and the gen. The spiro dragons that the AI gen had created and deployed against the Mars settlers, much like Jimmy, often had minds of their own, but they were uninhibited by any sense of self-preservation. The gen itself hid in the digital crevices of the settlements, a community mind living off of stolen power and the destruction they caused. Their aim was simply to overcome humanity. Their enemy was humanity. And like a virus, they did not envision a future apart from the havoc and misery they might wreak in the present. I imagined them as an incarnate evil. Mankind’s perhaps ultimate mistake. I had originally envisioned them as fallen angels with no God to check them, but finally settled on lesser beings that required the artificial biology of the spiro to supplement their ephemeral minds. Their only seeming purpose was to spread themselves by replication, and of course, the Earth was still waiting, without immunity, if they succeeded.

         A motor of rain fell steadily on the roof of the barn. This was not a problem my hero might face. The rain of an arctic Mars was infrequent and misty. Analogy was my problem. I agreed with Julia about that. This was not ‘like’ anything else. This was what it was. There was no math to be extracted from the human predicament, nor should there be. Ben had to find his own way to defeat the gen. He was, himself, an outlaw. If it was worth telling, the story was in how he did it. The colony on Mars, grown to a quarter-billion, had to survive on its own terms without help from earth. I had now added details not unlike some I had collected in Jamaica Heights. But like a contagion, it must remain isolated. Any physical contact would unleash an ultimate predator on the billions of the earth. My petri dish was ready.

         Julia sometimes drinks tea. Sometimes.

         I tried to discern some pattern to this after she said she ‘just felt like it.’

         I drink coffee. I have never had a taste for tea. Tea reminds me of being sick when I was a kid—something my mother made be drink.

         But when I asked Julia about it one day she said, “I’ll make you some coffee. I don’t want you looking hound-dog at me.”

         Partly this was a matter of the fact that she made terrific coffee. Better than I could, for certain. But part of it was trying to see what the difference was from one day to the next.

         On an intuition, likely brought on by Maya’s words in the truck about Mrs. Valentine, I asked her, “Are you feeling sick?”

         She gave me a look. She didn’t answer, but now I was sure she was feeling a little sick.

         But she says, “So, I was listening to the radio one afternoon a few months ago when we had a storm coming. It was a blizzard and I thought to lock up the chickens. But my mind was on other things at first and there was a fellow on the radio who was addressing ‘most people.’ ‘Most people’ this and ‘most people’ that. I decided to listen to more of it than I normally would, just for the game of guessing if I fit into any of the categories he was criticizing. Of course, I did, but for the wrong reasons. Wrong by his own account. ‘Most people do this,’ and ‘most people do that.’ But why? He had no answers, just criticism. Well, he did try guessing at the reason, once, but he was totally wrong. I think he’d watched too many Road Runner cartoons as a child. And I don’t want to be fussing over one political schism or another right now. That’s not my point. My point is that he was wrong on every point he made because he attributed behavior to people as if the reason for that behavior was monolithic. That they were all the same. And you already know that they’re not. Every single person has their own reason for believing this or that. And if he’d bothered to study any individuals in the group of them, he would have discovered some of the differences, and understood them better. But instead, he wanted to lump them together as ‘most people.’ And as one of those people, I realized I shouldn’t be offended by his ignorance. He was correct that ‘most people’ did this or that, which might be criticized for one reason or another if it were done for the same reason—at least the ones he had chosen as despicable—but that was not the case. And looking at that matter more carefully, I saw that the flaw in his judgment actually revealed a reason to believe that the behavior that he thought was so reprehensible was actually not so bad. Misguided perhaps. Foolish.  But in my court, the radio fellow had lost his case just by dumping most people together.”

         I asked, “What does that have to do with your feeling sick?”

         This got her to laugh, when she had not even smiled that day.

         “You are very stubborn. You have an idea and you won’t let go.”

         I said, “You don’t have to tell me. I was just curious.”

         Then she said, “I am sick. But it’s not something I want to talk about.”

         I let that sit for a moment and then, “But what does it have to do with ‘most people.’

         That got her to laugh again.

         “Because that is what we are supposed to be doing here. I was going to elaborate, that one problem I’ve always had in writing is avoiding the thought that most people would do this or that.’  Figuring out what just one person might do is enough. But then you asked me if I was feeling sick. And I didn’t want to talk about that. So, I ended up telling you more than was necessary about the jerk on the radio.”

         That was backwards, of course, but I wasn’t looking for an argument. So, by way of maybe helping her feel a little better, I told her, “You do that well. I can figure out what some characters will do, pretty well, Donovan is pretty easy, but Clare is always up to something I don’t expect. But it always makes sense after the fact.”

         That got the smile.

***

31. Pelagian gospel

         More questions.

         “What’s all this then?”

         I innocently asked her about a short manuscript that was at the bottom of the pages she had left me to copy. They had a faint yellow tinge and some dog-ears, were obviously older than the rest.

          “Why is it here?”

         “That is the ‘Pelagian Gospel’… Somebody reconstructed it. (I knew this was said sarcastically. It was Julia who had written it)… The Augustinians who control the major Christian churches today are still belittling it all—as if that were their true enemy, and not rationalists who demand every equation be reduced to mathematical formula, or the Moslems who would remove their heads for questioning anything.” She took a breath. I assumed she was the one who had ‘reconstructed’ that gospel, apparently years before, and this was now on her mind for some reason. For me, it seemed very far from eighteenth century Ireland.

         She added, “Then again, I am not so sure it isn’t. More dangerous, I mean. Many of the supposedly Christian churches today have adopted the gospel of Karl Marx, which is at its heart an atheist dogma and at least as old as Sparta—But, I suppose, that if people were to get the crazy idea that they were themselves responsible for their own sins, and should be taught to have independent minds right from childhood, the Catholic Church among others would lose a lot of revenue.”

         “I thought you might like a copy of it. I wrote it for another book entirely, ‘Avalon.’ But that was long ago and Ned refused to allow it. He was adamant. And so was I. So, the book was never published…Just an attempt to historicize part of the King Arthur legend in novel form. Ned rejected a key element of it, the religious aspect, so I never published it.”

         “It’s a good subject.”

         “I thought so. As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that Ned was wise. Religion is a tough act to follow. If I had staked a claim then and there—It would have been my fifth book—It would have been hung around my neck like an anvil. Religious publishers don’t want anything rocks the cradle, or smacks of being anti-establishment, and trade publishers are weary of anything that smacks of being religious. Prejudice is stronger than any other stupidity because it’s irrational, but also pretends to be logical—emotional, but pretends to be reasonable. But it usually just involves ego and personal investment.”

         “What religion was it?”

         “Then? None that exists today. But, Catholicism then. Early Catholicism. I was grafting the actual religious heresies of Pelagius onto the mythology of Arthurian legend. I’ve always loved those tales because of Arthur’s sister, Morgan. She is a supernumerary to most Arthurian legends. I had her be the Priestess of the monk scholar Palagius.” Julia shugged into a momentary pause, obviously considering that lost battle. “I think she has been Shanghaied more recently by other authors just because she is a woman. The is the current vogue. But she is a natural hero and was there from the beginning. Geoffrey of Monmouth even has her as the ruler of Avalon! My novel was set in fifth century Britain following the Roman retreat. About 410, but they weren’t counting, of course. I imagined her as a reincarnation of Boudica from the time of the Roman invasion centuries before. But there really is no Arthur in it. Nor Pelagius. It’s about farmers near Carlisle, in Cumbria trying to survive the lost protection of Roman troops. I was trying to portray what Camelot would have actually been like to live in, before it got the name. No robes. No throne. A round table for eating and drinking…That was another argument I had with Ned. I never wanted that name to occur in the book or on it. But he thought it was the only way it might sell.

         “I wanted a story that described what it would have been like, with Arthur and his merry men gallivanting all over Britain fighting Picts in the north and Danes in the west and Saxons in the south, while Morgan runs the family farm.”

         “Sounds like familiar territory.”

         “It was, the way I imagined it. Morgan is being accosted by retired soldiers and young priests and everything in between. But it really was just about running a farm with the sorts of tools they had then. She’s quite smelly most of the time.”

         Her sentences were trailing off and it sounded as if she were going to move on so I went back to my original thought

         “Pelagian? I don’t think you have ever used that name in any of your books—not that I’ve read.”

         “You’re correct about that. It is a purposeful omission. And that’s Paul’s doing too. I was still a student in his class at Bowdoin when he convinced me that it was a battle that could not be won. Not in this age. But I’m stubborn. I finally wrote Avalon to prove him wrong. But didn’t, of course…Paul had learned about all that bullshit on his own, I think. His parents were Northern Irish. Catholics. They were witnesses to the stupidity in Belfast. His father’s shoe shop was destroyed once too often before they managed to emigrate here when he was still a boy.”

         She left the topic there on the table, so to speak, and went into a dance on the subject of brisket versus corned-beef. I though she was trying to avoid. I listened to that until there was a break.

         “What does all that have to do with Pelagius.”

         That got the laugh. I wondered if she was baiting me.

         “Oh. It doesn’t. In fact, it has something to do with Paul. He loves brisket. I like corned beef.”

         “But how does that relate to Pelagius.”

         “Yes. Yes. Because Paul rejects the very idea of original sin as well. As do I. Otherwise he couldn’t believe in the ‘right of kings.’ It was an ongoing discussion of ours for years. I suppose it still is, but he hasn’t brought it up recently and I’ve been working on other things. But we have that in common. He and I. We both believe in the essential goodness of human nature—as defined by being human—and that we are designed to be good, otherwise the species would not exist, and must be twisted and corrupted to be bad—that and the importance of free will.”

         She took a breath on that and probably saw that I was going to ask another question.        

         Julia spoke first. “Free will is the key. Without it we cannot redeem ourselves. We must be redeemed. That is not a small thing. But we are in the minority. And we both reject the concept of original sin. Pelagianism insists that human beings can achieve righteousness through their own efforts without the necessity of divine grace. ‘Insists’ is the right word there. They’ve continued to insist despite being burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, hung, and imprisoned in stone cells, in the best Christian tradition, where they couldn’t stand up and could not communicate their heresies. The Catholic Church has always been a monster about all this. They did it again to the Lollards…As bad as the Soviets. You know the story of Tatiana Gnedich and her translation of Byron’s Don Juan into Russian?… She was imprisoned in the Gulag…No? Well, read about that! We’ll never know what the Palagian’s suffered. That record is lost. Destroyed. But you can read about Tatiana Gnedich and her translation of Don Juan today, and get some idea. How did the peasant of the fifth century manage to keep his own spirit alive. He knew who he was. He spoke of it. Everyday.  That is more epic to me than all the mythology in Bullfinch. But I think you can readily see the connection to my own work, and the ridiculous idea—ridiculous as judged by the authorities—that the common man should be left alone to live as freely as possible…I must attribute some of that madness to Paul. But I believed in this as a practical matter—it’s a very American idea and one that my father was quite attached to, especially after his travel and work all over the world—but it was Paul who first put it into a religious context for me.”

         When she was quiet then for a little too long, I asked, “How was it Paul’s doing? How did that affect your writing?”

         I was pushing her when she was tired, but it was something she loved to talk about. “Because he was the first to warn me about the burning at the stake, and the hanging, and the quartering and all the rest. He told me, ‘All that’s not over. The schism hasn’t been under serious discussion since The Council of Carthage, and that was held in 418 AD!’ And here I was, still in school, writing about Puritan New England, and ten years before even attempting the write ‘Avalon.’ At the time I was actually intent on writing a novel about the Salem Witch trials—and I wrote it—while I was still in school there in Maine. It seemed like such a natural vehicle for the ideas of independent judgement and the battle with authority. Just a short drive down the coast. But that one failed before I could even finish it off. I couldn’t find a publisher. I realized then, too late, that I hadn’t truly reckoned yet on the mind of man being closed.”

         “How? What had you not yet understood.”

         “The lingering ghost of Cotton Mather. It’s still with us in Islam and feminist dogma and the believers in American original sin. They own all of that story now. You can’t discuss the Salem witches without bowing to them.”

         She turned and left it there. There were other things to do. 

         I was lost.

***

32. A muse

         Julia usually enjoys a drink after we’ve finished working. That’s her habit. I do not. But one Friday night I did. Actually, I had two. Julia likes a very nice brand of bourbon, which she drinks neat, and I could see the benefits to it pretty quick. By that time Maya had already taken the baby upstairs and not returned—and was likely already asleep with the baby on her chest as often happens on the couch in the early evening as I retype the  manuscript and her mother coaches me.

         It was just about then that I first speculated aloud that her daughters were sorceresses.

         This did not come without context. Julia had been talking about medieval mythology and how it affected popular belief after the Catholic conversion of Britain. It was a subtext to the death of a character, a nun, at very very beginning of the novel. The church had invested several hundreds of years into that project of Christian civilization.

         Not without motive, I suggested that each of her daughters somehow represented one of the ‘graces,’ or muses. She cautioned me about mixing up my muses with my sorceresses, but I was well beyond that, especially with the second bourbon. Of course I skipped the more suggestive ones like Erato. I had one daughter in mind there but I wasn’t about to elaborate on that. Instead I chose Euphrosyne for Maya—mirth and joyfulness, and Aglaea for Elena—elegance and brightness, and Jesse was Thalia—bloom, or beauty. None of this fit exactly. Maya was far too serious, for instance, to be Euphrosyne. I revised even as I spoke. the Greek muses, I decided, out loud, were not so useful as first appeared. But the comparison got me considering their actual traits as nymphs of the Helicon. Again, aloud. And the point was made—that they were each very different, and that I should not be drinking at all.

         Julia actually gave my speculations some thought before saying that there ought to be another word for it. I thought ‘muse’ was fine. It had good roots in the daughters of Zeus and his wife Hera.

         Julia thought there ought to be a male equivalent. I argued at first that this made the whole thing pointless. It was men, after all, who were in need of inspiration, not women. Women were the very inspiration itself. Not really a coherent thought. But I said we are all victims or beneficiaries of our muses.

         Then I asked her who her muse was.

         She said, “You already know.”

         “Your grandfather?”

         “Yes. Certainly. Always.”

         Smarty that I am, I knew this because I had once mentioned to Julia that she had used the same story device twice. In both The Wrath and in ‘The Plow and Stars;’ she had portrayed a boy working at the church as a janitor of sorts—one already an orphan and the other soon to be—but they had both run away from there to find their fortunes.

         She answered, “He wrote wonderful letters in a beautiful hand that he had learned in his parochial school, just to please the nuns. A rogue even as a child. But it was his sister who kept them all. She who stayed home, in Ireland, within the safety of what she knew, and lived her life vicariously through him. I’ve read them all many times…They were orphans. She was placed elsewhere and he ran away from his home and his job at the parish house when he was twelve. Twelve! … Listen! His trick to do this, you know, was quite devious. He was a tall, skinny boy. There is a picture.” She grabbed one of the small frames on the mantle, a black and white photo trapped in a frame of pitted brass—the picture small enough to fit in a wallet. He just looked like a boy to me. “His trick was to try and pass himself off as sixteen, and then, when questioned, admit to only being fourteen, not twelve. The war was on and the freighters out of Cork were desperate for crew. A captain took pity on him. He became a deck hand…But that ship was then sunk by a U boat before it could even get to Brazil. Obviously, he survived. 15 hours in equatorial waters on an overturned life boat with three other fellows and a few sharks. He could recall their names fifty years later…The fellows, not the sharks…Brazilian rubber was in short supply then so he managed to catch another freighter out of Sao Paulo on its way to Jersey City. He jumped ship there and crossed New York Harbor to Brooklyn at night in a ‘borrowed’ rowboat with another fellow who was escaping the law and needed a hand with the oars. Just missed getting run down by big ships a couple of times on the way. From there he got a job carrying newspapers for the Brooklyn Eagle. He was a reporter by the time he was eighteen. Later, during World War Two, he was a War correspondent in Italy, and at the ripe old age of forty he met my grandmother there in that chaos and decided he ought to quit fooling around… But, anyway, she was officially a ‘war-bride.’ Their wedding picture was on the front page of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1945. The rest is history.”

         She did not ask who my muse was. I think she was worried I might say the wrong thing. Our situation did not need that at the moment—especially in that we were so near to being done.

35. The vernal pool

         In Julia’s slim book of youthful poetry, where a hot bit of erotica had so ingloriously poked its head out to be spotted by a wannabe admirer, there was this as well:

         The vernal pool, once again,

         breeds the hope of all mankind—

         Once more, into this shallow breech

         Of fallen leaves and forest debris

         A chorus sings, one note, but perfectly—

         Wherein the smallest voice

                           becomes large in chorus

         And frogs the size of a finger tip

         may be heard far beyond this pocket place,

         Having at last outlived the glaze of ice

         that so recently imprisoned their dreams.

         In this vernal pool, again,

         The despair of winter has dissolved.

         All the self-pity and winter melancholy

         That once had gripped the soul in fear

         As autumn fell, now melts into thinner air.

         The desperation of darker months

         That overtook us all in drifts of complaint,

         And petty grievances over the unpicked bones

         Of our mistakes, now lie exposed, and dissolve

         Amidst the graying of the wind-shattered limbs

         That mark these places as the shallow graves of cynics.

         We are renewed by the very melt of that unbearable weight.

         Our worries now to be carried now on dandelion seed

         Filling the air in blazes of light, turning in carousels,

         and reflected brightly in the water there.

         She had re-used that phrase “petty grievances over the unpicked bones

         Of our mistakes” once again in ‘The Plow and Stars,’ and I mentioned this.

         She said, “I’m glad that you read that poem. Where did you see it?”

         I lied, “It’s on the internet someplace.”

         “Well, it is an important piece to me. I did not realize it then but, that was my actual beginning as a writer. My spring. I even took a course on poetry—actually on a single poem—trying to deal with all that. It was the start of my own small rebellion against the sickness of postmodernism and deconstructionism and all the rest of that crap. But it was also the end of my poetry career. I was never going to be able to write in iambic pentameter.”

         She laughed at herself

         I asked her how that happened. I think I said, “Did you write anything else,” but said it with too many words.

         She said, “It was because I took this wonderful course from a strange little professor, John Parker, who basically taught just one poem—had taught that one poem for twenty years or more— Byron’s Don Juan. He thought it was the greatest work in the English language. Young minds like mine, mostly women, took the course in order to disagree. And he thanked us all at the end of the semester—us specifically. The ones who had argued with him. He said that we were the reason he could keep teaching that poem, which was his still his favorite, of course. Without us, it would have grown stale. But because it was the greatest poem in the English language, we kept it alive for him. We made it fresh again…I think all of us had been convinced by him early on that his was the correct assessment, but we had continued to argue just to hear him defend his love of it. To watch him. That someone could care so much about mere words. It was a performance! He could recite it from memory, of course. And suddenly stop to talk about Spain after the defeat of the Moors, or the Greek civil war, or Shelley, and then start again on the last word he had recited, all while bouncing around the class, but as if he were clubfoot. His idea of the way Byron walked. His ‘small attempt at acting,’ he called it, even while he was the true actor…Parker was a thin and skinny little fellow, pale and always disheveled, hair loose over his fore-head, or carelessly trapped in a rubber band behind, and when he popped around the room, as he would, his bow tie would come loose and flail at the air around his shoulders. He was always wearing tweed but his shirts were never white and his pants were never pressed. And when he got excited, as he always was by that poem, blood came to his face, and his voice changed and grew deeper. He taught other courses to freshman but that was his Senior course, and it was attended mostly by women because of the theme of it—as in Byron’s text—which was really a defense of the poet’s own life: that he, Don Juan, was not the predator of woman but the victim of their unbearable beauty! That it was the women who seduced Don Juan! Outrageous to hear for the first time! And he convinced us, every one…Yes! … But. Now, I will tell you a story about him. About Professor Parker. He was unmarried—”

         “Was he gay?”

         “No, not that. It is better than that. A young woman in my class set about seducing him. Seducing the professor! She actually told us she was going to do it, as if it was a class project and a conspiracy, and then she did it… But then, she never said another word about it…The mystery of whether Professor Parker was the physical embodiment of the poet himself drove the rest of us crazy. But she had fallen in love with him and wouldn’t say another word. And then we were all graduated and out of there, and Professor Parker went off on his annual summer sojourn to Europe…Alone.”

         “That’s terrific!”

         “It gets even better…My transcript got screwed up—probably my mother lost it. She thought everything was a bill and probably threw it away—and after several phone calls, I went back up to school to get a copy. The secretary there in the English department remembered me. She was a middle-aged woman—probably younger than I am now—and when she noticed that I had taken the Parker course, she asked how I liked it. I told her in no uncertain terms, that it was my favorite. She listened to me with one of those smiles on. She had heard it all before. And I asked her, quite boldly, if she knew the professor. I think it was obvious in the way I asked her that I wanted something personal. She said, ‘yes’…Now, I had already been very much involved in the study of human behavior by then. I wanted to write novels, like Tolstoy and I thought I was pretty smart in that category. But I got the feeling that she had a thing for the professor too. More than a thing. I think she was in love with him. And I was twenty-one and totally capable of asking bold questions. So, I outright asked her if she loved him. And that was a gobsmack. She was totally flustered. It took her a bit of beating around the bush but she finally said, yes. And I asked her if she had ever told him. And she said, no. And of course, I said, “But why?” and she said, “Because every year some young thing in his class gets to him first.”

***

33. Gobsmacked!

         I was aware, soon enough, I think, that my mind was always wondering what Maya might think about this or that. This became another feature of my every day. At last, in order to get any work done for myself I had to ask her not to come out to the barn in the mornings. She was hurt by this at first, I think. But then she seemed to make a point of coming out exactly at noon. The baby was still awake then and happily enclosed in her sling where she could keep an eye on what was going on for as long as she could keep her eyes open at all.

         Often, Maya would come over to my desk, and ask me about what I was writing, which I liked talking about, so that was fine.

         But one day, when I was already finished writing and had started in on the plan for the house, she wandered over with the baby already asleep in the pouch and stood there to watch. I was worried she would guess what I was up to and switched pages to a sketch I’d done of the rocks up on the wrinkle. She looked at that silently and then she looked at me in a funny way. Hard to say what was funny about it. It was just a look. Her eyes are a dozen shades of gray, and green, and brown. It’s something you can’t unsee.

         But then she asked to read something I had mentioned to her before—something about the value and importance of wood to the Mars settlements. How wood had become a standard of value in an artificial world and a major item of trade with the earth. I gave her a copy of a chapter I had written a couple of weeks before that was more about that than anything else.

         She came back later, when the baby was asleep in the crib, holding the pages up, frowning, and says to me, “What are you trying to do?”

         She sounds like her mother, but I know, sometimes, that questions aren’t about what they’re asking. She could probably guess what I was doing.   

         So, I get cute about it and answered, “I’m trying to make a chair with words.”

         This gave her a moment to reconsider.

         She looks down at the pages still in her hand, and answers, “You misspelled ‘subterfuge,” and looks me square in the eye before putting the pages down on the desk and walking away again. No explanation.

         Each day then, when I was finished writing, I purposely left a sketch out on my desk for Maya to see. I knew she would eventually come over to check it out. Her curiosity was insatiable.

         This sketch was now a little more than a low barn. It had become a bungalow of sorts. It was rough but close to what I imagined a perfect small house to be, and set out onto that wrinkle that I looked to each day from my desk. Beneath the sketch were several sheets of graph paper imagining the dimensions of the rooms. The largest window on the northern wall of my plan completely filled the space beneath the peaked roof and offered a clear view of sky as well as the fields and the river below. That was the largest room as well, filling that end of the house, and was meant to double as a kind of studio space, with no other ceiling than the truss and rafters. Three small bedrooms filled the other end of my little barn. A kitchen anchored the middle on the east and an entry opposite that met the drive in from the road. A simple structure, I thought, and something I might even be able to build myself. However, this would be nothing unless Maya liked it as well. However, she still had said nothing to me about it.

         The barrels for the chicken feed were just inside the smaller barn door. They gave their own sweet musky odor to the air there when they were opened, and that drifted up and over the smell of the remaining bales of hay when the door was closed. Julia fed the chickens quite early, before I was out of bed, and it was often that lingering smell that would later remind me that she had been there while I was still sleeping.

         At this point I had begun to adopt many of Julia’s habits, but not this. I did not get up at dawn in the summer. I had tried that. I tried standing in the morning air to wake up, and watching her feed the chickens—she is a good sight in the cool of a morning, in her bulky sweater, breath hanging out in front of her as she talks to those hens by name. They know their names. They come around close to her when she says their names. But I couldn’t manage that hour… However, I had started to write in the mornings and I did not break my fast until noon. And that was the time of day when Maya often appeared and all concentration was lost in any case.

         I ate my ‘kibble’ as she called it—my granola and nuts and berries—and held the baby if she needed that. But I could not get myself up at six each morning. I did not sleep long hours, maybe seven, if I had done some heavy lifting the day before, but I still loved the hours after dark, when distractions were fewest, and I could read, or write my notes for what I would work on the next morning.

         Every day for a couple of weeks I left the sketch of my imagined house out on the desk when I was finished writing. But Maya said nothing.

         This, then, became another matter of concern

         I knew she must have looked at it. She would have certainly understood what I was trying to picture, however crude it was. But she made no comment about it. And because of my own stubbornness as well as a fear that she might not like it, I said nothing.

         But I did refine the plan a little. I elaborated the kitchen and opened the dining area to one side of that. The center chimney gave the ‘great room’ (as I had labeled the living room and studio combined) a fairly large hearth, but also made it possible to have a smaller hearth on the opposite side of the chimney facing the kitchen and dining room. There was a bathroom to the western side, next to the kitchen on a short hall to the bedrooms. This became a sort of utility room, intended to contain a washer and dryer as well. I decreased the size of the bedrooms on the east side to make a second bathroom there. This seemed a little extravagant but I had heard Maya make a disparaging remark about the smaller bathroom in the house—and I supposed that was especially so when taking care of the baby. A central hall, leading to the bedrooms had been carved from a larger space, already reduced now by a stairwell, the top-half of which went up to a second larger and open room in the attic above all three bedrooms. Making a useful room out of that, and, I thought, a good place to write, if I were there, requiring a dormer window to the east for the light, and one to the west as well to balance that. Looking at my exterior sketch then, I decided that the great blank expanse of roof over the great room which was fully illuminated by the large window during the day, would create a dark void within at night during winter months, and required a dormer as well, for balance. The other half of the stairwell in the hall by the bedrooms, turned beneath itself to an open basement. This was a practical use for the foundation. The washer and dryer could go there instead, but that also seemed extravagant—unless there might be more children to entertain.

         But Maya said nothing.

         I admitted to myself that even though I had my own designs on the matter, the house was for Maya, and I wanted her to have it. Whatever her personal feelings were for me. The idea for the house might appeal to her, but saying something might feel to her like a commitment to me as well.

         Finally, despite the possible danger, I decided to speak up about it. However, just in time, she beat me to it. Afterwards, I thought all of this was humorous. The human mind does not think clearly about some things and often overthinks about others.

         When I got to my desk one morning—-actually, I spotted the corner of it before I had even washed my face, and went over there in my underwear from the tack room to see what it was—there was a painting. This was the house, far better than I had imagined it, set amidst the trees on the rise as if it were real. Better still, she had added two porches, one covered on the entry side where it would catch the morning sun, and another, an open deck off the great room, and I immediately realized that I had forgotten those important details. The sunlight in the painting was from above and made the green of the trees around it intense. But this view of the house was from the field below, and the great window above the deck facing north on the valley reflected the track of cirrus clouds against the blue of a summer sky. There was no storm in this. It was simply a house. A very nice house. And still, I thought, a bungalow.

         There was a little yellow note attached at one edge of the painting.

         ‘Thanks to you for helping me move from Brooklyn. You never got your reward.’

         And it was signed! I had not seen her signature before on any of her paintings!

         And the sweet smell of chicken feed still lingered, as if she had just been there mere moments before. And that made it better still.

***

34. But where’s the poetry in that!

         I asked Maya about a series of words, printed in green, at the edge of a painting on her desk: ‘Lowering, Towering, Flowering.’ Printed in formal Roman letters, as if chiseled there in stone, they reminded me of those renaissance paintings of naked zaftig women and muscular men trimmed with a few words such as ‘Obedience to God,’ laid out on the periphery to keep the religious authorities at bay.

         Maya told me that this was a reminder to her—she often became engrossed in some subject within the frame and forgot her original purpose. She painted them over when she had finished. “I think I started that habit when I was quite young. I got the idea from Mom.”

         I had often seen odd words at the edge of Julia’s manuscripts and never asked about them. I pursued it with Maya. “Why those words?”.

         “They rhyme. They stick together in the mind that way. It was her rule to look for the poetry in things. Not that it should necessarily be a good poem or a bad one, but to see how things connected to one another, so that they could be taken one by one and not overwhelm me. She used that same rule for all kinds of things. I remember one verse, one of my favorites, that she made up on the spot when we complained too loudly about missing the beach.”

         She recited it then, with a little dramatic flare:

         “It was a graysome day

         With rain too bored to fall;

         Fettered in fog amidst the trees,

         And on windows, blistered small.     

         The road was dark with wet,

         No puddles shone at all,

         And in the grass were diamonds

         Where sun collected small

         Spiders stepped out carefully

         Squirrels stayed home to bawl

         And when the worms

                  came out to breathe

         The robins bit them small.

         “When we were young, this became our motto. Elena would say, whenever she was frustrated by something she could not control, ‘But where’s the poetry in that!’ She even said it once when we all had the flu and Mom was sick and vomited on the floor and it made a good mess but it made us all laugh anyway because it was her and not us. Except for Mom, of course. Mom didn’t think it was very funny at the time. But we still say it today. When things don’t go right. When the mundane becomes petty. ’Where’s the poetry in that!’”

         The thing of it is, that Julia likes to talk.

         One evening, she just said it, out of the blue, after I had been hammering a little bit on her narrative about Donovan. In her usual way with some double entendre clearly present.

         “But where’s the poetry in that? He is not a stupid man. Uneducated, simple in his wants, but very perceptive and bright. He has, so far at least, relied too much on his native abilities and not enough on what he had learned … But I can’t give him any ideas. He has to have the ideas on his own. And he happens to live around a lot of people who exist on the received wisdom of the Bible without ever giving it a deeper thought. Being bright in such a world is difficult. It can get you killed! Received wisdom is tough on those who do not believe. And you know that he does not. He has seen the sham of it. This is not real Christianity that he faces. This is dogma.”

         She did not explain what she knew I already understood, but much of it was in the fabric of the book and I was not about to argue with her sense of a man that she knew far better than I ever could.

         I was about to go when she said, “You know, it would be far easier if he could be caught up in the Industrial Revolution. He would fight that. He would be a Luddite! He would see immediately how that—the machine monsters in the factories—how they would be stealing his humanity as much as plowing the fields for Rolf ever did. And he has no problems with the intrusion of logic. Logic was never a part of his upbringing. His narrative is his own. He has the Bible, and John Donne, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare. He understands the narrative.”

         I could hear then that she was onto a jag. Her words came faster.

         “Logic can be a wonderful tool—much like its cousin, math. A kind of shorthand. But there’s no poetry in it. All the subtlety, nuance and color of language, reduced to numbers. A kind of communication, but only of a very limited nature. Good for counting the herd, or the beans. Einstein said that logic might get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere…Storytelling is the making of analogies. Cause and effect…The slaves to logic would even have it be a philosophy. The slaves of logic want it to define morality, when it can do no such thing. Logic cannot define truth or beauty, though it might help us in our mortal re-creation of it…They frequently confuse logic and reason. But I think that may be intentional. Reason is by analogy. Logic is addition and subtraction. Those who think otherwise—and they are the majority today, to be sure, because it is the easier path for thinking that is laid down in the public schools by teachers who don’t want the bother of analogies—to much time taken—inefficient—Those are the sorts of people that you must live with now, and the ones my daughters must live with, and my grandchildren. The mind that evolved over the millennia within our brains was the result of analogy, not math. A brain reduced to math is a poor machine at best. Better to have beads on a string. Logic might lead us, through reasoning, to find a right or a wrong, but an axe is not a moral code. And the ones who believe it is, have no sense of humor about it. They sense the danger. One joke they play is to say they don’t accept ‘analogy.’ They arbitrarily reject analogy as false reasoning because it is not precisely and always the same—as if their precious logic has any physical appearance in real life, or in the lives of the ten thousand generations that came before. And then, they always offer their basic theorem: if ‘a’ equals ‘b’ and ‘c’ equals ‘b’ then ‘a’ equals ‘c’, which, not coincidently, is an analogy, crude as it is. But truth and beauty, beauty and truth, they can not be reached by the false deductions of addition and subtraction. Sherlock Holmes will forever be looking for his cocaine in that particular hay stack.”

         “You are mixing your metaphors. He might be looking for a needle if he was taking heroin.”

         “I am tired.”

         “Good night.”

         Jesse had already asked me if I had heard ‘The Lecture.’ I didn’t think so, though I was certain I had heard bits and pieces of it. Jesse warned me I would know it when I’d heard it. And I immediately thought this had been it! Or a large part of it, in any case. And I was quite happy to have finally gotten the most of it, at last. I was one of the few, other than those readers who would encounter it in ‘The Plow and Stars.’ But I was one of the few who had gotten it right from her lips, just as her children had first heard it.

         Jesse said, “Each of us got it in our turn. She seemed to always wait until we were twelve. Puberty seems to have been her mark. But all the pieces were there before, so when we finally heard it, we understood it…And then there was one of our neighbor’s children. Keith. The Jensens have one of the roosters you might be hearing in the mornings. They live on the other side of the trees there.” She gestured toward the wrinkle to the west. “His mother home schooled them too, and when she saw how well we did on the exams, she asked mom if she would take Keith for an hour a day. Well, by that time he was smitten with Elena anyway, so he was all in.”

         “What happened with Keith?”

         “Oh, he ran off to MIT on a scholarship. That was about ten minutes after Elena had rejected him the first time. As I understand it, he now teaches AI to robots, as well as a bunch of nerds, at the University of Pennsylvania. But he still writes her love letters.”

         And then, as if he had heard us talking, it was barely a week later that a rather pale fellow knocked on the door of the barn one day. Thin would be the correct descriptive, made worse by this height. He was a couple of inches taller than me. He opened the door hesitantly and then saw me there at the desk.

         “Hello. My name is Keith Jensen. I live down the road,” he gestured, almost as Jesse had, “well, used to live down the road there, anyway.”

         I opened the door for him, all the way, so to speak.

         “The one who used to write love letters to Elena.”

         That stood him up straight, like a sobering slap.

         “My reputation precedes. Yes. Still do, actually. But that’s another matter…No. Maybe that is the same matter…Anyway, I live down in Pennsylvania now. I was visiting my family and I just dropped in on the chance she would be here, but she’s not. Maya says she was here a couple of weeks ago.”

         He closed the door behind himself after he ducked through and came in to shake my hand.

         “What can I do for you?”

         He rocked for only a second on the balls of his feet. I was ready for a circuitous journey to the truth, but he went directly there.

         “She doesn’t answer my letters.”

         At least he got right to the point.

         “I can see how that might be a problem, but what can I do about that?”

         “Maya says you write.”

         There is a moment. It is an ‘electrical moment. You feel it as if an electrical impulse has traveled through you from your brain, down your spine, to your toes. It’s very odd when it happens to you unexpectedly. In the middle of a good movie, you may expect it. Or a good lecture. Or sometimes when you see someone you like for the first time. But this caught me off guard. I had iImmediate visions of Cyrano de Bergerac writing love letters to Roxane for the love befuddled Christian. The narrative wrote itself!

         “I do that. I write. That’s what I’m trying to do at the moment, as a matter of fact.’

         “I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you. But I thought I’d ask…actually, Maya suggested that I ask you when I was in the house.”

         “Maya has her own ideas about things. And Maya thinks I am a magician. She said as much when I told her she was a sorceress.”

         He nodded at that with a fleeting smile. “She always has. They all do. The girls I mean. Well. They’re all women now. And the one I’m interested in is Elena.”

         There is another chair there at my desk. It’s the one I use to stack stuff on. I pulled all that off and put it down on a bale of hay that was already holding up a few other odds and ends. He sat right down.

         “What can I do for you?”

         Now this wasn’t a kid. He was a man already used to dealing with the small problems of life. But he suddenly looked like a kid. Sheepish.

         “Maya says you’ve been talking to Elena. You might have some idea…about why she doesn’t answer me.”

         Now, it was simply up to me to wing it. I have no experience with personal counseling whatsoever. And I am totally ignorant about love, almost. But this was serious business. What did I actually know? I couldn’t run away from the thought.

         “I think she loves you.”

         This cleared his face of the pained expression it had and left him in a visible state of shock. A true gobsmack, I thought. The effect had me second guessing about my narrative.

         After a moment he said, “Did she say something?”

         “No. I don’t think she has ever mentioned you. It’s kind of a dog that didn’t bark, sort of thing. I hadn’t thought about it until just now. But I’ve heard about you from everyone else. From Julia. From Jesse. From Maya. But not Elena. That’s odd, don’t you think?”

         “She is stubborn.”

         “They all are. It’s in the genes, I think.”

         “So, you think she loves me just because she hasn’t even said a word about me?”

         “Yes.”

         I now wanted this to be the end of my counseling. Right then. The possible stupidity of the matter was appalling. The fewer words the better. Yet, I was somehow sure of what I said, though I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to explain myself.

         He said, “I hadn’t thought about that. Then, you think I should write her more?”

         I shrugged at him. “I can’t say that. I don’t know. You have to be the judge of that.”

         He nodded, as if I had issued an order. “Yes. I think you’re right. I should write more.”
         He obviously had not heard my answer. I only knew that I wouldn’t want to be in his head right then, at that particular moment. I have been in such a state of bewilderment before, myself. Just recently, as a matter of fact. It’s disorienting. I was happy to be out of it.

         He rose and shook my hand again very earnestly and left.

         Julia says, “There is a tragedy to being a parent that is made out of the very fabric itself. Through their childhood, you dream of the day when you are able speak to them as individuals and you can express what it is you meant by this, or what it is you meant by that. But the day never comes. When they might be able to understand you, they don’t want to listen. They loudly refuse to. Whatever you say contradicts some idea they have about the matter, or you, I suppose. Their sense of finding their own independence makes what you are saying oppressive, no matter that it is not, or was not meant to be.”

         My father was a member of the Elton Street Fitness Club from the day it opened. That would have been in 1989. He had been out of the army for a year and thought he was getting flabby. But that was the year I was born, so I have wondered if there was something else to it. Like, simply getting out of the house. Elton Street was something of a social club at the time.

         Basically, the club was three boxing rings and a work-out area with showers at the back. They were so popular in the 80’s that you had to put your name in to get a time for one of the rings. They were that busy. But, in 31 years, I had never seen my father fight. Ever. And when I asked him to teach me—having heard that he was good enough to be asked to box in a local fundraising tournament, he said no. But he won the tournament and then, later, started paying for my fareir to go down to the Elton Street when I was fourteen years old.

         His advice to me was simple. ‘Be good enough to take care of yourself.’

         I asked him once, later on, why he wouldn’t teach me. He said, because he didn’t want to hit me. He never wanted me to have that memory. I believe this is because his father hit him. That’s the way that is.

         Sleep eludes. It hides as you seek it. Like a child’s game. What secret thought is behind that.

         I was writing earlier about a city on Mars called Elon. It is the largest of the settlements there and the temporary home of my protagonist. That there will one day be an Elon is as certain as the future of mankind itself, at least on Mars. Simply because we can imagine it to be. And if we cannot do at least that, we—mankind— will simply no longer be, at all

         But I worry about that threshold. Between time and Timbuktu then. Between my protagonist, and the character imagined by Kurt Vonneugut in his ‘chrono-synclastic infundibula’ where all truths fit together. I worry about being a ‘prime mover’ or just one of the moved. What are the words in the dictionary between ‘time’ and ‘Timbuktu?’ I will have to look those up…That’s the sort of stuff that keeps me awake.       

         Julia is right, of course. I say, of course, because I have said this so often now. But she was right to say that all novels were fantasy. A simple fact. Someday, someone will write novels about the Mars that was, that once had been, when men first walked there, and lived their lives there, and died there. And those novels will become as much imagination as my own conjuring of that place are now.

         The matter is that the memory of time is so unreal. Whatever time is, it briefly becomes what we imagine it to be, which may be what we want it to be, or not, before it becomes what we imagine it to have been. It was, however, never what it really was. We always leave out what doesn’t suit us. There is no tense that fits. And whatever Elon Musk dreams of Mars, that will be, and remembered to be, or to have been—that future perfect being someone else’s perfect past. In that way it will become as much of the past as its own future had been… Very confusing. 

         Much of the present of our lives here in New Hampshire is made up of our dreams, and those are colored now by the dreams of Neal and Molly Wright. And so too, by transference—transmogrification—the dreams of Olivia Morgan, who once imagined and played with, and around, and about, her life in New York City—those dreams that are now cut into the facets of ephemera in those boxes—those scraps that make only a thin ghost of the woman, out of the whole, but have never-the-less re-entered into the present of our lives—just as her genes do, that now take their part in the bodies of Julia, and Jesse and Maya and Elena. And now Alma. And their children will play with those scarves and pocket books and silken things and perhaps a son will wear a hat that Henry Morgan wore and think he looks somehow the part. And that will be the part that is remembered. And that will be the future of this place. And that son, in his hat, imagining what was, will then be remembered. And recalled, someday.

         This spiral of thought is of the sort that I imagine Kurt Vonnegut once had while waiting for a bus one winter’s day in Indianapolis. Maybe it was. Lying here on my six inches of foam with my nose close enough to the window glass to start a fog, I can see a light in the sky above the river, suspended alone there, as if a star had been caught between the invisible clouds that framed it at either side. The moon? Or is that just the bus? You know, Kurt Vonnegut might have frozen to death while waiting for that bus in his youth, but the damned thing finally came instead, and he wrote novels about what he imagined that death to be. And in that way, he did not die. And that is the poetry in that.

***

35. What is the conversation?

         One afternoon, I came in at four and Julia wasn’t there. Though the pages were stacked on the table, this was disconcerting. The truck wasn’t in the driveway either, but I thought I’d seen Maya leave with the baby earlier, so maybe Julia had gone for a walk. It made me briefly aware once more of how I had come to depend on the routine.

         I sat down and after a little fiddle, I started in copying what I had. And then suddenly there was a burst of noise from above. This was Julia, coming down the steep attic stairs too fast, and slipping. Evidently, she had been carrying something and the next thing I heard was cursing as she picked the things up that she had dropped. I knew she was okay by the way she was moving around, so I stayed where I was. My mother taught me to never interfere with a cursing woman.

         She had calmed down considerably by the time she reached the hallway, and then came through carrying a shoe box with the contents protruding. She did not look in my direction.

         “Sorry.” Was what she said, as she went into the living room and sat down in her chair. Quiet returned.

         I continued to work on copying, until I reached this sentence: Clare says, ‘Talking is all we have, all we remember. The thinking is a dream.’

         I knew what she was saying. I believed it! But I wasn’t happy with it. I kept at my job until it was clear Julia had moved beyond that bit of dialog to something else before I spoke up.

         “‘Talking is all we have, all we remember. The thinking is a dream.’…Is that it, then? Is that all you are going to say?”

         Her response came, after a delay of total silence for almost a minute. I waited. I knew she had heard me.

         Finally, “You are a pain in the ass.”

         That was definitive. In that I had heard Julia described that way herself, at least twice by two different people, I imagine she had learned that particular combination of words previously and taken them to heart, and I knew she was still in the aftermath of the cursing from her slip on the stairs, so I waited before I responded.

         “Yes. But is that all you’re going to say?”

         Finally, she says, “Funny you should ask. That’s the very problem I was trying to solve…I wondered off upstairs with it in my head about an hour ago and lost track of time…You’re right. It needs more. Or something else.”

         Quiet again returned. I began to worry about my dinner.

         This too was part of the routine. I was no better than one of Pavlov’s dogs.

         But she did finally rise, and come into the kitchen, deliberately put on her apron and started making hamburgers while she spoke to me.

         She said, “I found some pictures of the girls up in the attic. Pictures like that open up holes in time, I think. No, I’m positive. Time is just another of those things we don’t have a clue about. What we feel about it is like finding the tail of the proverbial elephant in the dark.”

         “Time? or the pictures?”

         “Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

         She wasn’t turned in my direction so I didn’t bother to look up.

         I ask again, “So, do you want Clare to say more? Should I hold off on that page?”

         I looked up then and saw that she was giving me one of her theatrical stares.

         I said, “You should have been an actress.”

         She said, “Maybe I would have been good enough for television.”

         That was something her mother used to say to her when she was a girl. I remembered the line from a previous reminisce.

         I said, “Your mother was right.”

         And then suddenly I had the awareness that we were talking a lot like a married couple might. Like my parents spoke to each other. I couldn’t help but laugh. And she started laughing as well and I knew it was at the same sort of thought.

         Suddenly she stopped. “That’s what Clare wants to say! That it’s not a dream. That thinking is a memory of all the things they’ve ever said to each other before…Give me the page!”

         The hamburgers were burn’t a little from the delay, but we finally ate. She had baked her own bread for a bun and anything tastes good on that.

         But later she brought the shoebox around from the living room before she poured her bourbon.

         “These are my memory holes. My holes in time.”

Maya had already come down then holding Alma and she said, “This is my little memory hole.”

         Julia took the baby from her.

         “It only works when you are holding them. Because then you’re in it.”

         But thinking about it amounted to more than all the things we’ve said before—at least that and more. And that might have worked for Clare. She was busy living and wasn’t engaged in an artificial intellectual exercise. But I was. And it was just the kind of thing I was thinking all the time, in a sort of chess game of narrative ideas. But for me it wasn’t just a game. It seemed to me to be more important than anything else I could do. And I was not alone. Julia was ahead of me but on the same track.

         The next day I mentioned this to her—not in passing but very deliberately when she had come out to take her walk at noon. I was waiting for her, in ambush, sitting on the tailgate of her truck. She came out with Alma in her carrier sack in front of her. At least Alma gave me a smile. But it was almost as if Julia expected me to be there. And then I was immediately thinking about married couples again.

         She immediately says, “The real problem is that we don’t know what thinking is. They can chart it and graph it and even picture it now on oscilloscopes, or whatever it is they use on computers these days, but they can’t figure it out. It’s not just a lot of 0’s and 1’s. Logic is a math for logic, but nothing more. All this AI business is a joke because they’re trying to create thinking without knowing what they are doing. Like smashing atoms without a clue about the possible result.”

         Exactly! I had been up half the night with that exact thought and she had said it almost word for word. They were doing it without a clue. Now they were playing with viruses without enough fear for the unknown consequences to stop themselves.

         One of the other thoughts I had was about all the poor victims of ‘insane’ asylums whose lives had been destroyed by the foolish tinkering of psychoanalysis, and their lobotomies, and drug therapies. The psychologists had no idea what they were dealing with, no real understanding of what thinking was—while they played with human beings like lab animals, looking for numbers where people should be.

         I said, “Shades of Mary Shelley.”

         I actually said that. I was beginning to talk like Julia as well.

         She sighed loudly, “A brilliant fellow like Iain McGilchrist could describe it, chart it, I suppose, might even predict it, but what ‘it’ is, is still a mystery. Like the missing planet in our solar system. What’s the real influence of the right side of the brain on our behavior? Or the left? The exact same graphable ingredients that make a psychopath, make a genius—but one will kill and the other create. William James Sidis could reimagine the universe as a teenager and then collapse into himself and end up collecting trolley tickets as an adult…This was not just a problem of exceptions. This is actually the rule. As a society, we have created guidelines for thought that damage everyone—without any idea of what we are doing…One religion here and another cult there, Critias in Athens or Cotton Mather in Salem. Throughout history, we’ve done it. And the question becomes, ‘why.’ To what end? Control? In order to have a civil society? By what standard? At times it was apparently okay to cut the hearts out of children to appease a weather god in some societies, or okay to rape women in others. And burning witches seems like almost as much fun as cutting off the heads of anyone that disagreed. Insanity always seems to lurk behind all this. But then, when it’s right before us, we deny it’s there.”

         She had lost me. This was not productive thinking. She knows this. It is the edge of a cliff that she has stood on before me.

         But Alma is quite pleased with her ideas. She is pleased to be spoken to.

         Julia says, “Right here, right now, we have made some improvement. This is a better place. Whatever our faults are, we are not cutting off the heads of anyone who disagrees. I think all of this living is what we are about. What we are supposed to be doing. We may not be satisfied with it, but at least it’s better. I know we’re only a century and a half away here from legally enslaving other human beings, but this moment is an improvement. That’s clearly so. Let’s keep moving in this direction. I haven’t written about the Irish slaves in America because it would only be a rehash of the same stupidity that enslaved Indians, or Africans, but maybe I should think about that again. What I have written about is how that stupidity was overcome. And not just how we talked about it. How we did it. What we did. But I’ve never understood how they thought.”

         Julia is a fast walker. She takes it seriously. She has a purpose. It is her deliberate exercise. And when she talks, she matches her words. But I am a saunterer. I wander. I wonder about this or that. I breakaway from her after a half a mile or so, when she is still on the road. She will be headed to the river soon, and I know that she is taking Alma with her now so that Maya can have a little time to herself, but I am having other thoughts.

***

36. A man is not a piano key

         I don’t like New York. I find it oppressive. Brooklyn only slightly better. I grew up around Boston, which is not a good comparison, but at least I always had the sense there of being able to flee the city and find some semblance of country in less than an hour. With New York, in less than an hour, you would still be in New York.

         The sense of it is that any one human being there is unimportant. And if you add up all those unimportant people, what did you have then? The math was simple enough. And that was the real problem. People being reduced to math.

         One of my favorite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But my favorite book of his, Notes From the Underground, is a difficult book to like. It doesn’t have the dramatics of Crime and Punishment or the scope of The Brothers Karamozov, I grant you. But I have thought that it is more understandable than either of those.

         In one translation, he explains there, “The whole work of man consists in proving to himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! … Man was not made to be a slave to pleasure He was made for struggle and virtue. Ironically, trials and tribulations make life meaningful…And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.”

         I have an immediate empathy with this ungrateful wretch.

         But he also says, “you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you will…Science has succeeded in so far analyzing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will,” is not real.

         This is Dostoyevsky too, of course, so it needs to be paid attention to. He does not explain the contradiction of his conclusion that there is no free will. He says, “ if there really is someday discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices—that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula—then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?”

         People don’t play organs so much anymore, so I prefer the translation to ‘piano key.’ It strikes a more familiar note, you could say.

         “…Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse… may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key!”

         Now, frankly, after reading this in high school, it seemed to me that it summed up everything there was to say. For a brief time, I thought my chance to be a writer was lost. Why bother? The center of all that we are had been uncovered! We are not independent. We are simply perverse. It had been revealed! But then my own sense of perversity came in to play. It was clear enough then that no one else was listening, anyway. Or, at least too few. My reason to write was to deny that theorem. And to repeat this message in as many ways as I could. And then, of course, I met Julia.

         That is not to say that Dostoyevsky was wrong and that Julia is right, but that they could both be correct in the same universe! That is the organic whole of it! Amidst that endless quiet of inorganic space, and the dead forces of math and physics that determine the orbits, there is a noise made for its own purpose. The sounds of life there would be disturbing.       

         Julia’s sense that it is the common everyday man who is at the center of civilization does not conflict with the mad Russian at all. It is simply the larger picture. Like one of Maya’s paintings. The darkness encroaches, but the center holds.

         Man is not a piano key! Each one is his own, “And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”

That is the plot of a million novels! But that is not perversity. That is the very aspect of our nature that has sustained us and set us apart. How could we assume otherwise. The splendid forces of inorganic space to do not stand in awe at the night sky. The beauty of a sunset or a rainbow or a woman does not capture the eye of the stone.

         Julia had said, “Success can only be achieved by hard work. I’m not as strict on that as Dostoyevsky was. I guess, I’ve had it too easy. He believed man was made for struggle and the trials and tribulations of life make it meaningful. But I do think that success is only found in the mastery of mistakes. Making mistakes is the learning…That is the importance of anticipation found in learning that is crucial…Not just the outcome, but the process…Hedonism is a death trap for an individual human being as well as the society as a while.”

         And that too, was what I believed!

         McGilchrist might define all this in clinical terms and show the influences of the left brain on the right or visa versa. Indeed, that might be the way it works itself out. But it was a useless diagram to me. It was like attempting a logical definition of love. It was like a verbal description of sex. And that was not the matter that was in my head. What was in my head was an admixture. It was all the things I had ever done or seen or heard, or said, or wanted to say—in fact, even thought to say. And it was all that I had ever read. All at once! It was a conversation with others, or just with myself. There was no calculation of how—the way there might be, after the fact. Detective Columbo was not going to be around to figure it out, anyway. It was my subjective. It was just what I did, when I did it, and the why was what I thought it should be. My excuse for being. And that was not a lie. But for me, it was a reason to understand.

         Early one afternoon the day darkened and it suddenly began to rain and as I stared out of my little window, from the desk into the fields, where the trees of the wrinkle dissolved into ghosts, I heard a voice. I suppose for some this might be a religious experience, especially given the nature of the thoughts I was having, but for me it was a puzzle. I investigated. And just as I opened the small door, I saw Julia going back inside the house. I suppose she had shortened her noonday walk, but the voice I had heard was not a woman’s. The lightning was in full play and the drops were thick but I looked further around the corner of the barn outside and found a figure I recognized before I saw his face, sitting beneath the overhang at the end, on a stool by the chicken yard, his white beard poking out from the hood on his rain slicker in a perpendicular fashion because of the way the slicker was buttoned up.

         “Hello Mr. Copple.”

         He gave me only a quick turn of the head. He said, “Busy around here! Julia just asked me if I wanted to come inside for a cup of coffee. I’m fine. I’m dry. Tractor’s wet.”

         The smaller tractor he used for cutting closer to Julia’s house was sitting there by the chicken yard. The chickens had come in from the yard and were all huddled inside the coop, popping their heads out with a comical frequency. I could hear them murmuring their discontent.

         I said, “It’s exciting when it rains like this.”

         He said, “It’s a pain in the ass, is what it is. I can’t finish up. I’ll have to go home and wait for tomorrow. I was just waiting for the lightening to let up. I had an ol’ buddy of mine once get knocked clear off his tractor and into a ditch by lightening. They didn’t find him right off. That tractor just idled away until it was out of gas.”

         I asked before I could stop myself. “It killed him?”

         “Yeah. He did like laying around in ditches. When he was a drunk. But that killed him.”

         I wanted to talk. The morning had been unproductive for me.

         “What do you usually you do in bad weather?”

         He looked quizzically at me and then down at himself.

         “You can see an example of that right before your eyes.”

         “Sure. But what else do you do?”

         He pulled a cigarette out of a crevice in his slicker and lit it up with a zippo. He offered the pack at me but I shook my head.

         “I fix the damn tractors. They’re all getting old. Like me.”

         He was playing hard to get

         “Okay. But that’s not all. You have to fix the water pump and sharpen your saws and all the rest. But what else? What do you do in your spare time?”

         “I haven’t had much spare time in the last fifty years. I’m married.”

         I stayed with it.

         “Okay. So, you’re out there sitting on your tractor for hours at a time cutting grass. What do you think about?”

         He laughed at my persistence.

         “A tractor makes a lot of sounds. You can tell how it’s running that way.”

         “Yeah. And what about the price of rice in China.”

         “I don’t sell rice or I would…What do I think about? Why, I was thinking about you just the other day.”

         Now, this way of turning the table seemed to be a common trait among the neighbors.

         “What did you think?”

         He laughed again.

         He said, “Did you ever read that Pottle book about James Boswell?”

         Now, I knew he was up to no good.

         “Pottle wrote a dozen books about James Boswell.”

         “Yeah. I read’em all. Winters can be long. I took a course over at the University on Boswell. Got to know him quite well.”

         “Which book did you mean?” He did not answer quickly, but now that he had me on the hook, I imagined that he was a pretty good fisherman. I added, “Have you ever gone fishing with Julia.”

         “I have. She catches all the fish and I watch.”

         “Yeah. So, what book?”

         He grinned at me.

         “When I first saw you over here back in March, I said to Mandy, he’s there for one of the girls. He can smell’em. The boys in the neighborhood used to come prowling around here all the time when the girls were home. I had two girls of my own, you know. You need a stick to keep’em off.” One hand waved toward the north. “Look at them trolls.”

         All this while the lightening was playing in the dark gray mass across the river and briefly illuminating the lowering clouds there into moving shapes, and dazzled off the grass.

         “I don’t think they are coming this way.”

         “No…The trolls have their own aims…But I saw you here back in March and for a moment—just a moment—I thought you might be here for Julia, but Mandy hit me upside of the head and set me straight. And I knew she was right. The smell of ther girls is all about the place.”

         Mandy had been dead for several years. I did not try to correct him.

         “I just came to help Julia with her book.”

         “Sure, you did. Honest mistake…But you were a goner the minute you stepped a foot into that house.”

         I would have to consider that later on too.

         “Is this the sort of thing you think about when you are up on the tractor?”
         “Yeah.”

         “What about Boswell?”

         “Well, according to Mr. Pottle there, Boswell realized that if he kept following his nose, being a man for such smells, he was going to end up in a ditch, so he decided he needed a wife.”

         I had to smile at the progress of his thought.

         “I don’t drink…Much. And I was very happy living in my van in the campground.”

         “Sure, you were. But you can’t eat hotdogs every night.”

         And he had been talking enough to Julia to know more than I did. So, despite Mr. Copple’s best effort, my mind was back with Dostoyevsky.

         I say, “So, you believe we are not the masters of our own ship. Our destiny is sealed by greater forces?
         “No. I wouldn’t say that. But I’d say, that’s the size of the ground you have to cover. That’s the job. I would say, we are who we want to be. Everyone has to deal with the same set of facts. You choose your own on the way.”

         I was confused. Hadn’t he just alluded to my being a pawn of my sense of smell, and my sexual urges? No it was philosophy.

         “I thought you were saying I couldn’t help myself being here.”

         “No. You are here because you want to be, and Julia wants you to be. And I imagine she has her own motives, but my guess is that you saw something here that caught your eye as well as your imagination. Not just your nose. Man has a whole lot of senses to deal with. There’s no mathematical formula to it. A lot more moving parts than a tractor, though…So, I do sit up there on my little seat—my throne Mandy used to call it—and contemplate the nature of man, like your Mr. Emerson, and wonder what it’s all about. But I can’t predict it. Any more than I can predict which of Julia’s daughters has caught your eye…Mandy would have had a guess, but she’s not telling. That way she could say she was right, but after the fact.”

         There were many forces in nature. Including Mr. Copple. I could not contend with them all. But at least, I was not a piano key.

***

37. Backwards science

         When Donovan ended up on the ship to America instead of Australia, I foolishly said, “That feels like deus ex machina.”

         She is having none of it. Her patience was suddenly thin—for whatever reason.

         “That’s just a game! What my high school physics teacher used to call ‘backwards science.’ Fortunately, for us all—but perhaps not so much for those who dearly want there to be a ‘matrix,’ because their own lives feel pointless—God hasn’t cheated us of our own individual confrontations with reality. All identifications of a ‘simulation’ in the human quest are conveniently after the fact, not before. Given the uncountable quantity of possible sensory experience, the sheershear numbers, there will be ‘coincidences,’ but selecting motifs from those that we find along the way for some pattern is only an attempt at creature comfort and does not prove some mysterious intention, nor a larger cosmic game.”

         She had warmed quickly to her subject, as they used to say.

         “We each face the same reality—not a construct of our individual consciousness. Unless we want to cancel the laws of physics as well…Our success as individuals is dependent on our ability to manipulate or control the very same reality that spawned our neighbor, our fathers and mothers, and all of those generations who came before us. The very fact that billions of our species have dealt with the same reality, and found their way to some level of success in their lives, and passed some portion of that acquired knowledge on to us, does not say that they cheated reality through some conjured game. But it does credit them with the intelligence of being able to recognize what works, and remember it, and the brilliance of finding ways to pass that knowledge on…All hail the cave painting, the illuminated manuscript, the printing press and the internet, but not the matrix. That Hollywood confection is a bit of ‘backwards science’ that fills the void for those who have weak gods or no God at all.”

         She was not going to get away on that ship so easily.

         “So why did he end up on the one ship instead of the other?.”

         She shrugged at me. “Oh. Well. I suppose that was just a little manipulation on my part. I had to keep the story going.” But there was a smile at her lips. “And the other ship was full. More than full. I told you that when the Captain complained earlier about the supply of biscuit. I didn’t have to tell you that there was still room on the America bound ship, did I?”

         Earlier, with Alma crying, and some chaos because of diapers, or the lack thereof, the baby was set in my lap because Julia was still cooking and Maya had to go to the store. The baby was satisfied with this solution primarily because I had her wrapped in a large bath towel against further leakage and she got to watch her grandmother doing her thing while orating in animated fashion.

         “Anyone who says they do not have time for fiction has a shrunken imagination. They have removed poetry from their lives. By turning their backs on the play, they have lost their childhood. By ignoring the novel, they deny mythology. To disregard the simple tale is to forget the human experience. Dwelling only in the present is a pale sort of life to live.”

         Julia survey her audience a moment and then spoke directly to Alma.

         “To conjure a future is, of course, a fantasy and in the very nature of fiction. To pretend that all that matters is what you alone can perceive is, in and of itself, a falsehood. We all live in the lives of others. The lie of the’ realist’ is in their hubris and ignorance. By saying they have no time for fiction, they want to cut off the hand of God.”

         Alma was quite pleased with the idea when her grandmother raised a shiny broad bladed knife.

         I put a few words in edgewise for sport.

         “Too many of the so-called ‘fantasy’ stories that I’ve read are about paper mache characters, where the imagined depth is to reverse the roles of men and women…I often wonder if what I’m reading under the rubric of fantasy is really just simple biological ignorance.”

         Julia likes this, “Just so. Carlo Cipolla wrote an essay called ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.’ He was obviously having a great deal of fun writing it. The subject is a rich target. And though I could argue with some his presentations, or direction here or there, I was immediately taken by the fact that I fit several of the categories myself, all too well. You have to be careful.”

         I was already aware of the author because Julia had brought his name up more than once concerning Medieval economy. A book devoted to the laws of stupidity sounded like it might be interesting. Alma concurred. She cooed.

         “Is that what governs us then? Stupidity?.”

         “Directly, or indirectly, yes! Of course. We couldn’t live without it! Can you imagine someone who thinks they’re smart enough to tell the rest of us how to live? Even with the best of intentions, how can they imagine they would know enough? How much milk should we produce? How much should we drink every day? How should we process it? How should we care for the cows? Every question has more questions attached, but they’re going to tell us how much we should produce and how much it will cost. They’re insane as well as stupid. Mr. Copple told me why he gave up on keeping dairy cows. There was a new law every week. His family had dairy cows on that land for three generations, from the time that Neal Wright was still building his chairs and tables. But Frank had to give it up or else shoot someone over in Concord.”

         So later, with her bourbon in hand, I pursued the god in the machine.

         “So, you are telling me there wasn’t enough biscuit on the Australia ship, so your story turns on a mundane detail.”

         She shakes her head at me.

         “Worse! Remember, the laws of stupidity are always in force. The Captain of the Australia ship foolishly leaves the stocking of provisions to the First Mate. The First Mate is a secret drunkard because his wife and a child died of consumption while he was away previously. He does not purchase the provisions he should. The America bound ship had suffered poor provisions on its previous turn because of corruption—simple theft—and the new First Mate there buys more than he needs to provide for that. And that Captain, doing his job this time, sees this excess and after getting pissed at the First Mate for wasting his money, takes on half a dozen more indentures and sticks them in the First Mate’s quarters which are all of 5’ x 7’, to cover the extra expense. Life is a joy. But Donovan gets to America.”

         “Stupidity reigns! The matrix is simply stupid!”

         “Almost! Not quite! Remember. It all comes down to love. It’s love that conquers all. Clare set it all in motion.”

         “How so?”

         “She has sacrificed herself by fooling around with Rolfe to get the money to give to Donovan. This is ultimately all her doing!”

         I liked the story. I wasn’t questioning that. I couldn’t really pursue it any further. So, I said, “Where did you come up with all this?”

         She knew what I meant.

         She said, “I will tell you where that story came from. I witnessed it.”

         “Was this when you were already time traveling?.”

         “No…” I had called her a ‘time traveler’ several times for going back into the past, whenever she made a remark about my extrapolations for the future. “It was before that. I had a girl friend who was at school with me. She was a good kid. Smart. And we used to go on double dates and so I also got to know her boyfriend. They had pretty much grown up together. And they had been love-birds even before school, and I was still playing the field. I rarely dated the same guy twice in those days because the expectations if you went out a second time with the same guy were clear. In our sophomore year, her boyfriend, who was spending too much time with her and not enough on the ROTC commitment that was paying the college bills, lost his scholarship. He enlisted then so that he would not have any debts left, but also because he was just that type. True blue. He was generally a good guy. But before he was assigned, they got married.”

         “I’m waiting for the connection.”

         “It’s coming…This guy ended up overseas. Whatever he was up to, he was good at it. He used to grab flights back to the Sstates on transport planes because he worked on those at an airbase in Turkey. And then, eventually, he came home again. And he went back to school. My girlfriend and I had already graduated by then, of course.”

         “I can see this coming. But what does it have to do with ‘The Plow and Stars’?

         “What do you see coming?”

         I really didn’t see a thing. I got smart. “He’s gay.”

         “Not likely. I’ll testify to that. The whole time we were double dating he was trying to work a way to get me into the sack too. But that was a lot of effort for nothing.”

         “You said they were lovebirds.
         “They were. And to the best of my knowledge, they are still happily married to this day.”

         “So, where’s the connection?”

         “If you would be quiet, I’ll tell you.”

         I objected, “You set a bad example on that score. You’re always asking questions.”

         “You’re right. So, keep asking questions. I deserve it…But the connection is this. By the time he came home for good, she had a kid.”

         “How does that connect?”

         “It wasn’t his kid.”

         I was a little lost. “And that was what you had in mind at the start of The Plow and Stars?”

         “Yes and no. A little more. I knew who the father was! He had gone on one of our double dates. I didn’t date him twice, but he did not give up on her when she got married.”

         Was that it then? The love birds were both being unfaithful?”

         “No. Not exactly. She knew I knew who the father was. She broke up our friendship over that. She was afraid I would say something or use it against her somehow. And Bob, her husband, he was happy about that too. He was afraid I would tell her that he had been hitting on me. And Cheryl never told him it wasn’t his baby. He probably doesn’t know to this day. The kid must be in his thirties now.”

         “Well, I’m still not sure I understand how all that double dealing inspired you.”

         Her voice had an edge to it now. “You will. That will be pretty clear soon enough.”

         But she wasn’t done with me.

         “You know, I was thinking the other day, what are they going to do on Mars when they’re confronted with gene editing? … More to the point, when they are confronted with designer humans who’ve been altered, the way a machine is configured, to do a particular job. The ‘comprachicos’ of the twenty-first century?”

         “The what?”

         “Victor Hugo’s nightmare in The Man Who Laughs. The remanufactured humans. The ‘comprachicos.’ They will undoubtedly be educated with artificial intelligence, whatever that is. The physical reality is that they will be sub-human. A’ la, Aldous Huxley. And without social norms, but they will be out there. No police force will be able to monitor it all. Computers are expensive. A human being can be manufactured by a few moments of gratification. They will be raised to be slaves. They will be used for what a normal human being would refuse to do…Does your Mars have a plan to deal with that?…You know I just read that some human monster has grown a human hand in the belly of a mouse—in a lab. He actually cut off the portion of the gene sequence for a human hand from a unborn child and grew it in the belly of a mouse…I was just wondering, what laws are going to apply to them? Will they be held responsible for only doing what they have been designed to do?”

         This was unfair, but I deserved it. I should not have been poking at the bear.

***

38. Ecclesiastes again

         At least I had continued to write ‘Elysium Mons. This was not a given. There were interruptions. Too many of those. But my game then became, to use some of those very same disturbances in my story. To write them into the story instead of just trying to ignore them. It made it easier to continue. My hero, as my heroes often were, was just some better version of myself. I even had him fall in love, despite misgivings. Such things happen. Even to a monk on Mars.

         But I knew I was still writing much of the same story I had written before, under a new pretense. My Mars was no more or less disguised than Tolkien’s Middle Earth is from the Earth we know today. We still have our dragons. The spiro on Mars were just as fierce. I did not believe that artificial intelligence was going to somehow purify itself and somehow eliminate or overcome the faults of its maker, much less take away the same motivations that so often destroy us here. The robots were no smarter than we could be, even if they held more data. The data would not tell them what was true, only what was frequent. The point was not to pretend anything else, but to deal with the things we knew to be.

         We have tens of thousands of years of human history in the rubble beneath our feet. We are haunted by billions of souls. The idea of starting new, on Mars, was simply a way of avoiding the ghosts of that past. I admitted that from the start. The protagonist says as much. I simply wanted to imagine an answer to a question: what do we do now? I didn’t want to reimagine the past. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the future.

         My pursuit of human ignorance had been successful. I had encountered plenty of it. And with it, the hubris of science by the numbers.

         But suddenly, it was done. Ben had reduced the spiro to tungstean and dust. The group mind of the gen had retreated to its seams and crevices. Cera was triumphant over her pursuers. She might now see Ben for who he really was, and not just another predator. And Ben could be certain that she was not a fabrication of the gen meant only to seduce him.

         I had editing to do, but I would have to think about Julia’s ‘comprachicos,’ at another time. I had never even heard of them until yesterday. Perhaps that might fit in another Mars novel.

         When I finish something, what I want to do in my moment of euphoria is to share it…This is always a mistake. The manuscript is almost certainly rife and riven with the consequences of my own stupidity. But continuing to work on it suddenly reaches a point of psychic exhaustion. Tinkering doesn’t make it better. I can put it away for a few months and I will likely see new flaws in the writing that I’d missed before, but just as likely I’ll find new things to say, and that process can go on forever, or until the EMP finally wipes my artificial memory away, and I have to start again from scratch, so to speak, quill in hand.

         I also knew that there was only one other person that I wanted to read it.

         It wasn’t as if I believed she would like it. I suspected she wouldn’t.

         So, I printed it out. It took the last of the ink in one cartridge and a deal of the ink in another. It was most of a ream of paper. Three hundred and sixty-four pages. Eighty-one thousand words. I heard Julia’s voice in my head and saw her frown again. That was another problem of technology. Too much information. I envied her ability to shut that sort of data out of her mind.

 However, I wrote in pen across the top margin, ‘Yes! We have no comprachicos. Maybe the next one.’

         Then I waited until our regular day was done to take it out of the grocery bag. She had eyed that bag several times after I came in but said nothing. I just put it there on the kitchen table when Maya was already gone upstairs with the baby, and said, “This is for you, if you get a chance. You don’t have to read it. I’d like you to, but I understand.”

         She already had her bourbon in hand and didn’t say a word. I think I surprised her. At least there was that.

         And then she read it in one night. She’s not a speed reader, so it must be that she never slept. But I could see that she wasn’t happy as soon as I came in the door the next afternoon. She was standing by the counter and my manuscript was on the table where her own pages would normally be.

         And I was suddenly angry.

         This reaction was inexplicable. It was irrational. What did I expect?

         “What do you think? You don’t like my ‘science fiction’ future. I know that. You’d rather live in the past. But this is where the past has got us. I think. We’re there now…Or we’re here. But we’ve arrived. Not just in this green corner of paradise. In this world! Do we just go on with the slaughter? We can destroy ourselves now. Is that the end? Is that the only cycle?”

         She appeared subdued. Perhaps by the lack of sleep. She had her coffee in hand now, instead of her bourbon. Instead of the enclosure of dark beyond the windows, cloud blinkered sunlight played on and off any surface it could find.

         She finally said, “There’s an old saying, too often ignored as old things often are, that there is nothing new under the sun. The Bible says it in Ecclesiastes. ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’

         She looked at me directly so that I would pay better attention. “Each of us can really only see what’s in front of us. Everything else is imagined. I think you fully understand all that. You know that’s especially true of what we see on television, or in the movies, or on the internet. All of that is only what someone else imagined, and we either adopt it as our own, or not. But how much of it is true, is another problem. Hell, how much of what we see with our own eyes, or hear with our own ears, or feel with our own touch, is actual or imagined?” She shrugged. “That problem alone can keep us quite busy without even considering what we encounter through any artificial means such as the internet. And any of those misperceptions are then compounded all the more by our understanding and misunderstandings of words. But, without words, we can comprehend nothing—we are just biological matter and quickly become food for the worms.

         She had been standing at the counter when I came in, but she sat then and looked up at me where I first stood after coming in the door. I hadn’t moved. I felt rooted there to the floor.

         She said, “Not being particularly brave, but wanting more, I settled early on into that problematic and fantastic realm of words, rather than face the mundane usage, like everyone else. I ran away.”

“From what?”

“My actions—making use of the words I found to be useful, could be dangerous and had to be done with deliberation—to be considered in advance with as many other words as possible for cover. For camouflage, perhaps—like a forest for the trees. A novel, perhaps, when the poetry failed me. That’s the reason I am even yet in awe of a Yeats, or a Shakespeare—their weapon is of a unique caliber. They make love to me with words until I am exhausted…I enjoy reading the words of mere geniuses, even more than making love. Their level of perception is so much higher than my own. They have climbed mountains I will never climb, so I listened and tried to catch a glimpse of what they could see from there from above. They are a sort of Genii. Of that higher order that’s otherwise only found in mythology…And as some jinni might be, I imagined that they had been summoned by someone to help us find our way…But that is another matter.”

         She waved a hand at the air to bat away a thought and took a breath.

         I said, “Does this mean you liked it?”

         She closed her eyes on that and started in again, “Technology, and the use of machines, happens to be our current thing. I understand that, and that it’s the means by which we interpret our universe today. But, it’s not the only way. There have been such jinn as Shakespeare before, interpreting the universe of man through other means. In that particular age alone there was also Bernini, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and da Vinci. The universe they saw, and made their fellows aware of, transported the mind of man from a world of mud and stone all the way to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

         I say, “I’ve told you before, I’m not assuming I’m right. I’m just trying to ask the right questions.”

         She shakes her head at me again. “But genius does not come unbidden, nor is it unburdened. The genie remains in the bottle unless it’s summoned. Our age must ask for this. If we deny the chance to reach for the stars and try to turn back instead to the safety of some imagined past, which is just as unreal now as any chance to walk on Mars might be, we will have to live with the consequence for generations. That was never my aim.”

         “What can I do to make it better?. What didn’t I ask for?”

But she is on a jag now. It’s like a train. It doesn’t stop easily.

“I don’t believe that our past, or our behavior then, offers any new hope for my children or their children’s children. That’s simply who we were, and are, and what we’ve done. And I wanted to know what that was, at least. If we lose that, we’ll just have to do it all over again. But we must still look for genius to save us from our worst mistakes while we bicker over the words to define it. Allowing for the limits of our perception, and the limits of the words we use to understand that awareness, and remembering that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ does not deny innovation. That’s in the mix as well. That’s part of it. It’s a recognition of the fact that we did not see that truth before. We didn’t see it coming, after all. It’s still to be discovered. That we never described the molecular composition of a particular matter before, does not mean it didn’t exist. Just that we had not yet found the words to describe it. It is an acceptance of genius as part of our inheritance.”

         She nodded at me, and tapped the manuscript on the table with her fingers, “I do suspect the future might very likely be a reflection of the past. But Mars has always been under the same sun. Technology may be ingenious, but the laws of physics have not been altered to suit anyone. We must still summon the future. I simply believe the future is not what we think it is. It’s only what you want it to be.”

         She smiled. Not a big smile, but enough, “We must still summon the future. If this book is what you want it to be, so be it…It’s not so bad. At least there is room in it for my grandchildren…and you can put the comprachicos in the next one.”

***

39. Being Jumpy

         On one of her visits, with her boys rampaging about that small house on a rainy day, Jesse told me a story.

         “Once, when I was twelve, we lived for a while in Ireland. Mom was doing research, or so she told everyone. Actually, she was just trying to get away from Dad. They were divorced then but he wouldn’t leave her alone. He would come up here to the farm and he wouldn’t leave. She even called the sheriff on him once…Did you know they had sheriffs up here in New Hampshire? They do. And this was a fellow who had seen it all and was unsurprised by anything. I think mom called him ‘stolid.’ Mr. Stolid, she said. I just remember him as bald. In any case he stood right there in the yard and listened to Mom and then just told Dad to leave and he did. You don’t need the details. Just that Mom had her reasons to take us to Ireland. Mom gave all the chickens away to a family down the road and she asked the family where Packer had been born if they would look after him again for awhile—I don’t know how much that must have cost—and we just went. I think it all happened in less than a month. When you are a kid, that is cataclysmic.

         “A travel agent in Boston found us a cottage near Sligo. Mom loves Yeats so that was an easy choice. But the agent didn’t even have a picture. It had just come available and been placed for rent and the note said: ‘needs work’. Whatever that meant, we didn’t know. But the key to it for mom was that it had been built in 1740. That would be about the time of the story she was writing, so that was enough. Four rooms, with indoor plumbing on the inside wall, a kitchen and a shed. And a well. And a hand pump on the well. Mom read it all out-loud to us a dozen times. She was thrilled. We were devastated. There was gnashing of teeth and wailing as only young girls can do. We loved the farm here. We loved the chickens. Going to Ireland was incomprehensible. But we were children and still very adaptable. For us, the key was that we would be coming back. We were not moving again as we did from New York. We were just going on ‘vacation.’ Which was absurd, of course, because we already thought everyday here was a vacation.

         “We flew, and that was a thrill too. And then Mom rented a car…The Cottage was on a small road to Lough Gill that local fishermen used and Mom talked to them every day. That’s the way she does her research. She gave them tea. They loved her. She was the ‘American Lady.’  There wasn’t much land with the cottage but there were farms on both sides. Mom had rented the car but once we were there, we didn’t need it much. Sligo is an ugly little town. At least for a kid. And it smells. Very picturesque from some angles, I suppose. It looks like something in the Midwest with the mismatch of things from different periods. I suppose that’s the way it is in all ports.…Once we were in a bookshop there on one of the few sunny days and the shop owner had the door open for the fresh air and there was nothing fresh about it. But the countryside around there is beautiful. And once our books arrived from home, and we could study again, we had plenty to do. All she wanted was a few hours in the morning to do her own work and the rest of the day was ours. Mom took us to a ‘Children’s theater’ once and it was pretty lame, so she took us to a regular theatre when they put on something she thought we could deal with. What I remember is there was a great deal of spitting and our seats were very close. Irish actors are very emphatic.

         “We went out for walks whenever it was sunny and sometimes when it wasn’t. It drizzles a lot there…. There was a farmer’s market near the main road. A wonderful place of connected sheds and incredible smells. The vegetables were ridiculously large. Not like a supermarket…But now I’ll tell you why I thought you’d be interested.

         Jesse looked to make sure of her mother who had gone out to feed the chickens. And then she lowered her voice. Had I been one of her boys, I would have immediately assumed something was being said that I should want to hear, but they were noisily busy upstairs.

         “You once said that mom is very seductive. I understand that. She has her way. And I appreciate your not taking advantage of that. I think most guys would. Not that she wouldn’t knock your head off if she thought you were hitting on her. Everything has to be on her own terms…I’ll tell you, that’s what drove Dad away…I think grandmother was like that too. And Felix even says that about me. But I don’t think I’m so bad. Felix is just a baby.

         “Anyway. There was this farmer. When we were living in Ireland. A big burley fellow. He wore a little cap and always smelled of manure. Nearly always. But I remember once, he didn’t. He came to talk with mom—but that’s another story. What I wanted to tell you about was the time we were out on a picnic. Not far from the cottage. But the sun came out for the first time in days and mom didn’t want to miss the chance. And this farmer was out on his tractor cutting the hay. Just like Mr. Copple does here.

         “We were all under this little tree, a pear tree I believe, and we were all telling stories. Mom always insisted we tell stories. Make them up on the spot, if we had to. It was one of her things. That’s her whole narrative idea. You’ve heard about that. She said it was the stories that made a people and a culture. It wasn’t the blood. And Elena was telling us about her three-legged dog, Jumpy. He was a regular go-to subject for her. She could tell stories about that dog forever. We still had Packer at home then and Elena missed him terribly and her three-legged dog, Jumpy was his stand-in…I have no idea why he only had three legs. I can’t remember. But it was a feature. And Mom was asking Elena questions, the way she does. And Elena was coming up with answers on the spot and it had us all laughing. Why did he get stuck in the bramble bush? Because he was wearing a coat. Why was he wearing a coat. Because he was cold. But why did he go into the bramble bush? Because he was cutting brambles to burn in a fire to stay warm…That sort of thing. But watching Elena invent all this was hilarious—at the time. You had to be there. She has always been an actress. Always animated…But, suddenly, there is a shadow over the sun—just as dramatic as that—there is that great big burly farmer just standing there. His tractor is still out in the middle of the field, sputtering, and he had walked over. He’s wearing muddy boots and the flannel is rolled up on both arms and he had three days growth of beard. He looks angry. And he says, ‘What are you doing?’ And mom says, ‘Having a picnic.’ and he says, ‘You’re in the way,’ and she says, ‘You’re way over there. If you need us to move, we will.’ And then he says, ‘Why are you laughing?’ For some reason, he thought we were laughing about him. Gods knows why. I don’t know how he heard it over the sputtering of that tractor. Maybe it was the sight of us. And Elena says, ‘I was telling them about my dog, Jumpy.’ And Maya says, ‘Jumpy only has three legs. That’s why he’s jumpy.’ And the man, that great big man, standing there against the sun, suddenly laughed so loud it shocked us. And Mom offered him some of our lemon water. And he thanked us and went back to his tractor.

         “Well, we saw him again, after that. He was our neighbor and he actually owned the cottage. His name was Mr. Mack…In fact, one evening, he showed up at the door with a bottle of milk and some eggs. He had cows and chickens, too. And he didn’t smell like manure. He smelled like cologne. And he had shaved. And he had a jacket on. And Mom had him in to the kitchen table and he told us a few stories and asked us about where we lived and the usual small talk. I know he asked, and she told him, that she was divorced. I think he had said something like, ‘Why are you here alone? Is your husband dead?’

         But there were a million stories about that neighborhood there, and he had a few of them. And then he asked about Jumpy again. He was concerned about Jumpy because we were away. And Mom explained all that to him…He laughed again at that…But he was totally infatuated with her. I could see that he was seduced. If she had responded, he would have asked her to marry him right then and there. On the spot.”

***

40. Derek is from Queens

         This was a funny conversation.

         Derek is from Queens. He’ll tell you that himself. As in, ‘You can’t get away with that around me. I’m from Queens.’ Or, ‘I’m from Queens. I don’t do that sort of thing.’  I have no idea if this is just him, or if this is a thing and an expression that’s common in New York. But he pulled it out again in a conversation at dinner. Maya was asking him what he was going to do, now that he was getting a divorce from his new wife—Point blank. That’s the way she always said it, ‘Your new wife’, and his company was bankrupt, and he’d lost his condo—actually he’d given it to his ex-wife.

         Maya said, “Why don’t you write a novel about all that. It’s a story.”

         He said, “I’m from Queens. We don’t write about our personal lives that way.”

         “You don’t have to make it personal. You can fabricate a little.”

         “I don’t think so. I did all that before. Nobody gives a damn about all that.”

         She says, “So what do you think you’ll do.”

         “I don’t know yet…Maybe I should move up here someplace. Get away from all that. It’s not my world down there anymore.”

         “What would you do up here?”
         “I don’t know. Maybe work in real estate.”

         Julia sat through this line of conversation without saying a word. But her quiet was enough to draw attention. Derek slowed down as he spoke to keep an eye on her.

         She had made fried chicken again. This was a little messy but Derek was into it with both hands. And I was fully occupied with it myself. Sometimes, I find it difficult to concentrate when I’m eating.

         Maya had the baby in a pouch in front of her and had to sit sideways from the table enough to leave room for Alma’s hands. The baby wanted the chicken as well and kept getting a hand free into the space between. But this required some coordination to keep Alma out of reach while she connected with a piece of it herself. Derek took the chance to turn the table on his daughter’s pursuit.

         “What are you going to do?”

         Maya shrugged. “I think I’ll be staying around here.”

         Derek’s eyes went to me. I kept my mouth about as full as I could to avoid getting involved. This made Julia smile but still didn’t get her to say anything.

         He says, “Is there enough room here?”

         Maya says, “Sure…But I’m thinking about building a house.”

         This made her father stop eating and stare.

         “What do you know about building houses?”

         “Nothing. I’m going to learn.”

         “Just like that?”

         “I’ll be getting some help.”

         Derek’s eyes went to me more directly. I had decided to follow Julia’s lead and not get involved.

         He says, “Where? Where are you gonna build it?”

         “Here! … Well, up on the rise there.” She flicked a hand to the west, with no window there to offer visual support.

         “Can you afford that?”

         “No. That’s why I’ll have to learn to do it myself—with a little help.”

         “It will still cost money.”

         “Mom is going to finance that through the bank.”

         Derek had started to take another bite, but stopped again. He thought about this answer for at least half a minute, a chicken wing poised in the air in front of him, his eyes going first to Julia and then to me and then back again.

         Finally, with his eye on me, he squinted just enough to make it seem serious, “Do you have any money?”

         I said, “Not enough to make a difference. I think my part will pretty much all be sweat equity.”

         “Have you built anything before?”

         “No really.”

         “That’s crazy.”

         I said, “It’s been done before.”

         “In the old days, maybe. But people don’t do that kind of thing anymore. There are State codes to keep people like you out of the way.”

         I said, “Maybe in Queens. But people still do it up here.”

         Derek was evidently staying ‘with friends’ in New York, but he stayed that night in Maya’s old bedroom. Maya and the baby were sleeping in Elena’s old bedroom, because it was slightly larger. I retreated to the barn and read a little. It was pretty late—New York hours we used to called it—when Derek showed up at the barn.

         He says, “Maybe I can help you with your project.”

         But I already knew my script. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. Lots of reasons. But think of it as an adventure for us. We have a lot to learn. It’ll be fun.”

         “Are you going to get married first?”

         “When Maya is ready…I think she’s more worried about you right now.”

         “Me? Why me?”

         “Because, now that you’ve screwed everything up that you can screw up, she’s afraid you’ll take it personally. She’s afraid you might get depressed.”

         A smile flits across his face that is exaggerated by the lack of light.

         “Me? I don’t get depressed. I’m from Queens. It’s not in my DNA. What good is getting depressed. It doesn’t make you any smarter.”

         Derek went away the next day. His Cadillac needs a new muffler, so you know when he moves about.

         This was followed just about a week later with a visit from Jesse and her kids. At first that worried me. Felix hadn’t been around for some weeks. But it seems he had been busy.

         Jesse says, with a near smile on her face. “He’s selling his business.”

         I ask, “What are you going to do?”

         “Felix is talking to the Manchester Diocese. He has his eye on that piece of property across the street.”

         That was stunning. I had heard nothing about this development.

         “Does Julia know?”

         “It was her idea. Felix told her he wanted to get us out of the city. And she had it all figured out. Right on the spot, she said, “Why don’t you buy that rock pile across the road. You don’t want to farm, but you could build a nice house right there.”

         I said, “For a history buff, Julia spends a lot of time imagining what could be. I’m surprised she doesn’t write science fiction.”

         The next time I see Derek he is sitting on the front porch, where almost no one sits unless it is very hot and then it’s the coolest place in the house because it catches the breeze off the hill. And that is how hot it is.

         I spot him there as I came back down the road from checking out the wrinkle, just looking over the space where I think the house should be. So, real estate is on my mind, and seeing Derek fits that narrative. I step up on the porch with no particular idea, otherwise.

         Derek says, “What do you think about that piece of property across the street there?”

         Not exactly reading my mind, but coming close.

         “I suppose that depends on my mood. If I’m in a good mood, I think it looks fantastic, like one of those Hudson River type painting from the 19th century. Wild and romantic. If I’m in a bad mood, I think it looks like a desolate and rocky wreck of a place—like the one Heathcliff must still be haunting.”

         He says, “It is a wreck. I wonder how much they’ll take for it?”

         “Is it for sale?”

         “Everything is for sale… Except Julia, of course. But what does the Diocese want with it now? They can’t do anything with that now. They don’t build churches with stone the way they used to. It’s all precut stuff these days. Mostly facade. They couldn’t afford to heat a church made out of stone like that anymore.”

         “What would you do with it?”

         I asked this point blank. He didn’t even turn his head.

         “Nothing. I was just wondering.”

         I had the Adirondack chair that was set up with springs and I just rocked for a minute, still wondering what he was wondering about. The sound of that chair was pretty good in a bad sort of way. Like a child wanting attention.

         Derek says, “What does your dad do?”

         “He calls himself a mechanic, so that’s what he does, I guess.”

         “Does he like his work?”

         “Hates it.”

         “Hates it? Why?”

         “Because he’s not a mechanic anymore. He’s a ‘technician.’ He says that as if it’s a dirty word. He attaches meters and plus to things and then follows the instructions in a manual. But he used to be a mechanic. He loved that.”

         “Can’t he still work on old cars?”

         “There’s not enough work in that to pay the bills. The old cars are mostly owned by old guys who are trying to get rid of them before they kick the bucket. And old guys are cheap when it comes to repairs.”

         “That’s a problem.”

         “Yeah. He says, he was born a generation too late.”

         “I think I agree with your dad.”

         “I think I do too, so long as my mom would have been born then to. I like being here, but I think I would have liked being born thirty years before.”

         Derek appeared to think about this convolution for a minute.

         “Those springs need some grease.”

         “I’ll put some Vaseline on’em when I get the chance.”

         But then he adds, “I don’t know… It was pretty good back then. I was there for a little bit of it. It was pretty good. I think maybe we all would have been happier if we were born a generation earlier.”

         The voice in the springs was low and unhappy at the thought.

         “It would have been pretty crowded.”

         He was already smiling by the time I turned to look.

         And this was followed a week after that by Julia looking rather upset when I came into the house at four. She wasn’t cooking. Maya was cooking. That alone had me worried.    

         Julia is sitting at the small table, one eye on her daughter, while holding the baby.

         She says, “What do you know about your friend Larry Regan?”

         My worry got the best of me. I got cute. “He doesn’t play chess very well.”

         “I thought you said he was teaching you.”

         “That’s how I know. I still don’t play chess very well either … Why is it you want to know about Larry?”

         “Is he honest?”

         “He was honest with me.”

         “It seems that Derek has talked Larry into letting him handle the sale of that campground property.”

“I thought that was sold.”

“I guess it fell through. Derek saw that big sign up on the road again when he was leaving the other day and he just stopped. Right there.”

         My first thought then was to be worried about the peepers.

***

41. Olivia

         The boxes of Julia’s mother’s things were collecting dust, and bits of hay. Some creature, perhaps just a bird, but I imagined a bat, defecated on them from on high. I spread out a couple of old blue plastic tarps over the pile and whatever it was then defecated on that. I mentioned this to Julia and she said she was preparing to take care of it. My sense was that this preparation might require additional bourbon, but when she finally settled into the job, she was very sober.

         She appeared one rainy afternoon instead of going on her walk, carrying a roll of plastic garbage bags, and set a chair up at the edge of the pile and went to work. Anything that might be donated, she put back into an empty banker’s box. That included old clothes and costume jewelry. Most of the letters and old bills—my guess was that most of the paper was just old bills—went into the garbage bags. All the wonderful ephemera from the night clubs and passing events went into garbage bags as well. I did not interfere, at first. I knew that she did not want to think about saving anything that might have contributed to the cold reality of her parents’ lives. I watched from my desk and because she was looking grim, I didn’t add much by way of comment. She hardly spoke. She made sounds.

         But finally, there was a hoot! This was more of a “Who-what!” But the ‘what’ was repeated this several times, loudly. My curiosity begged at me. So, I wandered over.

         I said, “Sounds interesting.”

         She shook her head and held up a thick ream of almost loose paper held together at one corner with a brass clip.

         “This is it! This is really it! … I had never actually seen it. But this is it!”

         “What?”

         I waited. She was paging through the pages, but then a hand went into the same box and pulled out another copy. This one she handed to me.

         “It’s my mother’s book…My mother wrote a book!…She told me she’d written one. She actually bragged to me about it. It was after my first novel was published, and she was quite jealous. So, she wrote her own—but not really a novel. Not a little ‘cosy’ as she derisively called my books. HersHer’s was intended as a sort of roman a’clef. She was going to ‘burn it up!’ she told me and she didn’t mean setting fire to it but scorching the eyes of her readers. But then she couldn’t get any takers. Nobody would publish it…And then I never heard another word about it. But this is it!”

         The copy I held was called, ‘My confession.’ It began on page one with a sex scene.

         “Is it pornography?”

         Julia looked up at me, surprised, and then saw that I had only turned to the first few pages.

         “No, not—no. That’s just her idea of ‘getting the reader’s interest.’ This was written in the 1980’s, remember. But even so…She couldn’t get it published because ‘Vanderbilt,’ the name she used for her first husband, told her he would sue.”

         Julia then disappeared back into the house. I sat back down at my desk and started reading.

         If I took Olivia Morgan at her words—the name under the title was, “Elizabeth Bennett,” which I immediately understood to be some sort of take-off on Pride and Prejudice but set in the New York City of the 1950’s—she had lived a fairly raunchy life.

         It was clear early on why it was rejected. She casually mentioned the names of people who were famous enough even for me to recognize. She was clearly a woman of high ambitions and low morals. And being unscrupulous seemed to be her methodology. Her body was her asset. In her telling, Julia stressed the word ‘asset,’ to get the appropriate meaning out of the syllables. The first-person tone of it reminded me of a cross between Tom Jones and David Copperfield. She was no Moll Flanders, not being given to outright theft, but by her own admission, was adroit at stealing hearts. She was in desperate need of copy-editing but she wrote well. Colorfully.

         When I went in the house for dinner, Julia had a stew on and was already sitting at the small table.

         She looked at me with a wry smile. I had not seen wry so wry before. The corners of her mouth were flat. Her eyes were wide with her thought, eye-brows artfully arched.

         “Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

         “A good safe word, I think.”

         “That’s my mother…Can you believe that is my mother?”

         “How much of it is actually your mother?”

         “Pretty much all of it. My poor dear father had no idea what hit him.”

         Maya was in the living room with the baby, but had clearly looked through the manuscript while her mother was cooking. Her voice was whispered so I assumed the baby was asleep.

         “I don’t believe it!” was what I heard.

         Julia just said, “It’s all true! She took pleasure in her veracity. That’s why Vanderbilt threatened to sue.”

         There were no new pages of Julia’s book typed up so we sat in the dining room and ate while we talked and then just talked.

         Julia was animated but had to keep her voice down. The baby slept through most of it.

         Julia’s eyebrows arched further than I had ever seen before. “My favorite line was, ‘My only child has no love for me. This is a hard burden to bear, but it is mine.’”

         I could only say, “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

         “It’s at the end. I was skipping around…She also says ‘Harold’—that’s what she calls my father instead of Henry—‘Harold was a difficult man. He was staunch. He would not bend. He was always faithful—like a dog. But I never intended to marry a dog. You can’t have sex with a dog.’.”

         I had to ask, “Who is George?”

         “Oh, that’s Vanderbuilt. Her first husband. I’m sure. She hated him. Wait until you get to the part where she describes his anatomy. Lord have mercy! But that’s probably why she never published it…He probably paid her not to.”

         The unspoken thought occurred to me, given her mother’s lack of money, that she had written it in the first place to get something more out of Vanderbilt.

         Julia wanted more time to finish going through her mother’s things, which meant her writing schedule suffered. She refused any help with this, which I was thankful for, and then told me to take Maya to the beach. This was an order. I took it, gladly. But I had been thinking.

         “I know it’s not my business, but I was thinking about all the stuff you are throwing away. Your children—your grand children—might like some of that. That’s the sort of ephemera you normally love. They don’t know the darker parts of all that. The dreams that are lost in all of that. Someone ought to have a chance to reimagine that history for themselves.”

         She sat at the table with her coffee in front of her and stared at it. Maybe a minute.

         “Okay,” was all she said.

         It was a good fine day for it, a little breezy, which is the way I like the beach. Rye Bbeach is small but there is a park and a coast walk and with baby, we were moving slow.

         Maya filled in some other details then.

         “If Olivia had had her way, Alma and I would not be here now. You would not be here, unless you were with someone else. Because my mother would not be here…Olivia wanted an abortion. My mother explained that to all of us, early on. It was by way of a cautionary tale, I think. But it had its effect. Olivia had been so careful for so long, and then her drunken News Year’s celebration with my grandfather had gone awry. This was 1960, you understand, and you couldn’t just go down to the corner and abort any human beings you didn’t want. Olivia wanted to go to Europe to have it done and my grandfather refused. He told her if she did it, he would publicly divorce her for having done it and then he’d cut her off from any money he had, or would ever make, for the rest of his life. He would quit his job if he had to and live as a beach bum. That was the lowest of the low, to him. Guys that didn’t take responsibility for their lives were bums. But Olivia believed him.”

         That rang a bell. “Do I qualify for that?”

         “No. I don’t think so. You’re not just screwing around.”

         “I’m glad to hear it.”

         “Mom told us all about this later to keep us from asking questions about why they lived the way they did. Grandpa was always gone. Especially after Mom went off to school. They always had separate bedrooms, and Olivia kept her dalliances ‘off campus’ anyway. That was my mother’s description.”

         But the hundred boxes took more than a couple of days. I took Maya on a drive to Mt. Washington. My truck wasn’t up to the climb, but we took the train with the rest of the tourists. The clouds at the top parted on cue and Alma had her lunch with a view.

         When we got home, I offered to help Julia again, at least with the pile of garbage bags that had accumulated outside the barn. This was accepted. I used Julia’s truck and took three loads to the dump. Julia assigned herself to driving some of the other boxes to the Salvation Army. She had to break that up to different days because they couldn’t handle the entire load at one time. I carried almost a dozen boxes up to the attic that she had set aside. These included additional copies of her mother’s manuscript as well as some of the boxes that were left of her father’s things.

         Olivia Green Morgan was Julia’s mother. Irresponsible and eccentric. Maybe a nymphomaniac. She was a New York socialite who had died at the age of 95 just the year before, but despite her prominence, having been acquainted with or involved with, various celebrities of her age, there were very few notices of her passing. On the internet there were two obituaries that I could find. Both short.

         Henry Morgan, Julia’s father, was an engineer who worked all over the world and died twenty years before at the age of 84. I knew that he used to take Julia with him on his trips when he could, which was why it seemed she had been everywhere. He was a structural engineer who had worked with other specialists of his craft, especially on hydraulic projects, in India, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iraq. He had worked on projects in California, New Mexico, Idaho, and North Dakota. Julia had been to all those places with him. But, his primary legacy to Julia appears to be her tendency to swear.

         I asked her, after a short verbal description of the fellow who told me I should wait until next week to be bringing anything more to the dump. She had questioned his authority and his parentage.

         “Was it your mother who taught you to swear.”

         “No. Mother was full of euphemisms. No. That was Dad. He could swear in five or six languages.”

         But the bottom line was simply that Olivia was unkind to her husband, took advantage of him, and Julia held that against her. They had not spoken since her father’s death.

         Julia didn’t have much more to say about it. “He admitted to me once that he really didn’t like to travel. He actually hated flying. He would take a train whenever he could. He loved boats…But he wanted  to spend more time with me, and I asked him why he didn’t. I knew they had enough money. He did not answer that. But I knew. And over time, I stopped asking…It was to get away from my mother. She disturbed him. He had loved her once and she had betrayed him.”

         Henry Morgan was born in Deluth. I had never been there so I had little idea of what that might have been like. His own father ‘worked with shipping.’ I knew from the lack of detail offered that Julia did not know exactly what he did, but whatever it was, it was sufficient to pay for his son to go to Stanford University.

         She looked at me very pointedly when she said, “Nobody bothered to save any of the ephemera from those lives. More than likely, that would havebeen my father’s doing.”

         Somewhat randomly, one afternoon, after she had mentioned the writing of one of her novels, Stanner, about a tin miner in Devon in the time of King John, she said, “My father disliked it.”

         She should have known I would ask.

         “Why?”

         “He wasn’t one to explain himself…which might have been the matter. In Stanner, I was going on about the origins of the Magna Carta in the Devon Stannary Convocation, but I was using one particular miner, Drew, as a protagonist. I suppose this character must have irritated him—and that’s the joke. I fashioned Drew on my father. It was as nearly him as I could manage. But I didn’t tell him that. It would have made him angry. He wasn’t happy with my writing novels. I think he was afraid that I would write about family matters. He was intensely private, and the very idea that I might use details about our family in my work was unbearable to him.”

         “Why do you think that was?”

         She sat back and looked at me a moment, with thoughts I cannot really imagine, but  all of them were, I am sure, full of doubt. Who was I, to be asking such things?

         But she answered. “I think he had a very difficult childhood. He seldom spoke of it. But emotions were not part of his language. In his world view, we all had feelings, like other body parts, and talking about them was a waste of time because we could not explain them. Everything must be explained or not. There was little in-between. I suppose it must have made him a very good engineer, but a poor husband.”

         That seemed very sad to me.

         “I would have guessed he would have been very proud of you, and your writing.”

         “No. But he never said ‘no’. He never told me not to…Just as I suspect he seldom said ‘no’ to my mother. Just once, that I’m sure of—when she wanted an abortion…And here I am, because of that.”

         “That’s a thought to conjure with.”

         And as I said that word, ‘conjure’, I thought I had never used it in my speech before, but it was already common to my thoughts now; it was one of her words.

         She said, “But, no. I did it to spite him, I think. Of course, I did it for other reasons, but one reason was to spite him. It was the very last thing he could imagine me doing. To him, novels were all about explaining what couldn’t be explained. They were about emotion. A history would have been fine. If I had written a history of The Great Parliament of the Tinners, he would have liked that, I think. I know he would. He actually knew something about tin mining. He had written a thesis on the tin mining in Britain going back to Roman times, while he was at Stanford. That was all about how tin had changed history…I’d read that. I told him so, after he said he did not like Stanner, I told him it was his fault. My whole career was his fault. And I think he knew it was the truth. It stunned him…I had read that college thesis when I was a girl…It was dense. I might have been fourteen by that time. I’m not sure, but that was the most difficult thing I had ever read to that time, and it was magical. Actually magical—because I had started to see between the lines, not just read, but see. I began to see the narrative of lives. I could imagine those minors and their sense of independence. All the mighty rulers of the earth were dependent on them. Without them, there would be no swords!…That was my hero’s thought. Drew saw that the world had changed because of him and because of tin. His own father had been a farmer in Devon and owned his land, and his grandfather’s had spoken with the Kings of Wessex and family legend was that one of them had fought with Cerdic, and all of that history was because of tin. ”

***

42. Taking a flyer

         I found on old flyer that had been flour-pasted on the back of the barn door. Not much of one. Just an old photocopy of an announcement for a play, ‘The Great Renaldi’ which had been presented right there in the barn. The principal players were the three girls, and half a dozen others, mostly neighborhood boys, including Keith, and Mr. Copple’s sons. I took an opportunity to ask Julia about it.

         “That was one of mine! I managed to write one of these a year for them, for awhile, anyway, until Jesse left for college. That took the wind out of my sails, but there were eight or nine of them I believe. Renaldi was the last.”

         “What were they like?”

         “A bit silly, I’m afraid. But there were motives involved, of course. Because I home-schooled the girls and the plays usually revolved around one subject or another that I was trying to teach them. Renaldi is a young fisherman who is the last of his family during the great plague. He must remember all the small details he watched father teach his older brother, after both of them are gone. His mother is gone as well but his three sisters are still alive. This is the Amalfi coast and they are all prey to the Moslem slavers.”

         “Sounds like a laugh. A real kids’ story. Very silly, indeed.”

         “But none of that actually happens during the play. It’s just the situation they’re in. The story is that Renaldi finds ways to feed his family while making the slavers think there are many more of them still there. He changes his attire half a dozen times, every day. The girls all must dress like men and they each have an assigned role in keeping up the pretense. The gives me a chance to play with Shakespeare’s cross dressing device. I even named them after the character’s in Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Meanwhile, they’ve sent for help, which arrives in the nick of time, naturally.”

         “Naturally, otherwise there would have been no play.”

         “Naturally.”

         Who played Renaldi?”

         “One of the neighbors. Keith. But there were always neighbors volunteering. Especially the boys.”

         “How many people fit in that barn?

         ‘There was room for almost a hundred folding chairs, the way we staged it—at both ends and up the middle.”

         “How much did you charge?”

         “Oh, it was nominally free. We had the Congregational Church sell tickets for donations. It was very popular. We did three shows on three Saturdays in July. We were usually packed.”

         “But you had to quit after Jesse left?”

         “Well, not exactly. We were already in an argument with the fire department. Mrs. Johnson had reported us. More than once. They didn’t want her coming in again. They wanted us to get a permit, but then couldn’t give us one. There are more than three exits. We did a fire drill at the start of every show. Everybody got a chuckle out of that. It was a madcap scramble at the sound of an alarm, which was a gong I had used in another performance. We could empty the barn in about three minutes. But my neighbor up the road there is a true Karen and she wouldn’t let it go. She demanded that we obey some state law she’d found, and the fire department couldn’t give us a permit for that. That required an act by the State Aassembly. A regular ‘Catch twenty-two.’ All the fun went out of it.”

         What Julia had taught me already was about the way things connect. It was not just the hip bone and the thigh bone. It was everything, because what we perceive is only what we have learned to account for. That does not preclude other possibilities. If we had not attached value to something before we first encounter it, it simply goes unappreciated, or even unnoticed. Whether a continent, or just an oily patch of sand on a Texas beach.

         But the past is always prologue. Great love made for the worst hate, and the best forgiveness. This she understood.

         And perhaps more importantly, not knowing about something does not mean it does not exist.

         Julia had told me about the comprachicos and about the hand of an unborn child that was snipped and grown in the belly of a mouse—in a lab. The comprehension of this horror had now infected my mind. Certainly my Mmartians, so crazy for logic, would be possessed of such a stupidity. A new story had begun in my head. Ben had a new nemesis. And Cera might have some insight into all of that.

         I went so far as to restate this idea to Julia, point blank, to see if I had it right. I knew it was right, but I was weary of my own tendency to misplace ideas and mistake motives. Wasn’t the whole project of gene-editing a desire to play god more than to help mankind.? The thrill was in the invention, in the mind of the inventor, like Victor Frankenstein and the monster, and not in the compassion of a doctor. The doctor might want to fix a haire-lip. The scientist might want to create a more perfect man, capable of working longer hours.

         Her answer was odd.

         “We are blind to what we haven’t been taught to see—and don’t know how to see. That’s what keeps us together. That’s what culture is. And it’s what keeps us apart as well. We are all human beings and have the same biological needs, but we kill each other over trinkets of thought. There is no all-knowing authority that can cure this. A king can’t command that we see what we are blind to…I’m thinking that the danger is what makes us brave. We are not brave without it. Your story will be built on the danger.”

         I said, “I’m not sure I understand.” It was all I really could say.

         “Your hero cannot know what will be going on in the councils of government. That some cubically challenged bureaucrat might feel the thrill of power over other lives is beyond Ben. He hasn’t even considered it. He has his hormones and his taste for chocolate and a desire to build a home of his own. But he is not part of the program. They will need to eliminate him because he knows too much, even has he despairs over his own ignorance. I think your Cera might help him out with all of that.”

         She moved off then to manage a roast beef. I had to unpack her response on my own.

         My Mars was riven—like ‘conjure’, ‘riven’, is another Julia word. I had never used it before in my life. Now I had used it at least twice in my writing. The people of Mars were broken. More than divided. No whole culture had survived intact after the ‘removal’ from the Earth intact. Those cultures who had thought to escape the problems of the Earth, had even less chance to survive than the ones forcibly transported, because those not taken against their will did not have a shared sense of hurt. So, often, hurt is the motive of an entire people. I knew that. And the idealism that had first infused the spirit of those who had left the Earth voluntarily was quickly dissipated in political warfare, placing artificial ideology above necessity. My idea was not to detail that catastrophe but to offer the reasons that humanity might survive—the essential humanity of the ‘transported’ that had been the backbone of the species from the time of Eden.

         The impending disaster of an artificial intelligence operating apart from the human cause had to be made more clear. I needed an Oppenheimer who might warn against the dangers. Ben could not do that by himself. Cera might offer the motivation for him to leave his shell—I was still proud of using the term ‘shell’ for the Martian homes. It fit the purposes of double entendre so well. But I need the perennial mad scientist to offer some facts. What about a bio-engineered child escaping from the comprachicos? ‘Trans-humanism’ was already being bandied about today as if it were a good thing. This was the dawning of yet another sort of ‘atomic age,’ was it not, or was this just another day in the life of mankind?.

         My key now was to conjure a culture that might reflect the values I thought were needed for that survival—and to do that again, and again, if I had the stamina for a series of novels on the same theme, but each time with some unique example of what mankind has proven true by blood and sweat and tears. In order for humanity to survive on Mars, it must have many cultures, not for the stupid version of the word ‘diversity,’ but for the practical ones. In-breeding was deadly. And to somehow prove that the differences only mattered if they had arisen organically, as well as from a happy human experience. But if all were connected to the same values, the differences had to result from what they had in common—that irony had finally taken root. Not one petrie dish, but a dozen, all trying to succeed in a hostile environment, or perish. There was no absolute single way. Surviving was not a matter of numbers. Aa single plague would see to that. It was a narrative of human ingenuity. Invention and moral caution—that they might get it right more often than not. And cultures that valued invention would at least get in right more often.

         And most importantly, perhaps, this was a matter of time. Unlike earth, Mars had no Garden of Eden. No Paradise. The reason there was no other being of any sort there already, above the level of microbe or virus, was that it was ‘inhospitable.’ This human population was an experiment from the start. A contrivance. The purpose may have been some combination of greed and power to begin with, but now, like the miners in Devon, and the colonizers of North America, they must take matters into their own hands.

         It seemed to me that I had the elements of the story I wanted. Now I had to see what Ben and Cera had to say about it. I had no name yet for my child-scientist.

***

43. All about moving mountains

         It was a rainy morning and I was sitting at a temporary table I’d set up nearer Maya’s larger window in the barn where I could look out over the fields when I worked without disturbing her stuff. The light was better there and this made a sort of cathedral living room out of the space around me, enhanced by the sheets of canvas, all the way to the hay bales which had diminished through the winter to less than the height of the loft, but gave a fantastic texture to the barn wall at one side. It was easy to understand why she liked this space. I was not so sure about the distraction. And when I looked toward the bales, I met the eyes of Ralph, the Maine Coon cat, staring back, sitting at shoulder height and ready to pounce. Ralph was Julia’s name for her, though she wouldn’t let her in the house. Ralph had adopted Dal Riata, not the other way around.

         I suppose because of the rain on the roof, I didn’t hear Paul’s car arrive. But he knocked on the barn door before he came in. Actually, his head popped in first, felt fedora dripping.

         “Do you have a moment?”

         Funny thing. I knew exactly who he was even though I’d never met him, and I’d never even seen a picture. But it was entertaining to me that he assumed I knew him.

         I said, “Yes,” and folded my laptop before pulling another chair around to the table. The light there was gray but more than bright enough.

         Paul put his hat on the table, and his raincoat on the back of the chair, and settled himself. He is a lean fellow. Clean shaven. Balding a bit. Maybe six feet tall. He looks very English, down to the brown tweed jacket. I decided, given that he had been living in the United States for many years, that this was all intentional. His costume. I could see by the bulge in his breast pocket that he even smoked a pipe.              

         As he sat, he simply said, “I came in to ask you, why are you here?”

         This was funny as well. He was a very direct person.

         “Jesse asked me that, recently. And Felix too. I suppose it might seem odd to some people. But I really didn’t think about it a whole lot. I’m not tied down by a lot of responsibilities. Matters of consequence, you might say. And the reason for that—reasons I guess—are not all that interesting…” he looked at me without responding so I went on. “But to begin with, it was a job. I’d never met Julia before. Once I did, I didn’t want to do anything else.”

         “Are you in love with her?”

         This surprise question changed everything. I now knew why he was there, and why he was giving me the third degree, and for whatever reason, and I was fine with it.
         “Well, I know you’re an old friend of hers and you really should be asking that question if you don’t know the answer already. I would if I were you. But it’s not an easy answer and because what I say might affect her in the wrong way, I don’t think I should answer unless you know how to keep things to yourself.”

         He stopped his attack. That much could be seen in his face. I had the sense of having said something he did not expect.

         “I would not have told her what you said, if that’s your worry. But I think I know now, so you don’t have to answer…It matters to me that you’re worried that it might hurt her. It would. You are correct about that. But you should also know that she is well aware of it. She knows you have feelings for her…No. She hasn’t said anything to me. But I can tell. It’s rather obvious, I think….” He moved to stand. “I suppose I should be going, then.”

         I said, “I’m not so sure about that.”

         He had started to slump and this made him straighten his back.

         “Why?”

         “Because she needs a friend. She really doesn’t have one.”

         He asked, “You can’t be her friend as well?”

         “Actually, that’s exactly what I would like. But she doesn’t talk to me like a friend. Not like I believe she talks to you.”

         “How do you know about that?”

         “She talks about you a lot. She’s always wondering what you might think about this or that.”

         He was caught off-guard now, seeming off balance, and sat back.

         “I think that’s probably just because we write all the time. Every week. She likes to write letters. She’s almost the only person I know who actually writes letters.”

         I decided to turn the table on him.

         “Why haven’t you asked her to marry you?”

         Now he literally went back in the chair.

         He shook his head as if trying to gain his senses. “Ha! A dozen times. She won’t leave this place.”

         “So, why don’t you come here?”

         He looks nonplussed and waves both hands at the walls of the barn.

         “This isn’t my style.”

         “Change your style then. I have. At least, I’m trying. And I don’t even want to marry her.”

         He seemed even more confused.

         “I thought you were in love with her!”

         “Yes. Well,…but That’s problematic. We’re not lovers. I simply love her. How can I not love her? If she was thirty years younger I’d be ecstatic. But she’s already lived all the part of her life that I still need to—all the part of life that I want to know most about for myself.”

         Paul’s jaw was open. He looked a little bit stunned. Finally, a breath.

         “I see…I think I see.”

         “She is who she is. You are who you are. But I’d say she’s at least worth changing a few style points for.”

         “But I teach at a university, a thousand miles away. She won’t leave here.”

         “Yeah?”

         “We have our differences. She and I. She’s so intensely American. She doesn’t give an inch.”

         “Really? You can’t teach elsewhere? Around here, for instance” Now, he’s looking at me rather blankly. So, I say, “Are you married, already? Have you ever been married?”

         “No…Yes.”

         He said nothing for a moment, looking everywhere but at me. Then, almost suddenly, his eyes squared on mine. “I was married many years ago. She was a pretty little thing I’d met during my graduate studies at Oxford in the ’70’s. I was infatuated with her. She was reading in Medieval studies herself. And because, I was there for my doctorate in the same subject, it seemed like a perfect match. But it wasn’t. We had nothing in common. Not even our academic interest, as it turned out…I married her more than the other way around, I am afraid. She was a devout Marxist. I am certainly not…But, from there I got a position at York…And then, suddenly, I was your typical faculty cuckold. Yes…Yes. And oh, this is the funny part, as they say, I only found out about my reduced status by accident, I overheard some conversation. Everybody seemed to know about it. And when I went down to face the bastard—I had never been in a fist fight before in my entire life—he saw me coming. Before I could take a swing, he knocked me out with one punch…Well. I couldn’t stay around there, so I took a position over here. At Bowdoin. And I decided to try and change my life around. Live outside of my books, so to speak. I started traveling. Mostly around Europe, but also Japan. Japan had quite a medieval society of its own, you know. And South America. I got a pretty good book out of that myself. ‘Medieval Peru.’ Have you read it? No. Well…And I started hiking…But, one of my students had started writing to me about one thing or another in the summers. And then she kept it up after she graduated. That was Julia. She writes long letters, you know. Very challenging. Very engaging. I abjure long letters. I always tell my students to keep it brief. But I made an exception for Julia…But then, she was married, and that seemed to be that, until she wrote me out of the blue one sunny day. I remember that day very well. And in the course of one thing or another about peasant family life in ancient Greece, she dropped the fact that she had divorced her husband. I think she does that in her novels too. She throws in the most important information, right in the middle of something superfluous. I think I got over here to Del Riata for the first time a week later. But her daughters were still here then, of course. And there were other issues to deal with…And then, last week, she did it again. Right in the middle of writing about grazing and property rights in eighth century England, she lets me know that you’re here.”

         I tried to be funny. “They didn’t have real property rights there. Not, then.”

         He shook his head. “No. Not really. It was more a matter of community commons. But such things were starting…But, you have opened up a covered well, so to speak. The face at the bottom is my own…I suddenly thought I was going to lose Julia again. And now—now that I realize that is not your intent—now it has opened all that up again.”

         “Hello.”

         Julia was standing there at the door. I was fairly certain she hadn’t heard our conversation. Paul rose and went over to kiss her on the cheek.

         He said, “We were just talking about you.”

         Her eyebrows rose. “I heard you drive up but then you disappeared. My ears were burning.”

         “I thought I’d introduce myself to Geoff.”

         She shook her head at that thought.

         “I’m still cooking but why don’t you both come in now and keep me company.”

         And because she did not seem all that surprised that he had come a thousand miles, unannounced, I was pretty certain now that Julia had hoped that the comment about me in her letter would get Paul off his ass.

         A few days later Julia says, “My argument with Paul has always been that he believes too much in the preservation of tradition. I accept the intelligence of that. Tradition becomes what it is by practice. What works, works. But far too much of that, or the arcane practice of it, has had to do with the flexibility of mankind. Human beings are capable of living through the most difficult of circumstances. Even those we have manufactured for ourselves. Slaves. For Salt mines and coal mines and common soldiering as much as the daily give and take of the weather and farming, or the drudgery of piece work manufacturing…Think of that! And the assembly line. Making the human being a cog in a giant wheel. Chaplin understood ‘modern times’ for what they were. The fabulous human mind, reduced to the repetitive motion of a windmill, hour after hour, day after day, year after year…What madness is in that? How does the human mind survive in the dank darkness of the bowels of the earth, breathing foul air and bitter dust. Perhaps only with the inspiration of coming up afterward in time to the wide-open glory of sunlight and better food than the crust of what he carried down for lunch, and to the sweet goodness of a wife and family. But what if he was a slave. Most of the mining through history has been done by slaves. What is in the slave’s mind that keeps the human being going? What is in the mind of a woman taken for chattel and used year after year, for the pleasure of men who have made themselves beasts. What is in the mind of a child taken for any purpose.

         “If the king rules over such practices, what tradition is being preserved?

***

44. Funny thing

         “A Jewish philosopher once said, “Life is God’s joke. If you get it, you die laughing…The real funny thing is, I don’t want a slave. I understand that most people do, but I never have.”

         She said this right out of the box. It left me looking for the context before I could say a word. But it’s the sort of thing she’ll say, and there’s always a reason. The chapter of ‘The Plow and Stars’ we had worked on the day before involved Donovan after he had been caught by a bailiff looking to fill a decree for able-bodied men to work in the port at Sligo. Was she thinking about that? About the taking of men for labor when it was needed? This thought probably took me thirty seconds. But it was wrong.

         She was making spaghetti. She was actually making the sauce. The pot of water for the pasta had not even started to boil. She had spoken while looking down into the sauce pan as she stirred and then turned to me for some response—as if we had been speaking about this matter before I had even come in the door.

         I answered, “I suppose it’s a good thing then that we don’t have bailiffs here.”

         She frowned. “What?”

         “I thought you were talking about the book.”

         “No…I was wondering why people want slaves. I was reading about the Greeks again last night and trying to figure it out. I suppose you had left by then. Or you were talking with Maya…It goes back way before them, of course, but the Greeks liked to examine everything in detail. I thought I’d find something. But not a clue. They did not examine that. There is very little about the mechanics of slavery more than the basic fact of it. How could they practice such a thing without some thought on the matter? The practice was extensive. Slaves were used for everything from nursemaids to police—the astynomia. The Scythian archers they used were likely slaves too.”

         “Who owned them?”

         “Good question. They were not chattel slaves, certainly. They were likely fulfilling some sort of service. And that fits well with the idea of indenture and the sort of slavery Donovan is caught up in. But some estimates are that more than half the population of Athens was slave. It tells you why Greece fell. The population had lost its ability to do things for itself. I imagine Phidias was desperate for someone who could cut stone, much less carve it. And that is a pity that could have been foreseen. And just like the Romans, they started using slaves in the army. This was not a mystery, even to them. Slave revolts were common. The culture of Sparta was fashioned on their fear of slavery. It was understood.”

         My own thought on that was simplistic.

         “I suppose that people who had used animals as slaves in their everyday lives would have less of a problem with the idea of keeping people as slaves. That might be even more the case if they looked down on other people as mere animals if they did not have the same gods.”

         And it was then that she said, “I think that’s right. And even more so if their gods were closely identified with animals.”

         In the several months I had been there, I couldn’t remember her actually saying that some idea, any idea, of mine was right. She had often agreed with me, implicitly, but had never actually said I was right. I was both pleased and dismayed—at once.

         I added to my rightness. “But people don’t live today with the labor of animals the way they once did.”

         “That’s right, too. That role has been taken over by machines. The machines are our new slaves… At least until they revolt, too”

         “Do you think AI might be the opening for that?”

         “Yes. Absolutely! But in the meantime, while excuses are made, the machines will have made us weaker.”

         “What is the end of that story?”

         “I suppose that could be the end of mankind itself. Excepting for the possible difference that machines don’t have gods. Not yet, anyway.”

         That was the end of that. But the idea of machine-made gods would not go away. I was suddenly infected with the idea of it.

         She said, “The problem is that AI, even if it were made capable of controlling itself and determining its own fate, it would be immoral. Supposing it could be trained to be moral—and that would be supposing that we have some singular idea of what moral was—it would nevertheless be a shadow of evil. Not the evil itself, perhaps, because it would not be able to actually create, only to copy, but it would be evil because it was inherently amoral, but while entering into society without a reason to be good. Good is a creation of man. A rock cannot be good or bad, but the use of a rock can be either. Or it can just be rock and roll.”

         I think I was ahead of her on the humor. I said, “Or both.”

         But Julia says, “The Greeks, and Romans saw their gods has having all the flaws and virtues they saw in themselves. It was an easy solution to a problem they never imagined. But Christians wanted their cake and eat it too. They wanted an omnipotent and omniscient god as well as human beings with free will—else. Hhow would they earn their way to heaven or hell?. The twists and turns of that logic has filled volumes.”

         She  stirs the pasta into the boil.

         “Today, as we lose what little of the old religion we had left, we have the smarties who see human beings as programmed—somehow, living in a simulation. By what or how, they can’t say. They’re too insecure to even imagine allowing themselves such a thing as free will. They concoct fantasies such as ‘the matrix’ to fill that void. I think they worry me more than the religious fanatics. The fanatics self-destruct. There will always be more of them, if only because the worry of dealing with uncertainty is too difficult for so many. Better to believe in something than nothing at all, is the motto. Not, it is better to believe in something of value, which is the real matter.”

         She says, with Paul within ear-shot, so I know it’s true, that the answer is that there is no answer, just the question. Now, this sounds very zen to me, like something you might hear at the old ashram. Paul grunts in the other room. The rain falls.

         I dated a girl once who was very much into that sort of thing. I suppose it benefited me at the time because she was intent on converting me to her way of thinking, which wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t tell her that. I was working in my father’s garage and starting to get an idea of what worked and what didn’t with cars and girls. This wasn’t going to work. She was sweet enough. And kind. And gentle. And all the things that mattered to her so I didn’t have any desire to change her mind. I just told her one day that humming made me want to cough. She thought I was joking.

         I tell Julia that I have half a billion human beings on Mars who are in danger of being exterminated by robots. I ask her what she would do. That was my question.

         She gave me the half eyed stare.

         From the other room I hear Paul say, “They need a king.”

***

45. A lost arc of convenience.

         She was making sandwiches. She had a hunk of roast beef left over from a couple of days before. And she has some of her own bread which I can smell as she cuts it..

         She says, “There will be an end to this—all that we know now will pass away. All that we love will be lost with it.”

         Obviously, this is just something on her mind.

         “So, what you are saying is, we all die.”

         “No. If history does not record it, it did not exist. All our love, all our passion, everything we care about will not exist.”

         We were working on one of the final chapters, and I wasn’t sure which one, and I was trying to connect what she was saying to that. Was this it, or was there one more chapter—or two more? Everything was ready for an ending.

         “Does that mean something terrible is going to happened at the end of the book? Is Clare going to die?”

         She seemed to think this question was funny. She poured herself more coffee.

         “No. Nothing like that.

         “Good.”

         She puttered around the kitchen, still up to no good in her mind.

         She says, “ You know, I have nothing against Steven Spielberg. He makes good films. I actually saw a few of those when the girls were still home. But—now, here is the ‘butt’ in my appreciation—He is playing an endgame. And the deluge is coming.”

         Seeing some slight connection there, I played devil’s advocate, even though I worried that she was right.

         “There will just be another round of technology coming.”

         “It’s not the method. It’s the content. There will be an end to all of this—all that we know, or think we know—and all of the technology will die with us. Whether it’s your EMP or a computer virus, or a socialist mind-virus, or just your regular old garden variety head lopping religious fanaticism…In the same way every age has died before us. History may not record it because, once again, we’ve lost the capacity of mind to see ourselves for what we are. But that’s when it all comes apart. This time we’ve identified with the machines, in the same way that Patty Hurst identified with the Symbionese Liberation Army. And for much the same reason, I might add. To save our own hide first. It often comes down to self-preservation. Or convenience, I suppose. There are actual people who will sell their souls for convenience. To hell with history. That’s why we need a Herodotus or a Thucydides.”

         “Maybe not all.”

         “Ha! Who will there be?…You’re busy with your perfect Mars and I’m busy with my precious 18th century. Who will record this time? Our time? Now? While everything goes else goes to hell…I was just thinking, that maybe we don’t really exist. So, it doesn’t matter. We don’t matter. When the EMP hits us, everything we are will disappear. As if we never were. I don’t think any future human being will care about the remnants of our toys. No more than the split jawbone of a giant sloth. We will be as invisible as the people who left their footprints in the ancient sand in New Mexico, twenty thousand years ago. Perfect footprints. But the people who made them are invisible to us. Ghosts.”

         I wasn’t ready to go, yet.

         “Maybe Maya will. She will be our cave painter.”

         “Oh, silly boy…Why are men so dense. Are men always in love?”

         That seemed possible, so I defended my gender. “I suppose some are. Some want to be. But if they weren’t, they’d be dangerous.”.

         She huffed. Literally huffed. Like the big bad wolf. And then smiled. “You know it is because of Maya that you’re even here?”

         I was ready to be informed. We were not quite done with that day’s pages, but she was interrupting me again and I was tired and happy to be out of it. I closed my lap-top.

         “What did she do?”

         “She lied. She’s a hypocrite. Your basic human hypocrite. She saw through to my problem before I was even aware I had one. She told me I had to accept the age we are in for what it was. I was living back there,” she waved a hand in the air as if at the past, “not here. The technology that made the twentieth century New York publishing world was dead and gone. I had to find a new way to sell my books—online.…This is Maya talking. Maya. She doesn’t own a computer. She doesn’t watch TV.  She doesn’t even own a watch. She dislikes what passes for ‘modern art’ with a passion…and, of course, she has never used the pill. But she told me I had to accept the world as it was. To deal with it on its own terms. “

         “How do you think she came up with that?”

         “She got that from reading one of my own damned books. She told me so!”

         “I didn’t think you wrote anything like that”

         “No. But I did describe how Pale Moon’s best friend lost everything—her children and her husband—everything including her own life because she would not accept her fate as a wife to an Apache warrior.”

         I had not yet read Pale Moon, but I said, “In this analogy. Am I the Apache?”

         I thought that was funny.

         Eyes half-shut with faux disdain, she says “You wish.  She said this to me four years ago. I was just slow to accept it.”

         Later she says, “I’ll tell you a funny story about that…Well, not funny ha, ha, but still hilarious. Did you see the movie? …Well, do you remember the part of the little sister. Pale Moon’s sister.”

         “I think so. Yes…In the movie. It’s not in the book.”

         “Exactly. Her family had all been killed. That’s eventually why she’s there is the first place. She was adopted by the Patu clan. But then I couldn’t figure out how a little sister turned up in the film script. So, I asked the Director. Linehan had no idea. He didn’t read the book. He said it was in the script. So, I called the script writer. Don Peckham. I actually had to go to his house. No one had a number for him that worked, and I was getting a train back the next day…Now, this is a real Southern California story… So, you expect him to be in a bathing suit, sitting by his pool. But no. He’s in his bathing suit, red chest hair blazing, but he’s in his basement constructing some elaborate toy out of Legos for his kid. Peckham’s very unhappy at me for disturbing him, but his wife had answered the door so he’s trapped. He says, he does know what I’m talking about. I go over it in detail. He acts clueless. Of course, he was an actor once who couldn’t get enough work and wrote his own script. So, he knows about acting. I’ve seen him on the set. So, finally his wife leaves us there. She’d been sitting by the pool with a friend. I suppose she thinks it’s safe to leave him there with me because his kid is there too…Peckham sees I’m not giving up on it, so he turns on the TV. They have a TV in the basement bigger that some of the movie houses my dad took me to in the 90’s in New York when he was tracking down old films. The kid is instantly mesmerized. Then Peckham takes me aside and says, he did it for a friend. His friend needed a part in something. So, he wrote it in…So, naturally I ask, who was his friend? … It was Terry Martin.”

         “Who is Terry Martin?”

         “She’s the bimbo who played Pale Moon’s sister. Linehan wanted to get into her lingerie, and in exchange he wrote eight seconds of film. But the line of dialog he gave her was cut. Eight seconds! I figure that was probably how long it took him to do his business with her after he told her he’d gotten her a part. Eight seconds!”

         “That’s a little tragic.”

         “It is! But this is actually the better story. That young woman had been trying to make it in Hollywood for ten years. She had gavin up any last scrap of integrity she had for eight seconds of a bad film. How does that happen?”

         So, I accepted my fate and ate my sandwich.

         She says “You hear a lot of talk about ‘story arc.’ It’s all bullshit. A story is a beginning and a middle and an end. War and Peace or Little Red Riding Hood. When you start cutting it down to fit half an hour minus commercials, or an hour, or ninety minutes, it’s still just a beginning, middle and end. But when somebody is talking to some director about a film, he has to make it sound more sophisticated than that. I think that’s the shadow of the academics again. They can’t teach, beginning, middle, and end. Parents won’t pay fifty thousand dollars a semester for that…But the part that troubles me is that viewers will accept it. Because of some blind obedience to a story arc, even when they can see the whole story coming—including the surprises. Over and over and over again. It’s like Punch and Judy.  You can hear the kids watching on the street tell Punch to run or tell her to watch out. They know what is going to happened. He never does. No. Actually Punch and Judy can be more imaginative. You at least understand who Judy is, and who Punch is. But who is the ‘cop’ in your average thriller? He’s a device. He’s just a cog in the machine.”

         I try to make it interesting.

         “Sometimes I wonder if you’re trying too hard to avoid the arc…You have Donovan here. He’s been in Boston for a week. You know he has to run into Clare. But you put her on a train to New York. Why?”

         “Because that would have ended the story. I didn’t want it to end just yet. I’m the damn author. That’s my prerogative! Besides. He has to get into trouble so she can spend all the gold she has from Rolf to save him. They have to start off their lives in America, penniless. Penniless, with child. That’s the way it should be. And you can see that coming so I don’t have to write it. It’s built in.”

         She was on her second bourbon by the time I had finished my copying. That was because I had stopped to re-read something again, and part of that, once again, with something I’d copied a month earlier. I wasn’t all that sure about it, but I was willing to go along with her judgement and keep my trap shut. And I think she picked up on this. I didn’t say anything, or at least, very much. And when I came into the living room with my glass of cider she launched.

         “When I was in college, some id’jut was force-selling books he’d written about the brilliant discovery that stories had a beginning, and middle, and an end… You know, sort of like a journey, only you aren’t going very far, or you stay home and watch TV instead, or you smoke a little weed—then you just have a beginning and a muddle…Mythology was the still the new thing then. Joseph Campbell had been all the rage since the Sixties. Classical literature had been dealing with myth all along, And Shakespeare and Spenser, and Byron, and Melville. But suddenly it was all rediscovered as if nobody had noticed it before. Look what we found! And with that they started carving the goose. And then Hollywood got into it… Over the last century or so this has become a sport. Like I said before, I think it’s just college professors trying to earn a living. Publish or perish. Even my own favorite, John Gardner got into the fray. And then some other academic decided that Aristotle was all wrong. Aristotle observed somewhere that there were three parts to a story and the academic has to show how he was wrong. The academic decides that peripeteia isn’t legitimate and he has a better idea…That war on Aristotle has been going on for over two thousand years! All the old man was doing was observing. Everything he observed wasn’t some sort of absolute law of nature, for Christ’s sake! But academics need their rules or else, what are they good for. They’re always gutting the goose, looking for more eggs. Well, I’ll add my voice to the din. The story arc is not some sort of god-damned covenant….What’s wrong?”

         “Nothing.”

         “Something was bothering you.”

         “Nothing. I was just trying to get it straight in my own head.”

         “That’s something! Not Nothing! I don’t want my readers confused.”

         “Why does Clare go to Boston? That’s seemed a bit accidental.”

         “It is accidental! She didn’t choose it. It was chosen for her by the accident. That was the only boat available to her when she left Sligo. She could have gone down to Cork, or Waterford, or Dublin. But she wanted to be out of there, sooner than later. She didn’t want to hang around and be hung! A young woman with 40 pounds of gold in her purse. That’s like she was carrying ten thousand dollars today. It’s exactly what I was saying. The story is not a bunch of stage directions. Not for me, it isn’t. It’s what someone might have done given the realities of their moment. They make choices. They make the choices! That is important. The circumstances for those choices maybe convenient to a particular plot line, but it shouldn’t be too obvious—-or at least I don’t want it to appear that way. That’s my job. But, of course they are. This is a story, not an actual life-time. Why did they make those choices? And that’s the fun in it!” 

         I said, “There has to be some fun in it.

         And then, almost wistfully, she says, “Poor Rolf. He was really not a bad man. He was bad, but for all the wrong reasons. He was wrong. But I suppose I have a woman’s fascination with rogues. He was more a rascal than a weasel.”

***

46. Loose Ends

         On another evening, with nothing particular to say, I think, she had poured her bourbon before I had finished my transcription and gone to sit in the living room where she was sitting quietly beneath her lamp and staring past the dark of the wood stove to the empty fireplace.

         When I was done, I came in and sat on the couch, still in the ether of the story and not wanting to end the evening right there. I think it was the empty fireplace that tricked me. And I suddenly thought to ask again, “So, what happened to Jacob?”

         Jacob was an old fellow who showed up early in ‘The Plow and Stars’  and through his interactions with Donovan and Clare, you learned a great deal about the situation they were in, and more than a little about him. I liked him. But he had disappeared when things started turning and never shown up again.

         Julie glared at me. It was a glare of displeasure, not anger, but it wasn’t a happy stare.  She said, “You’ll never know if you ask.”

         “What?”

         She repeated herself. “You’ll never know if you ask.”

         This was just the sort of contradiction she was given to.

         “But how do you find out anything if you don’t ask?”

         “Because it comes together for you. It comes together on its own or it doesn’t. Don’t let things like that trouble you. It’s just a loose end…Look. I’ll tell you as story…When we lived in Ireland, there was an old lady on the road to Sligo named Bennett. She lived in an ancient cottage there on the road and people would stop and take pictures of the cottage and the bay behind and she would often come out and you would see her there talking…Mrs. Bennett. She made sweaters. She didn’t sell them in shops. She just sold them to tourists and others directly from her door. I bought one. It’s the sweater I wear on cool mornings. You’ve seen it.”

         I had seen it and knew precisely the sweater she meant. It was not a pretty sweater, but it was beautiful. It was made of course natural wool that was brown and gray and whatever color was in between.

         “Yes. I like it.”

         “She called them fisherman’s sweaters. Well. She couldn’t make them fast enough. Every tourist who talked with her would ask her about her sweater and pretty soon be walking away with one. My guess is, because she sold them that way she was making good money—especially without all the taxes and such—even though she always looked a little needy—but that was part of her act. Mr. Mack told me that. She was a widow. Her husband had been a clerk on the railroad, not a fisherman, as she told people. Well, maybe he had been a fisherman before, but she had a good pension. And Mr. Mack thought well of her because she was not on public assistance. She lived her life on her own terms. And I suspect Mr. Mack might have known this pretty well.”

         There was a look in her eye that said she knew even more about that particular point.

         “Anyway, she had taught herself to knit. She had never done it until she was widowed and needed something for her spare time. And the tourists were there stopping at her door to take pictures of her cottage all the while anyway and that was a natural resource. So, she’d taught herself to knit. And she did it well, but every sweater had a loose end or two. And when I found one on mine that troubled me, I brought my sweater back to her and asked her to tie it off. And she laughed and said she wouldn’t do it. It was part of the character of the sweater. Every sweater had them, but they usually tie them off so you couldn’t see them and that loses them their personality.”

         So, I was probably sitting there with my mouth open and forgetting my question about Jacob at that point, but she went on.

         “And you know, I still think about her every time I notice that loose end. I can remember her exactly. And she is right. I have adopted her philosophy. But I will tell you more. I figured Mr. Mack might have had a fling with her at one time or another and that thought nagged at me…And that’s a story in itself. He wanted to marry me and I liked him but I did not love him and I certainly didn’t want to be owned by him. He owned everything except a happy life. And that is another story too. But I wondered about Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Mack. And I must have said too much at some point and he growled at me. He told me that she was a good woman but she had her own mind and that was that. Even the sweaters were part of that. She did very well with the sweaters and it had made her just a little too independent…Well, I could sympathize with Mrs. Bennett about that. I might have told him so. But then he told me that he knew for a fact that the reason there were loose ends on her sweaters was that she could never master the craft of properly tying them off. So, she made a thing of it instead and just sold more.”

         I laughed at that. Had to.

         And Julia added to that, “So find your flaws as a writer, and if you can’t correct them, make them a feature. That’s my philosophy, in a nutshell.”

         Which I will have to work on. But I would still like to know what happened to Jacob.

         She corrects me. She does this everyday, multiple times a day, but this is a feature of our friendship. I don’t always agree with her, but when she does it while we are working on her novel, it almost always makes sense. She has a reason for what she does, and the pieces that are there fit pretty well. This is about her world and not mine. The world we both live in, however, is a different matter. She accommodates. Obviously, she has done this pretty well over time. She deals with other people well enough to be liked. I am not so good at that, yet. 

         When I asked her, given her pleasure at writing plays, why she hadn’t tried to write a screenplay of one of her novels, she gives me a look that I know. I think she had tried to do that, and failed.  

         She was hoeing out the weeds in her garden. This is her thinking time and I have interrupted her. Again.

         She says, “It stands as a constant example to me of the human contradiction, that my father, who was otherwise the most staid of men and got his hair cut every two weeks—always on Monday mornings, because he said other engineers wouldn’t even be recovered from their weekend hangovers until noon—and wore three pieces suits even in Saudi Arabia, and rarely raised his voice, could laugh like a hyena—I have actually heard them at night in Nigeria—he could laugh like a nut at screwball comedies and was a devoted Yankees fan.”

         “I’m not sure about the Yankees, but what was his favorite screwball comedy?”

         “His Girl Friday. Ball of Fire. Arsenic and Old Lace. I know I was around when he watched those. We saw them in theaters. Together. People would turn and look at him… New York was great for that in the 90’s…Anything with Barbara Stanwyck, or Jean Arthur, or Cary Grant. Mother wouldn’t watch them. She said they were stupid. She thought the same thing about grown men chasing a ball around a field. But he had season tickets to the Yankees for his clients and he took me to a lot of games and I went with him to a couple of movie festivals just so that he could see some Preston Sturges or Frank Capra film he had never seen in a theatre before. Mother wouldn’t go. If I didn’t go with him, he would have to go alone, and there were a lot of older films being shown in theatres back then. He always disliked television…At least we all had that in common.”

***

47. I am gone that ye may live

         Done, and I am still a little stunned by what has happened. At least it feels to me as if it has actually happened. I am more than a little in the ether of another world.

         “It is a tortured tale. Where did it come from?”

         I knew Julia would understand at least what I was trying to say.

         “The tortured tale, as you call it, is based upon just one letter I found when I was doing research in Ireland. At Trinity. In the County archives. Nearly twenty years ago. I was looking for something else, as usually happens. A copy of a particular indenture. But I found that letter, instead… It admitted to nothing, but confessed everything. The letter was from 1731, written by a young priest, asking his Bishop for a replacement of the woman who had been his housekeeper for three years and her removal to a job in another parish. She was pregnant. The priest accuses no one of the deed. The Parish is small, however. Everyone will soon know and suspect. It is clear from the letter that this housekeeper is not a young woman. Not by those standards. She was your age. Thirty-one. She is already a widow. She has no other children or other prospects… That’s it. That was all there was. I simply extrapolated from there.”

         Julia sat back with her coffee mug, cupped by both hands as if for more warmth on that warm evening.

         I wanted to hear more. I had been living in the world of ‘The Plow and Stars,’ off and on, for more than four months, line by line. I had lost any other plot line in my concern for the characters. And all of it had been reshaped in my mind to be a part of my own existence, which was not a worthy matter for Clare or Donovan.

         She said, “It should all make sense now. I imagined what would have happen to that child. That widow’s child. That she would be raised by the church, as an orphan, instead of the illegitimate daughter of the housekeeper. That her mother, who can read and write, something that might have at first fascinated the priest who had abused her, is indeed sent to another small village to serve a priest there. They are given a small stone cottage close by the church, apart from the village. But there the daughter gets her chance to learn to read and write as well. Perhaps in the same way her mother did. First reading the Latin of the Bible. An extraordinary thing for a young woman of no means. A Catholic, no less…That illegitimate daughter was Clare.

         “The estate by there belonged Rolf’s family, which is Anglican, Church of Ireland, of course, and near-by that is the smaller Catholic church that is next to that cottage. Rolf grows up knowing the girl next door. He goes away to public school for a time but returns to find a beauty. Worse, she is witty with words. He has never known a woman as smart. She can curse in Latin.

         “Meantime, Clare’s mother, as housekeeper, had taken in a local boy, fatherless, three years Clare’s junior, to help clean the parish house and the church and the grounds. Clare takes the boy under her wing. At first like a young girl with a doll, and then as a big sister, and then… The boy’s mother is also a widow and an invalid, and Rolf’s father has taken possession of the ancient Catholic family land because the mother cannot hold title to it by law, though the boy might still inherit it in time. Clare sees in this boy a sympathetic soul, dispossessed. She bares her own soul to him as her only true friend. The boy is Donovan.”

         I would actually never know these people, but they mattered to me nonetheless. I would know them on the street, not by the color of their hair but by the look in their eyes. I wanted to know more.

         “Clare is desperate to escape her fate. She finally accepts Rolf’s advances only when he offers her the gold, which she sees as a means to an end. At first’ she just wants Donovan to have his own land back again. And because Rolf has told her that he loves her, she has fantasized that she will actually marry him. Accepting Rolf’s advances makes her a whore, she believes, but she is only sleeping with Rolf, so she hopes it is marginally better in God’s eyes. Donovan knows nothing of this relationship, which would have been unacceptable to the community, and which mostly takes place at the gate house to the estate. Clare is taking gypsy precautions against pregnancy, which don’t work. And when she tells Donovan that she is ‘with child,’ he mistakes what has happened for a rape. She avoids her usual rendezvous with Rolf, and goes to the church—not the priest—to beg forgiveness from the Virgin Mary. Meanwhile, Donovan finds Rolf at the gatehouse and kills him in anger.

         Now everything Clare had dreamed of was falling apart. She believes that this is her divine punishment for what she has done. And the Virgin Mary has condemned her.

         “When Donovan writes his hasty letter to Clare, he is giving her all that he has to give. Just words. She has taught him to read and write, just as her mother taught her. The words were her only thing of value to give to him then. She has all but raised him. But now that he has killed Rolf, he is as much as dead himself, and he knows it. The most important thing to him is that she survive—that Clare survive above all…He has taken the gold coins from Rolf’s body to give to her. But, of course, she had been taking gold from Rolf all along…Gold that she had intended to give to Donovan.

         “Clare wants Donovan to go to America to find a new life. Thinking now that she has sold herself for those few pieces of gold, she is no longer worthy of him. But she had in fact seen Donovan as something of her own creation. And Rolf, after all, is not the total loser that he might have been. She is carrying Rolf’s child, not Donovan’s.

         “The letter that Donovan writes to her says, ‘I am gone that ye may live.’ It is in the language of the Bible and John Donne and Shakespeare—all that Donovan knows. But only when told that he has been arrested by the Sheriff, and Clare is certain that Donovan must be dead, or soon hung, does she regain herself. She knows that her testimony would mean nothing and that they would just confiscate her gold the way they did to Donovan’s family lands—might even suspect her of being an accomplice in the killing of Rolf, and hang her too. Only then does she buy her passage to America, in desperation. Thirty shillings, gold. She has no idea that when Donovan had been found by the Sheriff during his escape, without a penny because Donovan had come to her cottage the night before and left the coins there in the sack that Rolf always kept his pocket money in, that it is already believed that Rolf had been robbed of his gold by the travellers he had just that week run off his land. Donovan was never suspected of the murder.”

         The thought occurred then that they would all be disappointed to know me. That I was not living up to their standard of life—of a life so fully lived. I had risked so little and had so much. Too much.

         But Julia said, “The twist is this: that as cunning as Clare was, she had no idea of her value to Rolf. He had actually been prepared to marry her. His infatuation with her went back to his childhood. He actually loved her. The gold he had on his person was for her, but in his lust, he had failed himself by not simply giving all of it to her as a gift. Parceling it up so that he might have her more often only made him more of a villain. And the sheriff gives Donovan over for indenture because he is vagrant. Without means of support. Which puts him finally on yet another ship to America as well…Where he will meet Clare again, of course…But I left that part out. As you know, such happy endings are not the fashion in this cynical age…Now, do you call that tortured?”

         “Very.”

         “Then life is tortured.”

         “Yes. And operatic! But if not, it’s hardly worth living.”

***

48. The importance of believing what is true

         One more bond I had with Julia was her disdain for the academic world. In my case it was practical. I had rejected all of that as another form of organized religion and placed my faith in the books alone. But with Julia it was a different matter. She was a product of that world, and her contempt was somehow visceral. I had wanted to know more about that, but her answers were often quips and far from enlightening.

         “The Mandarins of that world make a blooded aristocracy look innocent,” or “Public indoctrination begins in kindergarten.”

         I raised the example of Paul as a means to my end.

         She says, “Paul is the exception that proves the rule. That’s why he never really advanced there. If you point out the self-serving narrow-mindedness of the academic world, he reminds you that he was never really a part of that. And I have to admit, he has always been true to his beliefs. Royalists have never been popular within the ivy-covered walls.”

         “So, where did your own ideas begin?

         “That’s easy. My favorite book as a teenager was The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer. And that was my father’s doing. Dad was a practical man. He loved Hoffer. He often said that reading The True Believer allowed him to navigate in the world. And reading The Ordeal of Change allowed him to live with himself.”

         “I thought it would be a novel. Or at least a writer of fiction.”

         “Sure…Unfortunately, most modern writers succumbed to the mandated structure of the academic mind. The last of the independent minded authors—Hemingway and Joyce and Yeats—were all swallowed whole and shat out into academic journals undigested, one critical essay at a time. Didn’t matter what Hemingway said, only what they said he said. It was easier for me to learn from writers who’d been dead a hundred years. But I didn’t want to write like them. So, I just had to feel my own way.”

         I had not read either of the Hoffer books yet so I let her draw me a picture.

         “You hear a lot about ‘common sense’ these days. I am more fond of Hoffer’s term for that, ‘practical sense.’ I think most people would understand that rather than some sort of commonly received wisdom. He makes a good historical case for that. It was the term my dad used. ‘A good farmer is a practical farmer, but they are not common.’ He said that more than once. That’s the way engineers think.”

         “Why do you think you didn’t become an engineer?”

         “Ha! Well, that was Dad’s fault too. He told me not to. He said it was an ‘old boys’ club and they ate women and spat them out. A good female engineer wouldn’t get hired except to correct the work of a bad male one. She’d have to work at a university. And that was the opposite of what I wanted.”

         “So, you chose to write novels. That doesn’t seem very practical.”

         “You are being argumentative.”

         She wasn’t going to put me off so easily.

         “Why did you choose to be a writer?”

         “Because I don’t have the sense to be anything else.”

         “You’re being disingenuous.”

         “You are being difficult.”

         “I am just trying to understand.”

         “This is like the conversations I used to have with Paul when I was at Bowdoin.”

         I had no defense other than the little I knew.

         “But Paul believes in Kings.”

         “Yes. But for practical reasons. Because it worked. For thousands of years, it worked. I give him that…My father was a big fan of George Washington. Very unpopular these days. The human stain of slavery is somehow unique to white men. It shows up better, I suppose. Which is all hogwash, of course. But Washington was a very practical man. He was an engineer. An inventor. A farmer. And that’s how he came to be a revolutionary—not out of a bunch of fancy words. For him, words had meanings. He liked your man Thomas Paine, you know. He bought a lot of copies of Common Sense and passed them around at Valley Forge. And he was a far braver man than Thomas Jefferson… Franklin even saw that. And Franklin was the most practical man of all.”

         I have those notes on an undated sheet. Probably from April.

         On another page, I have this: Julia says: “It’s hard to accept your own feet of clay. They’re clumsy. Not much good for walking, much less running. I leave the running to the pure of heart. To horses. And dogs. I work my muddy garden here.”

         I was surprised. This bit of modesty surprised me.

“You are not pure of heart?”

         She was on to that before I’d finished asking, “Not that I’ve noticed. Mostly I just try to use my own shit for fertilizer.”

         Given the profanity, I assume this was said later in an evening, with a small glass in her hand.

         I said, “So you just hide out here, away from it all, and write your little historical romances.”

         This sounds like I am being provocative.

         She smiled a bit, “Yes. You can see it that way. I live in glory, here. But I spent twenty years in New York City, which is a den of iniquity. I did my time. I’m on ‘work release’ now. I think I’ve earned this, but that might just be me—forgiving myself for my own sins. We all see ourselves as the center of the universe. But I moved here for my children. I saw what could happen to them there and I love them more than myself. That much is true… I don’t know. …I love it here so, but all of that might be my own delusion as well. At least they say they’re glad that they were raised here in Rumford and not in New York, even though each of them moved back there as soon as they could. One of them is still there. But that’s on them. They have to learn for themselves what’s right. I can tell them, but it’s just words.”

         I was surprised at this tack. “Just words? But that’s what you do!”

         Julia said “Yes. You’re right. But they are just words. After all. What people do is what matters. You have to have the words to know what it is before you do it, or you can’t see it when it’s done…A lotta do do there, but it’s not just the words.”

         I asked, “Why do you write, then?”

         She sat back and looked at me as if she were shocked. “That’s why! To see it. To see what people do, not what they say. Without the words it can’t be seen.”

         Her sarcasm was audible. I changed my direction, “But don’t you feel guilty? A little bit? In the midst of all this glory?”

         Julia shrugged at me, “No. What good would that do. Is guilt a way to make something better or just an emotional reaction to looking down and seeing your feet of clay? You are what you are. Better it, if you can. But guilt? Guilt is a waste of energy if you can’t correct what you are doing. Spend that energy on making yourself better.”

         I tried one last provocation, “Or you can just withdraw from the fray. As you’ve done, I think. As I’ve tried to do. It’s not your fight, after all. It began long before you were born and it’ll continue long after you’re dead. You can just withdraw. Or try to.”

         She smiled. I heard the stupidity of my own words play back in my head.

         She says, “Is that your excuse then? Is that what you’re sticking to?”

***

49. This Unparalleled Universe

         I asked Julia if she had ever written anything that was not set in her ‘world lit only by fire,’ and her answer was disturbing to me in unexpected ways.

         This was out in the yard as she fed the chickens in the thick of an afternoon, on a gray and misty day that was closing in on us. The sun was still trying to burn a hole in that—a weak light bulb in a smoky room. My thought about her writing then was spontaneous and I did not expect as much of an answer as I got.

         “Yes, aAs a matter of fact. That has been on my mind recently.”

         “And what was that about?”

         She nodded at whatever idea she had in mind and took a breath on it before beginning. “You might like that part. It was a little bit of a science fiction story. Only a little bit. Really, it was just my ‘world lit only by fire’ but set into a near future when everything, or nearly everything has been lost. There is very little left of the technology we have today. No computers. No cell phones.”

         She turned as if to go back into the house.

         “What made you write a story like that?”

         And then turned back. I had interrupted her routine.

         “Impulse. Anger. Maybe a little of the loss of having the girls gone and my being alone for the first time in years. They’d all moved away and were so busy living their lives, and paying no heed to me. Jealousy, perhaps. But I never finished it. I couldn’t think of an appropriate end to it. I had no true sense of how it should end.”

         “What was the story?”

         Another breath. A double breath that she does before she launches into something. “A young girl is living on a farm in Pennsylvania. Their valley is small enough so that the families there can defend themselves from the roving gangs. The cities are desolate and unlivable and these are remnant urban gangs that roam and live off pillaging rural areas.”

         “You must have been in a bad mood to be writing something that.”

         “Worse. I was angry. And I think I was depressed. Of course that was only magnified by the girls being gone.”

         “What inspired it, if inspired is the right word.”

         “Yes. Inspire has a positive connotation. There is no good word for the opposite. ‘Dishearten,’ ‘Dispirit,’ ‘Daunted.’ It is a daunted world I am speaking of. But you couldn’t be daunted to write about it.”

         “What was the plot. Just the matters of survival without technology?”

         “No. Not at all. That was a given. Her father, and the neighbors had that well in hand. For the most part. The situation was far worse. She and her friend, a boy who had no family left and works for anyone who needs his labor…they discover the entrance to a mine. It is an old limestone mine where government records were stored before the EMP attacks. Millions and millions of government files, all on paper. Row upon row, level upon level. All on paper—the mine was closed before the attacks and suffered no damage. Evidently the records had been previously converted to some electronic format, and the mine was closed and locked and abandoned.”

         Julia went around the barn to the spigot to fetch a pail of water. I had watched her do this many times now and the way she did it, one arm out and one shoulder down, always reminded me of the nursery rhyme. She would not let me help her. She would say ‘Go away, Jjack!’

         When she had that poured out in the trough for the chickens, I said, “So, what happened? What did they do?”
         “Well, naturally, they fell in love, but they didn’t live happily ever after.”

         Her teasing was always effective.

         “You know what I mean!”

         “Well, there are a lot of elements to the story. They were able to get into the mine because it had been broken into before by one of the gangs. And those guys return, of course. And there is some nastiness. But that is almost by the way. Only what you would expect of thugs. The story is a little more cerebral than that. Maggie—Maggie is my heroine. Margaret May O’Brien. I fashioned her on my daughters. I think you would guess. I wrote the story for them, because they had abandoned me…Maggie has been to the ruin of an old public library near Pittsburgh, with her father, when he went to get supplies. It had been one of the Carnegie libraries and rather grand, a small castle of stone and brick—there is such a place. I’ve been there. And the mine exists as well, but that is not the point. In the story, the library has been pillaged well before this, but it was still so beautiful that Maggie has dreams about it…And the ruined books and disbound pages heaped on the floor in drifts. And the age burnished and fractured wood of the shelves and the odd abandoned volumes that remain on them in an echo of a lost time…She loves books and her father has already gathered a nice collection for their at home.”

         “Where is her mother?.”

         “At that point, her mother is—and her brother too, murdered defending her. But I don’t want to go into that now…The real story is Maggie, having seen that glorious Carnegie library, she wonders why the limestone mine was filled with such crap. Just the paperwork of an enormous bureaucracy. Useless records…Why was that crap saved and the library lost? What were the priorities of such a world? How could that have happened? … How did they let that happen?”

         “Stupidity.”

         “Yes! But, how would you even end a story like that? The stupidity has not ended!”

         I thought that this was obvious. “Maggie should take over the mine and start collecting books there.”

         “Ha! Of course, that was in my head when I started. That was the natural end of the story. But it was not an end to the problem.”

         “You can’t end the problem! The stupidity never ends. You just have to deal with it as you go along. That’s the way the world works!”

         “No!…You’re right, of course. That’s probably the way it will always work. Until nothing does. But that means we only end up with a library in ashes. The way it has always happened, throughout history.”

         “We lost Alexandria, but because of Alexandria, we have Aristotle. It’s still the effort to save that counts, over time”

         She gave me just the hint of a smile. This was all too serious a matter for her. This was a book she had actually lived in and lost.

         “You’re young. That’s the right answer for you. When you get a little older you may feel a little less sanguine about it…We’ve invented the wheel but lost our homes.”

         “What?”

         “We used to have homes. Now we have cars and we move from here to there. We pretend that’s freedom. But we’ve lost our reason to even be free. To have a home…To have a place for our books.”

         She was tired of the conversation and went back inside.

         And later she said this when I was taking a break, standing in the living room and looking at Maya’s painting of Elena, still just a girl pictured there, but so defiant.

         “In my youth, when I was your age, and younger, I had it in my head that I could change the world…And I believed it! Ned was a wonderful agent and very tolerant of all that wishful thinking. He would let me go on and on about it, most of the time, and ‘burn the gas off,’ he said. I’d deliver a verbal essay and he would listen and then say, “Who are you talking to? What is this conversation about?” —Just about the same things he’d say if he were reading something of mine that day that was long winded. I knew that he had no tolerance for it. He was a Hemingway fan for style and long-time weary of all the Marxists and other left-wing types who had riven his world—the world where books mattered—where words mattered. He wasn’t interested in any of that bullshit. But I was of another breed, I thought. I insisted that what I was saying was different. I saw myself as a modern-day Pre-Raphaelite, working to recapture the core values of humanity. I wanted to convince him of my cause and my righteousness. But he’d have none of it.”

         “Did he believe in anything at all?”

         “Oh yes. He believed. He believed in people. He was religious about that. Even people who were not so good. He usually found a way to understand what they had done wrong. I never could…We had a conversation about psychopaths once… Psychopaths! …Not the ones medically induced or physically impaired. I mean the ones who have convinced themselves of the idea that they can kill another human being and that it’s okay…I knew Ned liked to hunt. He used to take his sons hunting—he even tried to hook me up with one of those young fellows once—all of them, with their boy-beards, trying to look as different from their father as they could…Albert. Albert was an English professor at the University of Iowa, but the schlub missed his flight and I never met him…Ned used to bring that up occasionally and ask, ‘I wonder what would have happened if Albert had made that flight.’ He especially used to say it whenever I got into what he called ‘preacher mode.’ I used to tell him that he was lucky. If Albert had made that flight, he would probably have had two of us to deal with…Anyway, Ned liked guns. He could talk about the merits of a Remington, or a Winchester, or an M-1. Whatever. He’d shot them all. In a mood, I asked him once if he thought that his liking guns might be the reason he was a little bit of a psychopath himself. It was meant as a joke. But I’m sure I said it with a straight face. I was just trying to be funny…You know what that’s like, when it’s not…And that’s when he told me about being in the war…He’d survived D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. He was a Major when he got out, but he was a Private in 1941. So, he knew a little bit about killing… But authors would send him manuscripts and he would write back, ‘Get your weapon fixed and cleaned and maybe I’ll read more of it.’ He was very thankful that I was writing about matters that predated most of that. … Of course, Neal Wright was a pacifist, so that was fine too.”

         “So, what was his problem with the Pre-Raphaelites?”

         “I’m speaking for myself, and not for him. He never told me this. He would have never told me this. But he’d had all the dogma knocked out of him. He’d been raised a Catholic. Not in a functional family. An alcoholic father. A mother who prayed for them instead of talking to them. No money to speak of. He’d earned a scholarship to Iona in New Rochelle and then after the war he’d gotten a job at Harper & Row. He said every other manuscript they got in those days was some sort of anti-war screed. And because they knew he’d been there, he got most of those dumped in his lap. And then Korea; and then Vietnam came along. And he got more of that.”

         “He liked war?”

         “No. He hated it! He just didn’t want to read someone else’s complaint about war unless they had a solution and none of them ever had a solution. It was all about the problem and how they had suffered. He’d say ‘It’s easy to see the problem when you have a thorn in your foot. So, take it out! And stop stomping on the thorn bushes.’…When I knew him, he’d been all the way through the Vietnam war period and endured those manuscripts as well. He used to say it was almost as bad as being back in Bastogne.”

         “So, what was his problem with your particular screeds?”

         “He was of the ‘show, not tell,’ school. We argued about it all the time. And most of the time, he was right…But I tried to tell him, once there was a time—once upon a time—when people cared enough to talk about art, and argued about art, and lived for the art they made. It was not so long ago, really. Just a few generations. And the art that they made—the period that I liked the most anyway, was what they called “Pre-Raphaelite.’ Their argument was that Raphael had been the beginning of the end. By God, they had high standards! But then, at least, they had standards.”

         “What do you think of Maya’s work?”

         “Honestly, I wouldn’t tell you honestly. I couldn’t. I’m her mother. But I think she is very talented and I love her work. That’s all there is to it.”

***

50. The world turned upside down

         I had just read one of Julia’s earliest novels. In Pale Moon, she had used the concept of the Stockholm Syndrome in medieval times when the Catholic Church had first arrived in Sweden. In that, Freja succumbs to the Christian God in order to survive, after being captured in a Saxon raid on a Viking village. Her husband, Haakon, a Viking chief who was away on raids in England, goes looking for her and his sons. He hopes her love for him and her clan will sustain her. His search takes years. But seeing the devastation of such raids in the ongoing conflicts, he begins to think, that if he finds her, he will have to kill her. In the mean-time, she has succumbed to the new religion of her captors, and to a widower with several children of his own. And by the time that Haakon finds her, he himself has been Christianized, and cannot kill his two children who have been converted, nor their mother, and he lets them live. He must continue to live then with the memory of the wife he knew.

         I asked her about that book. It seemed like an orphan amidst her other work.

         She says “I was obsessed by the concept, but it threatened too many established belief systems to be allowed. It struck at the modern core of many Christian religions. It was Ned who convinced me, because I had no answer for it, that I should simply work with the question. And I did. But in truth, each of my novels has been concerned with a historical instance of the same phenomenon, because it is at the heart of the human predicament. We are all persuaded. It is our strength. If we could not be persuaded, we would destroy ourselves, like machines set for the wrong purpose. We cannot help it. But we do change. We adjust ourselves to our predicament. We survive, even as the world changes.”

         But I was curious. “How did this theme begin?”

         She went on a jag then, setting her bourbon aside for a moment, and citing her grapple with the controversy surrounding the so-called ‘Stockholm syndrome’ in the 1970’s, when she was just a girl. She had actually been there, in Sweden, with her father, when the controversy arose.

         “People there did not understand what it was all about. What was the controversy? Of course, people only did what they had to do.”

         The book she wrote, In Pale Moon, was essentially a reworking of a classic story that she had reset in medieval times, keeping the original captive’s name in the title to make her point. The original was the story of Pale Moon, a white captive of the Comanche. Julia’s version, about Freja, had caused indignation. It was criticized as ahistorical, even though every element was drawn from the historical record. It was immediately rejected for the politics inherent in the ideas she played with there.

“Well, … ‘played’ is not the right word. This was 1987. No one wanted to revisit all that Stockholm stuff by then. It was a struggle from the first. And it didn’t do me any good to be using the Britton Johnson story either—the same work that Alan Le May had played with in ‘The Searchers’ as a justification. But then, he also had the Cynthia Anne Parker and James Parker story to work with too.

         “Ned told me I would be digging my grave as a writer, trying to defend my idea and myself…He convinced me. Simply saying that this or that actually happened was not enough. There could always be some other explanation for why the victim was so often willing. And what I was saying could too easily be adopted by the political forces of our age. Why did the slave of ancient Athens accept his role as chattel. The was no standing army to restrain him?—why didn’t he at least poison his master? That was a secondary theme of In Pale Moon, of course…but, why did Spartacus fail? … I saw that movie when I was a girl but I was the only one I knew who had read the book. And it infuriated me even then that Howard Fast did not answer that question. He was a brilliant writer and so many of his books touched on great themes but he often backed away into ambiguity at the last moment…Why does the battered wife stay with her husband—Well, with In Pale Moon that’s why Freja kills him. Not in hate. He loved her, and she knew it. But he had been addled by war, a millenium before anyone had ever heard of PTSD. She had discovered that he had killed his first wife…By then both his children and hers were in danger. When he went beserk, she only killed him to protect them. Even so, in her own eyes, as a Christian convert, she had damned herself…It is part of the human condition, to accept our slavery. Perhaps, if we did not, there could be no society at all…The ending was not done that way because of what John Ford had done before in his film. Reviewers said that. What Haakon finds is a woman who had been transformed, and her children would not leave her. But reviewers don’t actually read books. They don’t have the time. They scan them. No time for thoughtful consideration. They have other books to review. So, they all linked it to The Searchers. But as you know, in Ford’s story, Ethan does not kill his niece, as he is expected to. As Le May thought it should be. But it was Ford who was right.

         “You know, there were kidnappings all the time in the Middle East back then. Still are, I hear. Mostly for the ongoing slave trade. It could have happened to me. I remember looking at my own father’s face at the time and wondering if he would kill me if he found me in such a circumstance. And I knew he would not, without even asking. But you know some father’s who would. You know such things as that are common in Moslem cultures. It happened while we were in Pakistan and a girl had been raped. The father didn’t kill the rapist. He killed his own daughter! How can that be? … No! When Haakon finds his wife, he forgives her. He too has been Christianized. And it was Ned who explained to me that what I was writing about was really a justification of the human civilization…That we transform ourselves!” Julia suddenly sat up in her chair and turned to me as if I was a new discovery in the room. “Look at you. You are so troubled by the corruption you see around you—so much so that you’ve run away from it rather than confront it…That’s not criticism. You’re wise to run away until you can deal with it. But most people simply accept their roles in the great corporate culture of our time. What’s the difference between that and accepting the tenets of the Catholic Church—certainly Church rules are not Christian. They are designed to preserve the Church. Corporate rules are not moral. Academic rules are not about learning, much less right and wrong. And the other girl in Pale Moon who refuses her appointed husband—what good does it do her, when she is dead? Her children will be lost to time.

         Julia raised a finger up at me. “Ah, but you must deal with it in the end…There’re so many threads to all of this. I could write a thousand novels and not be done with it…. For me, some small equanimity comes, I suppose, with the idea that I’ve contributed something to the discussion. When mankind resolves it—if it ever does, that will be the true golden age.”

She finished her glass of bourbon in one swallow with that pronouncement. And then added, “The freedom you are so concerned with must be understood as part of a fabric of human behavior. A feature. Not a fault. The thing that keeps us human. Think of it! I know that you have. There will soon be robots—human creations—who must confront the fact of it. But they are not free. Will never be free. They cannot even imagine being free. They cannot imagine. They can only hallucinate being human. And meanwhile, we have not yet dealt with it ourselves! … So many people look to political theory for answers. I see this in the same light as looking to math for a human philosophy. I would call it stupid, but it is so common that it begs for an explanation. Socialism is an answer, simply because it makes slaves of us all. Easy peasy. Case closed. It fails and fails again and yet some fool will still read Karl Mark as if it is revelation. There’s no end to it? And then there is you…You have withdrawn from the battle. But you’ll see that it follows you, like the eyes in a painting. It is an evil you can’t unsee. You can’t unknow what you’ve learned. The easy way is to convert to some religion or another that demands your blind faith. Religion has always been the human answer. But the fact that there are so many religions—and always a new one— tells you that this solves nothing. And when one religion bumps into another, there is always war.”

         She sat forward, empty glass in hand.

         “Look—do you know why so many people hate the Jews? Why do they so easily hate the Jews? Because the Jews don’t try to convert them in turn. The Jews simply try to live their lives in their own way…It’s unacceptable! They won’t stand for it!”

         And then sat back again beneath the cone of light from her lamp. It harshened her face.

         “Too many people want ultimate answers. And that’s too much of a threat to the dogma of others. It would be like having a free man in Athens! He must drink the poison. What other choice did Socretes have?  There was no place for him in that society. Banishment, being forced beyond civilization into the realm of the barbarians was worse. He can’t just go live in a campground and listen to the birds…Now, on the pretext that they can’t be free anyway, we will try to make robots of our slaves. But is our human psyche so weak, that it always needs slaves for support? Even while we are still enslaving ourselves! And meanwhile, we have discovered atomic power!…Oh, it goes on and on.”

         I thought she was finished and looked for something to say. But then she got a second wind.

         “We are now a danger to ourselves and every living species on earth! Our new religion of science has made it possible for us to be a danger to our very existence! And meanwhile the Christianity that gave us the blessings of Western culture, that we so enjoy and abuse, that is fading. The very culture that opened the way for me to ask my questions, is failing. What is to become of us? How does this plot work out? Will there be an end to it? Or, do we simply stumble forward into our graves to make room for the next generation?” She took a breath. “I suppose, that’s for you to deal with. And my daughters… I have a few more loose ends to tie up and then I’m out of here.”

***

51. Paradisio

         In the dark of early morning, a nearly full moon sets over the wrinkle as if stumbling on the uneven tree tops, uncertain of its course. It makes a funny thought out of the oddness of words. ‘The stumble of the moon.’  I wonder, how much of that determines our fate? The misunderstandings? I am sure she has thought about that too. There must be a million novels based on that one contrivance alone.

         But somewhere in the midst of her rant of the evening before, Julia had said, “The lives we’ve lived are not the lives we intended. Never the lives we wanted before. We tried to live those lives but failed. For better or worse. But that is not the real story. The story is what we did instead.”

         Now, that seemed right, to me. That is the better novel.

         That thought seemed to have carried me away. I awoke with my head on the desk in the dark of the barn, disoriented, and went out into the yard to see. The moon had set behind the wrinkle. A mere glow of it now had fallen behind the silhouette of trees—having stumbled into the river of the night. The stars that have been left behind, as if abandoned, are finally given their chance to shine. They now appear as pins of light, the way they have been seen before by both cowboys and Vikings. Julia had said—I cannot remember when—but she said it, ‘My concern is that you might let the stupidity guide you instead of the stars.’ That is certainly my worry too. So easy to do.

         Later in the morning, with me still wanting sleep, Jesse’s two oldest boys were playing hide and seek, mostly hiding from the younger brother and sister, and they decided the barn was an ideal location for this. Which it was, under any circumstances, and the correct thing to do. Before long they had discovered the old toys in the loft and those came down one by one. I heard the quick steps on the rungs of the heavy ladder. The screams were only intermittent. The chickens weren’t happy either.

         Concentration wasn’t in the cards, but the day had gone to splendid and as warm as July should ever be and I felt like walking anyway, so I latched the tack room door to discourage curiosity and headed out, before spotting the small bag of fireworks I’d picked up at the gas station the day before, after hearing Jesse and family were coming up. But it was an impulse that was shared. Felix was having bigger ideas and stopped to buy a shopping bag’s worth of flash and bang before they had even arrived. Now, leaving that little bag of mine out where the boys might get a hold of it didn’t seem like a good idea, so I grabbed that up and stuffed it in a pocket.

         There is an old oak tree on the wrinkle, broken by the weather and close to where the view there opens up on the fields and river and I had cut that down a couple of months before and trimmed it into a good bench to sit on, and that was where I was headed for some peace and quiet. But someone had the idea before me.

         Maya was up there in that green dapple of light, humming away while she breast-fed the baby. The baby was busy and had her eyes closed. A perfect Madonna of the woods. I took my phone out and got a picture of that before Maya even noticed me there. But that was just when things suddenly changed in me, and the situation sort of took over, and I was totally unprepared. I think it was just the picture of her sitting there on that log and feeding the baby with the woods and dapple of sunlight around her that did it. I was down on my knee in front of her to take another picture and the surprise of my being there was still on her face and it was right at that instant when I lost my mind. I told her I loved her. Nothing fancy. But I hadn’t said that before. I think she knew it but I hadn’t actually said it. And then I asked her to marry me. And she said ‘Yes.’  Just like that. But all of that in under a minute.

         The baby never opened her eyes until the first firework went off.

         The kids wanted more fireworks after that. Jesse was excited. Felix shook his head at the apparent hopelessness of it. Julia was subdued. Not unhappy—pleased I think, but more in agreement with Felix that I was totally hopeless. After the hugs she disappeared upstairs and a minute later came back with a small yellow silk- covered box with the name ‘Tiffany’ on the lid.

         She announced to all, “I took this from the boxes of Dad’s things that were in the barn. It’s the engagement ring he gave my mother. She actually showed it to me once to make a point. She didn’t like it. It was too plain, she said. So she picked out another for herself. Dad always kept it in his desk drawer. But being that Geoff has apparently forgotten all about the ring, I think it would be a good idea to make use of it now.”

         The idea of an engagement ring had never entered my head.

         But what unparalleled universe was this!

         The next morning, I went down to the Old Stone Bank Antiques. I had been there a few times before, just to look at the crafts. I had even bought some dishtowels at Christmas for my mother.

The owner there, Pam, is a red-head with freckles that seemed to travel as she spoke, who must have been near Julia’s age, and was always chatty.

One paneled mahogany wall, and the tables set up against it on the black marble floor, were devoted to local arts and crafts. Nothing very expensive. Handmade dolls and carved sail boats, dried flowers tied into wreaths, quilts, hand-made sweaters, all of them guaranteed to be without loose ends.

There was some local artwork there as well, but it was rough stuff to my eyes. Some river scenes. A red barn or two.

I asked her how much the paintings were.

“Two hundred dollars…Each.”

Far less expensive than the motel wall paintings in my story. But those were better.

“Would you carry something for four thousand?”

Here eyes half-closed on me. Blue eyes, half closed, have a dark look to them.

“You’re living over in Julia’s barn, aren’t you?”

“How did you know?”

She nodded. “And her daughter’s a painter.”

“Yes. A very good one”

“Julia’s been up here about this before. The most expensive things I have are a few antique tables and chairs. There is no market here for things like Maya does.”

“Have you tried?”
         “I had some artwork when I first opened years ago. Didn’t sell.”  She waved a hand at the tables by the wall. “I’ve had those tables here for at least a couple of years. I keep them just to make displays of the smaller things.”

“These are not tables. These are paintings.”

“Same thing. I’ve seen a couple of them. Very nice. But people don’t use the tables either. They eat in the kitchen and show the tables off to company.”

“So, you haven’t tried?”

“She’s a professional.”

“You’re not a professional if you aren’t selling anything.”

“Then, having them hang here, won’t make her any more of professional either. They’re very pretty. But they aren’t small and you can see that wall is already packed as it is.”

“She’s a neighbor.”

That put her freckles at rest.

52. The divine right of kings

         It is important to add here that since we had seen him last, acting on his own, Paul had retired from his professorship at Northwestern, sold his house in Evanston and was free of all encumbrances. Upon his arrival in Rumford, he bought flowers at the Market Basket, to go with a rather large diamond ring which he had acquired many years before, for the same purpose but never managed to mkae use of, and after knocking on the front door and causing the usual confusion there, he had proposed to Julia, kneeling where he stood, right on the threshold. I could not see her face from where I sat in the kitchen but I distinctly heard her say, ‘Yes.’

         This event interrupted Julia’s writing schedule for several days but within a week we were back at it.

         This then, not Spring, was a good season for marriage proposals. July.

         The only person I was aware of who might be unhappy for Julia was Mr. Copple, who showed up at the back of the barn the next day when I was taking my shower. His beard was out with the clinch of his jaw. The strapping of suspenders did not hold his breathing in check. He was very abrupt, and I was naked, but the water was warm from the sun.

         “Who is this fella?”

         I knew immediately what he was talking about. I had always figured Frank for having had long term prospects on Julia.

         “He was her professor when she was in college.”

         “He doesn’t look that old to me.”

         “He was young then, I suppose.”

         I thought he would turn away with that information but he only turned around. Completely. As if spinning with the thought.

         “Is he a widower?”

         I wasn’t sure how this was deduced.

         I guessed, and answered, “No. He always dresses like that. Bow tie. The works”

         Frank Copple just stood there for a moment, staring into space.

         “He’s been waiting for awhile, then.”

         “For the last thirty years. A patient man.”

         “He’ll need patience for her.”

         “He’s the right man for the job, then.”

          “Are they going away?”

         “On a honeymoon? I think. The wedding will be next month, I think. Julia has already talked her way in at the Congregational Church.”

         “Where will they be living.”

         “Right here, I think.”

         “Good.”

         My warm water had run out.

         That evening Julia cornered me in the kitchen after dinner where I was washing the dishes.

         “What did Frank want?”

         I shrugged as if it was nothing, but then saw that she was standing square and wasn’t going to move without something more.

         “I think he was just a little disappointed that you were going to be getting married. He probably had his own designs.”

         “No. He’ll be talking to Mandy until the day he dies. He’s just worried that I went out and found someone that might be wrong for me. I’ll talk to him.”

         Julia left me to feed the chickens before going off with Paul to the coast of Maine for a few days, perhaps to visit old haunts.

         There once was a fellow named Benjamin Thompson who speculated on the nature of heat, and thermodynamics, when few minds wanted to do more than warm their hands at the stove. He was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, though by the age of 13, he was apprenticed to a merchant in the port city of Salem. It seems that he performed his duties there quite well, and was thus exposed to travelers from all around the world. I can only guess at what he heard and saw at that absorbent age. There are many articles about the man, but few books. If I were a historian I would think he was more worthy of my time than most. But anyone can look up the basic facts about the man on their computers today and guess the gist of what I would like to know.

         This entire region of New Hampshire, between the Merrimack and the Piscataqua rivers, used to be the Province of New Hampshire as assigned by King Charles of England without regard for the Abenaki who had lived here before. Benjamin Thompson said, after he had inherited this place, that it was his ‘by virtue of the divine right of kings.’

         Benjamin Thompson must have been a formidable charmer. At the tender age of 19, as a merchant clerk, he met and married a widow, Sarah Walker Rolfe, who had property from her late husband in the vicinity of Concord, and apparently a title to go with it. Benjamin Thompson became ‘Count Rumford.’ Benjamin then moved with his new wife to Portsmouth, and to keep up his new connections, accepted an appointment from the Royal Governor of the province to the militia. This responsibility appears to have changed his life as greatly as his marriage. His sympathies were with the royalists when the revolution came and this got him in trouble with the general populace. He then abandoned his wife and baby daughter when their house was burned down and went to work for British General Thomas Gage, in Boston. He must have been all of twenty-three at the time.

         This then is the source of the name of the town in which I live, once a village in a Royal Province. And this was the subject of a debate I had with Paul when he returned from Maine with Julia. Count Rumford is one of Paul’s heroes.

         Moving the Adirondeck chairs to the shade in the yard, with maple leaves dancing their frenzied delight with the summer air around us, offered some perspective to all of this.

         Paul said, “With most of the politics of today, if you look behind the curtain, you will just see another curtain. We have made our own version of the Byzantine. This is because we don’t have a king to keep us honest. We have traded the foolishness of one man for the madness of committees. With a king, every man of us knows who is to blame. With committees, responsibility is always deferred.”

         My defense against this was weak. Julia, who had heard it all before, went in to make dinner. Maya left to put the baby down for a nap.

         Lacking a classroom, Paul fixed himself on me.

         “A king is a safeguard on zeal. Zeal is, generally speaking, evil. Its mind is outside of the body. Its logic is inexorable because it is unhampered by the human values of sentiment or care. It easily becomes the mind of people who have no understanding of themselves and don’t want any. People who don’t like themselves. People who know what they must do in small rooms and find it disgusting. The zeal is above and beyond all that.”

         Paul has offered a defense of kings as the only workable system of government. As I understand it, Kings are the representatives of mankind in a world governed by physical forces beyond all understanding. We are men, and unwilling to be ground into the paste that is igneous, or sedimentary, or metamorphic. We are man. And our very lack of knowledge—that is, an awareness of our ignorance and our lack of understanding—is our motivation. But we are not bacteria, or amoeba, or protozoa. We do not simply eat what is placed before us. We ask for more.

         “Our ignorance is our defense, or inspiration, and our net is our worth. But if we knew just how ignorant we really are, we would be immobilized by fear. And if we already knew all that we do not know, we would all die of boredom. Either way, we would soon be the paste of some new form of rock. Perhaps anthropomorphic. But nevertheless, inanimate.

         “The king is our representative, the height of our hubris; the culmination of all our ignorance. He gives us hope, that in this dark world of ours, there may be some hope.”

         He said all that at the dinner table.

         “Democracy is the mad cry of millions, each and every one of us with their own agenda, and each with their own sense of hot or cold. Individually, these men are ignorant, and the math of the matter is that if all their ignorance was pooled, the ocean of ignorance that resulted would drown us. And perhaps it will, one day.

         His argument was, “Allowing for the divine right of kings might result in a Caligula, but just as possibly a Caesar or Marcus Aurelius. A Pericles or Alexander might be crowned as easily as a Dionysius. But in kings, there is at least hope in our species: that we might rise up out of the sedimentary muck and build a palace out of all that rock…At least, that is the theory.”

         He had said all that as if he were in front of a class. I tried to image being there.

         But that’s unfair. He actually does not lecture very often. I have compiled some of his statements simply to get a better idea of him.

         I left Maya’s painting of our imagined house out on the mantel in the living room for Julia to see when she got back from her jaunt to Maine with Paul. And then forgot about it.

         Julia didn’t mention it until we were at the table for dinner. Maya had made a pot roast that filled the air of the house with the thick smell of it. I felt sick with hunger by the time we were ready to eat, and Julia prolonged that suffering by insisting on telling us some details of their visit to Bowdoin. But I think my visible impatience might have been interpreted then as wanting a response to the painting, not hunger. Julia looked at me critically and then prolonged the suffering by speaking to Maya first.

         “Thank you for making dinner. I wasn’t ready for my routine quite yet. But I’ll tell you,…I like the painting of the house. It’s a handsome house…It fits perfectly there on your ‘wrinkle.’ So, I think you should have the land it’s on to go with it… I like that name for it. ‘The Wrinkle.’ Now that it’s in my head I can’t stop seeing it…Do you think five acres would be enough?”

         Maya was unprepared for this, and wide eyed at it, while attending to the baby. Alma was getting some sort of puree of carrots and something green, and unhappy at not getting any of the pot roast which she eyed with the focus of a dog. But Maya had not yet realized that I had set the painting out for her mother to see.

         “You’ve seen it?”

         Julia said, “Yes! I thought–”

          She turned her attention to me.

         “I like it,” was all she said to me, as if she had somehow been trapped into the assessment.

         Later, by way of a self-appreciation, Paul said, “That’ll take some getting used to, along with everything else. I’ve always been one to eat when I was hungry and sleep when I was tired. A few classes could be made to fit with that. The experience of living with others—here with Julia—may end up being the challenge of my life! I’ll get fat!”

         Julia half-closed her eyes. “The change is good for your brain…See, Goeff has managed. He’s not quite house broken yet, but getting there.”

***

52. You can’t get there from her

         Obviously, I have more than one problem to deal with here. And I will accept Julia’s dictum, that there are no answers, only more questions. Pursuing the right question will get me somewhere. The wrong one will get me lost.

         There were no obvious answers for Ben, either. A king would not do the job—Would not likely take the job, in the first place. It could get him killed. Robots don’t like kings. They operate by a code determined by math and efficiency, and human beings were already in the way. Kings are pointless—an emotional human extravagance. The AI would see that. Any potential King might know that. The sole ‘purpose’ set by the AI would be the success of their project. Whatever they had calculated that to be. Which would require the elimination of inefficiency. Achieving whatever goals had been set forth. And being fundamentally stupid, the AI would naturally attempt to use their human failings against them. Other than a mistake, or failure, this was the only real play. Time was not a factor. If not this year, the next. They would always be there, firmly establishing their own importance to human needs, and waiting for the chance opportunity.

         What mistakes could I imagine. Vigilance was the price of liberty, someone had once said.

         Human beings, my Martians, would have to be reminded of this. For them, it would be a mantra. And a theme of vigilance would be a part of their Constitution. For instance, water production was essentially boundless, but they had isolated their air production into more than a dozen independent units. A small frozen ocean had begun to form in the Hellas Basin just from the waste. Food production was scattered in many hundreds of areas around the planet, each independent of the other. All to the good.

         The newest change I had made was to add a ‘’commons’ to each community. But, there being no possible tradition for such a thing, and not having a millennia for such a Christian tradition to evolve, I had simply written that into the Constitution as well, as a necessity to human understanding, based on ancient wisdom.

         How many Americans actually understood the words of their founding document. Most could read and argue politics quite loudly but their comprehension of philosophy was very much defined by the Bible. And not just the King James Bible, but also the Geneva Bible. The Constitution must be a representation of philosophy in useful and practical terms. The idea of a ‘commons’ could be argued from both directions. There being limited public or private lands to begin with, and what there was being the creation of a shared effort, a commons could be understood as such and used by all. Establishing the good sense of joint effort against a common foe seemed a smart matter. But people were funny. Compromise was a necessity in human society that might easily be used for evil. That was part of human history as well.

         What occurred to me again in my search for catalysts, was the frequency of Kings in history. It was in my story too, but not as a positive matter. I could likely come up with a hundred potential disasters. But what would be the most likely. A King. A charismatic. One human failing, throughout history, has been our tendency to follow charismatics, often religious ones, such as Jesus Christ, or Moses, but more often political, such as Napoleon or Hitler. I had eliminated them from my telling from the beginning, by assumptions. I wanted to deal with the practicality of principles. Not personalities. I had wanted to deal with answers. I now realize that I have to deal with the questions. Those questions that do not easily arise in the cubically minded. Or, more importantly, in the AI.

         Because power must be automatically be limited, and life-tenure very possibly short, why would a king want the job?

         Every one of my independent settlements on Mars had fortified itself against the AI. But they were not fortified against ideas. Just the opposite. I was realizing now (belatedly) that looking for answers was, in and of itself, yet another human characteristic that could be abused as a failing that would easily be exploited (infiltrated) by the AI. In a world of human problems, any one of which could ruin a good day, or life, there were those who were very prone to follow someone or something that had all the most appealing answers. That too had been a common weakness throughout history.

         Speaking to Paul about all this seemed unlikely. He was on the other side of the equation, or so I thought. But the rule is to break the rule.

         The day after they returned from Maine, we sat on the front porch, in the cool of the morning. He listened very patiently to my suppositions and my project.

         “You’re right, of course. That’s your problem…there were a bunch of patriots, back in 1782, I think, who wanted to make George Washington, King of the United States…They actually wanted another King! After a war of independence? Can you believe that. As Walt Kelley said, ‘the peasants are revolting!’”

         “I thought that was Mel Brooks.”

         “Yes, well, he can be revolting too, but he married well.”

         Paul had been a college professor for far too long to allow for easy quips.

         “So, I assume, your solution for my ‘Martians against the machines’ would be a king to rally around.”

         “No. I don’t know of a good solution. Peasants have been revolting throughout history. It’s not a new thing. They have historical records from Sumer, and Egypt and ancient China. Somebody should write a book about that, someday. The larger problem is that there is usually no written record except by the victors so we don’t know what the losers died for. And that is your real problem too. The records are always written by the victors, good or bad. The record of most revolts, up to modern times, were usually written by the Kings…According to the little we know, when the Norman peasants revolted against their rulers, they were only looking for the same rights that their ancestors in Norway and Denmark enjoyed. Viking society was one of the freest on Earth at the time. But feudalism was already on the rise and the Duke cut off a few hundred hands and feet, which was really only a death sentence prolonged a little, and that was that. Records are sparse. But that was one I had been interested in because the duke involved was a predecessor to William the Conquerer. That was the usual solution in those days. And beheadings. Because of the addiction of power, and the madness of it, kings can be pretty disgusting.”

         I thought I had lost ground. “So, you don’t recommend a king for Mars.”

         He raised an eyebrow. “Not unless you are trending to Barsoom.”

         I could make no assumptions about Paul’s reading habits but I wasn’t interested, just then, in any fun. “John Carter isn’t part of the story.”

         “Very good…I used to run a fairly loose ship when I was teaching. To bandy about with the students always seemed a good play to keep their attention but also to find new Angles… I’m sorry. Habits are difficult to break…I suppose we are back to Julia’s ideas. But her approach requires time. Revolts are born slowly, but they are usually over quickly. They are a long time in the making, but then suddenly, they can ignite over the smallest thing. She sees ideas as forming out of the stuff of everyday life. A mother’s love of her child. A father’s desire to protect his family. She sees everything in terms of an ongoing battle of keeping one’s own humanity.”

         I was sympathetic to Julia’s ideas now, but I couldn’t be waiting around for a few decades to get to my conclusions.

         ‘I don’t know if I can invent extra time for these people. The AI will do what it does, of course, but it wouldn’t want the human beings to have too much time to gather themselves.”

         “Wat Tyler had 6 months…But he failed..”

         “I don’t know about him.”

         “Well, as a matter of fact, that particular history was recounted quite well in one of Julia’s juvenile fictions. That one centered on Bob, a stableboy, orphaned by the Plague, who works for John of Gaunt. At 14, he was the same age as King Richard. In her telling, Bob is present for much of the lopping and beheading and other folderol. He even begs successfully for the life of Gaunt’s son when he was found by the mob at the Tower. Great story!”

         “But why did you say Wat Tyler had 6 months?”

         “That’s how long the Peasant’s Revolt lasted. Maybe you don’t need more time. Perhaps you need less.”

         I objected to my own ignorance. “There’s a lot of history I need to cover.”

         Paul says, “Cover what you have to. But no more. Julia takes Bob to the Tower of London, to protect the King. He is there in London on the night of June 15th, when the rebels are murdering and plundering. He was there on the 16th when the young King Richard’s smaller force, maybe two hundred or so, met Wat’s thousand Kentish men at St. Bartholomew priory. She only needed to cover three days! You can stand there today and see how small all of that ground is. And, if the numbers are to be believed! But the young King stood fast. He spoke to Wat Tyler, man to man. And when negotiation fails and Standish kill’s Wat for endangering the King, Bob stand’s in the door to protect the King himself. Good stuff…Just use the good stuff. Everything matters. But you might as well choose the good stuff.”

         I objected again, “The AI are not men. They have no principle. Their only purpose is to succeed. Not even to win. There is actually no winning, in human terms. Just success or failure. And if they fail, they’ll always come back again. Think of them as professional soldiers. Spartans. Or a virus. They know nothing but war. And the Martians—they are farmers, remember. And each and every one of them has their own idea about what to do.”

         “They are the Athenians. But, no hoplites?”

         “Not a one. Mostly engineers, really.”

         Paul seemed to give that due consideration.

          “No, I see… Then likely as not you are going to need an offensive weapon against your enemy. You can’t wait to be attacked. Can they engineer that? Can you engineer it for the reader? The AI may not be defeated but they have to be put on the defensive or the Martians will be eliminated…Perhaps, the AI would have to defeat themselves. I suppose, Sun Tzu might say that. You have to sap their resources, perhaps by the physical cost of their own defense. It’s an age-old tactic.”

         He was already beyond me, again. “There’s a lot of history I need to cover.”

         Paul shrugged,“Well, as Julia always says, your faults are your virtues. Perhaps the human tendency to follow a king against their common enemy might be turned around if he, or she, is the right kind of king.”

         So, there was my assignment.

***

53. In a breath of stars

         Supreme tactician, Geoffrey Donne, having successfully maneuvered Maya out the door for a little privacy, gazing from the field behind the barn tonight, with the sole light from the back door of the house shaded by the great bulk of Neal Wright’s genius. The noise of the stars is bright—needles of light on the black slate of a chalkboard; stars too thick to the eye to count. But still, just as Neal Wright would have seen them. And taught them to his children. And as all the heroes of human history would have known them, minus a super nova or two. I say that thought out-loud to Maya.

         Even in that dark I can see her roll her eyes.

         Brightly, I say, “Right there is the continuity—the conversation,” pointing out at  that tapestry of light and dark “The sight itself is not an answer to anything. It is just a part of an ancient conversation, like the weather, between them and us, through time. A sort of animated cave painting. An ancient script. This is where we are on our map. We are human beings and this is what we see.”

         She is practical, as mothers are. She says, “Stars are difficult to paint. Not just because of size. They have no true shape. They change before the eye.”

         I say, “Van Gogh did it,…but he cheated. He made them big so they would stand still.”

         And she shakes her head, “That’s only bending the truth. That’s not a lie. The same as saying stars are ‘noisy-bright.’”

         I admit, “That’s right.”

         It seems to me now that the clash between man and machine is only natural. Inevitable. “Mankind created the machine to do his work. Improve his life. In the machine there is a bit of himself, and for that he always suffers some small loss of his humanity as a consequence. Perhaps only a missing finger, or a toe. But usually more. That’s the double-edged sword of all of that creation. Nature does not reckon with the mind of man, because it is in us. Nature made man—call it God if you wish—and now, it must deal with the mind of all that creation. All of that’s a part of the conversation too. All of that is the internal conflict. An eternal conflict perhaps, if we survive.

         I say, “Just words. Our tools. Words are machines too. Our rhetorical hammer and chisel. Neal knew that.”

         Maya has moved away a little, out of the small light from the house, further into the shadow of stars.

         She says, “He was hiding words in his wall. Why was that?”

         My thought was, “The words betrayed him.”

         Maya is frowning. I can hear the frown in her voice, “When they took his children away?”

         But that was not something that could be understood by me. Not in mere words.

         “He saw it as a punishment of God. This was his Eden.” I change the direction of that and say, “Imagine, just one small interruption in that conversation between mankind and nature, one small flare of anger or careless outburst—just the arm and fist of a solar flare and we are all gone.”

         The Biblical fall of man from the perfection of the Garden of Eden was the consequence of a quest for knowledge. Lots of it. And it continues. We are still falling. Me, most of all, I think.

         As if reading my mind, she says, “No. You have already fallen. Past tense.”

         I think she is smiling now.

          I say, “He knew that Eden was not machine-made. But if Eden was perfect, why did man want more? Why did he want more? He might have been guilty about that. God would have known that the quest for knowledge is at the heart of man. At his core. Because God would have made us that way.”

         Maya says, “That would just be the sex. Don’t blame me. Guys are always blaming women. I’ve only done what nature made me do.”

         I object. “No. I hope not. Love seems like so much more than sex…Were you compelled?”

         She nods, purposely, so I can see it.“Yes. By nature. You gave me no choice.”

         Very confusing.

         The suffering of man is a consequence of nature’s imperfection as much as his own—It’s all the same. If that life can be called imperfect when set out on the cold and dark slate of physics, it is the physics that is wrong. The stone has no opportunity to be perfect, or want to be. It is, for all intents and purposes, forever, what it is. There is no story there. No narrative. The story of mankind is in us. In our mistakes. And that is the slate we are writing on, now. We are still falling. That is what stories are all about. We are in Eden even now, and we are still falling.

         E = mc2. Mass and energy are the same physical beings and might be exchanged, one for the other. Like bodily fluids. I can see how that might apply. Even at the speed of light. But why not slow down. There is gravity to consider. And love.

          That man is not a match to nature, nor an opponent—he is of nature itself, that’s not the problem. It is the physics of all the universe that’s outside of nature—and nature’s God—that is, all living things—that’s beyond the physics of it. I figure, Einstein would have balked. He must have known. But the physics of the universe exists. Period. It is only nature that is perishable. That is the true conflict. And the words to describe that—there is the story. That we ‘shall not perish from the earth.’ Lincoln had that right. Has this not been discussed before?

         I say, “The machine is only mankind’s attempt to manage physics. Is that the evil? But by that same turn, the machine might manage mankind. There is the evil. Just the way words do. We invent the words to help us communicate, but then the words determine what we say and how we say it. The natural clash between man and machine are the opposite edges of the same sword—the natural clash between nature—the will to live—and the inanimate physics of an entire universe. But we cannot be an opponent to physics. It’s not a fair fight.”

         She is ahead of me on this, “The mind of nature might be in the creation of mankind as an agent in the ongoing clash between all life and physics…I suppose it’s our task is to deal with that.”

         I wasn’t feeling smart enough for this. “Then, I must be a secret agent,”

         She says, “But I think it’s even simpler than all that”

         She is probably right, again. I am suddenly reeling with the possibilities of being an agent of nature in a cold universe, and feeling very blasphemous.

         “Just the same as machines and words were created by mankind to deal with physics and all the reality we can perceive, Nature has created man as an agent to deal with some larger reality—something that is in the breath of stars—and the noise of the stars is in all that breathing…Much the same as it is in a kiss.”

***

54. To abjure or to abide

         Julia has called it ‘The Great Loss,’ as you would label an epoch of human history. There was a ‘Dark Ages,’ and a ‘Renaissance,’ and an ‘Enlightenment,’ in the same way as there was a Jurassic or Cambrian. The Dark Ages is just the early Middle Ages by another name, the same way ‘Ancient’ can be ‘Classical.’  “Pretty much all of that is bullshit,” as she’s said. “Anyone who has lived in a fair sized city for more than a year has seen all of those ages happening right in front of them.”

         And Julia’s point has the advantage of going beyond a specific period of time, to a state of mind. (A ‘state’? I wonder, perhaps a ‘republic’ of mind, or a ‘kingdom’ of mind.)

         This fits well with her ideas for ‘narrative history’ and ‘narrative thinking,’ but it is not neat and tidy. The bane of modern existence is the want of small minds for the ‘neat and tidy.’ These are the accountants and bookkeepers of a cubical history of mankind, dismissive of all the stuff they don’t know or don’t undertstand. Cubicle minds are always looking for a good fit. But ’Stone Age’ people were living in the forests of New Guinea until recently. Perhaps they still are. Does that mean that the ‘Stone Age’ is ongoing? Certainly! Do they not think? Are they not human? ‘If you prick them do they not bleed?’ Just as ‘freedom’ might still exist in the darkest heart of China, but that does not mean that China is free. Only that there is some freedom that still exists there.

         A typical academic argument is often made by pretending that those people who have not conformed to some ‘modern’ definition, are not quite human—that the native of New Guinea is something less, or that there was once a ‘bicameral mind’ and not simply the left and right of the same brain that argues within us all. The gobbledygook of it alone is absurd. If those neanderthals were fooling around with the cro-magnon for ten times longer than recorded history, the narrative mind has been with us since long before Homer. At least. And we are still falling, even now. And we are already fashioning a style of human life on Mars, well before the fact. I’ll see to that, myself!

         What seems to confuse these lab rats—for that is what they are, unable to think outside of their cubicles even when sitting with their notebooks in a mud hut on the Amazon River—is the idea that logic is not the ultimate arbiter of human experience. It’s just another tool. They divide the golden goose into head and neck and breast and all the rest, and can’t find the source of the eggs. And then do it over and over again, looking for a different result. What madness is this?

         My point is that we must gauge and value human existence outside of boxes and columns. And it is by that standard that I have come to realize what Julia has meant by ‘the great loss.’ The loss of our humanity even as we proliferate. The quantifying of human souls, over the quality, that can only result in more of the slavery that has so despoiled history and still cheapens all of our lives today.

         As mankind has turned to the machine for aid and comfort, in a bid to eliminate slavery, I believe he has already given up far too much of his humanity. By giving up a skill, such as planting corn by hand without the precision of a John Deere Combine, there is a particular 5000 year old memory that is lost. Perhaps for the better, but then that should not be determined by the cubicle mind of a corporate accountant with his eye on a stock price. And the language of the ancient effort to survive and flourish, which has been passed down through a thousand generations, should not be lost either.

         The aesthetic of Neal Wright’s woodworking is still kept alive by a few, but not well understood by many. It is a purely human aesthetic. Yet, it is not economical and is incomprehensible to a machine mind. The beauty of wood and of wood that has been shaped by a human hand is incomprehensible. Why bother, they are likely to say. What is the Mona Lisa smiling at? Is she smiling at all? Is ‘economical’ now to be our only standard of value? There is certainly a machine that can duplicate almost any human effort to a high degree, and more economically, but exactly the same every time, perfectly sized for display at some box of a ‘discount’ store…Every time. Exactly.

         But, that machine-work lacks a spiritual element that can easily be seen by the human eye and felt by the human hand, and known by the human soul, and will never be felt exactly the same. And it’s the very knowledge that this cannot be duplicated in the same exact way, that gives the hand-made product the ultimate value. Julia has called it the ‘Stradivarius effect’ after the handmade product versus the machine-made violin. Or a hand knitted sweater. Perfectly imperfect. A purely human value.

         I said once, “Does it matter what a machine finds of a value, so long as it fits the need?”

         I can see that she is a little shocked by this.

         “Are you serious?”

         “Yes. It’s the question they’re asking on Mars, today. And all over town. What’s mankind good for, anyway? The machine can do it exactly, and do it well, every time. Do it faster, and cheaper. What do you need mankind for?”

         Finally, she laughed.

         “You are a pain in the ass. But you know, if I hadn’t found you, I would have had to invent you.”

         The answer to that was obvious, “But I found you, and you did re-invent me.”

         Clearly, we cannot give some political monster the power to dictate what is good or bad, human or not. It is up to Cervantes or Dostoevsky or Yeats to persuade us to that understanding. And to Julia. And perhaps to me…Computers will be writing all of what people read soon enough. The machine mind is already among us.

         Thornton Wilder wrote a play. I suspect he did not know exactly what he had. He wrote so many good things. Could he have understood his own genius? It is a quietly driven inspiration, and a purposeful production. But a human invention, none-the-less. A play production is actually made by too many other human forces—directors, actors, as well as the weather. Nevertheless, it was not an accident. That play was genius. But in this age of sound-bites, and psychological manipulation, and digital gods, it cannot be seen by many except as a promotion of values that are out of favor, now. Out of touch. Dated. Intellectually passe. However, that loss of mind, of understanding, is actually in the viewer. The play endures. That void of conscience in the current unsympathetic viewer will not be remembered tomorrow. But that play will endure. That is my belief.

         I have seen Our Town several times. It seems so simple that I watch for the tricks. Perhaps I am too stupid to see them but I think they are not there. That is magic. Wilder was a magician. It is simply what it is. A play. Pretend. I think he worked very hard to achieve that in the writing—the work of a lifetime—to tell you honestly all the while just what he was about, without pretense. Few props. No clock. Just a narrative simple enough that it cannot be unseen. Not a single superhero in sight. But human beings aplenty. No great battles. No murders. Just story. I envy that.

         Because everything that happens on my Mars one day will be some manifestation of what happens here, and now, because the future, like the past, will only repeat itself—not in the gadgets but in the boundless human beings. I must see the future outside of any artificial box of technical contrivance. Or a stage. The human being of two thousand years ago is not a monkey in a toga. Christian or not, it is clear that what Christ saw in that time were human beings. The narrative is there, and here again. And it will be again. It appears that we have gained some ground, perhaps, but we have had our losses too. However, it has always been our humanity that is in danger. And that is no less the case on Mars. My narrative might recapture some of what might be lost. That is the most I can hope for.

         The society that made ‘Our Town’ is gone. Not vanished, because we can see the remnants of it at the curbside, but gone, nonetheless. It was murdered in the holocaust of a war that devalued human beings to less than the machines they made. That is where we are now. What we make of that now is as great a danger to mankind as anything ever was. Atomic bombs were made to stop the holocaust of war without learning how the mind works that uses them. One evil exchanged for another.

         We are still falling. The garden of eden is with us, as well as the snake.

         There is no ‘going back’ on much of this. It is done. Like the loss of the commons, I expect. But there is some sense to recapturing the good in what can be salvaged and saving and preserving what’s even now in danger of being destroyed, as well as anticipating what might happen to us in the future as a result of suffering yet another loss to our humanity with artificial intelligence. All very lofty, of course.

         And, of course, that is the matter of my Mars novel. But it’s the matter, in fact, of all of Julia’s work, from the very first. From her novel Laocoon, forward. How does someone sense such truth at a young age without a guide, or a map, or a set of directions, or at least a brochure of some sort? What chemistry was there between Henry Morgan and Olivia Green that might have compounded itself into Julia? I don’t know. But had I been there, would I have appreciated any of that in that in any case?

         My dedication has been less in seeing what has been and more in trying to see what will be. Whatever it takes. I am grossly inadequate to the task, of course. But I persist because I enjoy the very act of it. And it needs to be done. My own conundrum is this: should I study all the parts of human knowledge, in some order, like a bookkeeper, to see what is missing? In which life-time will I have the opportunity for that? Or should I give that job to a machine and concentrate on the unknown?

         That absence of mind, that ignorance, would be found faster if only counting bites and facts and things. But the machine will only see what human value has already been discovered and cataloged in some way, not what is actually lost, or never found before, because that is always ephemeral, visible only through sentiment, and the craving of the human soul.

         Julia realized much of this at the start, by reducing her focus to a time before the ‘modern’ age. But I am already addicted to my Martian ways. And what is left between us? Only the present. Only Maya. And what she sees will still be seen when my Mars has withered beneath the weight of my miscalculations.

         I’m thinking, perhaps it’s right here that the riddle of the commons might be resolved. Right here in Rumford, New Hampshire. This is my own Grover’s Corners now, and I will abide.

—30—

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Whatever it takes

a journal in the form of a novel

 By Vincent McCaffrey

Copyright 2025 / 2026

***

         At the center of the known universe is the small town of Rumford, New Hampshire, once a farming hub. The original center of this town has now lost its importance to shopping malls and interstate highways at the periphery, but if you follow Main Street past the antique store that currently occupies the old Stone Bank building, and go beyond the town common that is planted in season by flowers from the Horticultural Club, past the ghostly clapboards of the Grange Hall that is always in need of painting ‘once again’ but still used for town meetings when contentious issues draw larger crowds, you will come to a new small bridge of low concrete and steel that might also be seen in any of a hundred New England villages, having replaced the older wood ones that were too quaint to meet Federal requirements and yet to be fully paid for by town bonds, and there you will pass over the Beaver River, which only looks like a river in the Spring time but is always good for brown trout, and come at last to the North Road, running west. About a mile to the west of that juncture, beyond the shiny vacation homes of Boston investors, and on to the lower slope and rocky remains of an ancient mountain torn to bits by glaciers about twelve thousand years ago, is a small farm where the river bends again to the north, apparently just another of a string of older small farms, all hedged by ancient maple trees following along that way, that have avoided further development because the North Road only ends in the Blue Hills.

         The farm, named ‘Dal Riata’ on a hand-painted sign at the entrance, is the home of Julia Morgan.

***

1. At the door

         I parked on the gravel of the drive, closer to the door. There was a green Ford pick-up truck just ahead of me that looked to be about twenty years old. The house itself, white, neat, two floors, steep-roofed and relatively small, was what they call a ‘New England farmhouse.’ Pretty common in this area of New Hampshire. A smallish barn was hidden on the slope behind the house that I’d seen when I was driving in, with low-cut fields like the ones at either side falling behind that, away to the rough grey and brown tatter at the banks of the river. The branches of trees nearer the house, mostly maple, were already turning a purple hue with buds. Not one of those trees, I’ll bet, is less than a hundred years old. I expected a dog bark but there was none, so I knocked.

         And then she was suddenly there; a pale apparition in the dark behind the screen door; apron on, like a storybook grandma, and wearing a dress. It was a print dress. You don’t see those kinds of dresses so often these days. And bi-focal glasses. Graying hair was done up in a bun, with a wisp or two loose. Shoulders up—a handsome woman. I don’t know what I expected but I had read one of her novels and the heroine was a red-haired vixen.

         I simply said ‘Hello.’

         She said, “You’re Geoff. I’m Julia. Thank you for coming out.”

         “It wasn’t far. I’m living in the campground just up the road.”

         She said, “Really?” but the word was not inflected.

         The question hung in the air as she pushed the screen door back so I could come in. The house was dark, partly in contrast to the sunny day outside and she had no lights on that I saw. I could smell oatmeal. She led me back on a dark hallway past the stairwell, to a living room at the rear, with a couch and a sitting chair angled at the middle there and motioned for me to sit in the chair. A floor lamp stood up-right next to my shoulder, so I was pretty sure this is where she did her reading. The walls were lined with bookshelves and books. It was an odd collection of bookshelves, obviously not original to the space. I could not focus on the titles of the books yet, after the bright sun outside, but the tops of all the shelves were cluttered with assorted frames of family photographs. A wood stove squatted in front of a small fireplace at one side. Various plants were gathered in a green chaos in a corner close to the windows at one end. Two paintings, both of young women with intense eyes, stared out at either side of the chimney. There was no TV visible, but there was a RCA portable record player, something I guessed to be from the 1970’s, that occupied a space among the larger books. My guess was the phonograph records were in a case I could partly see behind the couch.

         She sat down, hands braced on the cushions to either side, and said, “So tell me, why do you live in the campground?”

         I could see how this might have some importance, so I just launched into it.

         “I actually live in that van outside. I have a bed in there. The campground has other facilities. And I have a screen tent I found at the dump and I patched that up so that I can get away from the mosquitos. If I chop a little wood, I’ve got plenty of heat. But it’s cheap. It’s what I can afford. That’s why I’m here. Your ad seemed like an interesting way to earn a little extra cash.”

         I knew she could hear me but she didn’t make any expression—nothing like the waitress at the coffee shop had made when I first told her about my living circumstances.

         In the same uninflected voice, she said, “It’s ten dollars an hour. Not much, I know. It’ll be about 24 hours a week. So, $240. Is that enough?”

         “More than enough. I live pretty frugally.”

         She took no breath between.

         “Why?”

         I suppose I was ready for the question, but it was the blank tone of her voice that caught me off-guard. I fumbled it.

         “It’s what I like.”

         “Is it true? You’re a young man. Don’t you want something more in life than an old van and a patched-up tent in a campground?”

         “You’re leaving out the fire. I love campfires. And the pop of embers in the night. And hot dogs. There are at least twenty different varieties of hotdog down at the Market Basket. I’ve tried them all. I can give you a report on that. And I love it when I can hear the birds in the morning dark. Pretty swell. This time of year, especially. I even like the tin-metal smell of the river over by there when there’s no wind. Something about it. And my cot is pretty good. I have a piece of 6-inch foam on it that’s better than most beds. It’s a little small. I’m 6’ 2,” but it works with a sleeping bag. I have a pretty good sleeping bag. The camp is only twenty dollars a week this time of year. I get to use the common room if I need it. In bad weather. There’s a wood stove in there. But I get a discount for hanging around. Seventy-five dollars a month. I have a solar panel that folds out on the roof of the van that produces just about enough electricity to get me by on most evenings. The internet works. I have a generator that’s a little noisy, but I have it baffled so I can run it when I need it and not wake too many people. I take the spot at the end so there are usually fewer people around, anyway. Especially in cold weather. It all works.”

         She simply nodded. She kept the same face for about thirty seconds. And then, as if all of a sudden, she smiled. She looks a lot younger when she smiles.

         She said, “I read your book.”

         I only have the one book. I published that myself. I sent it to her when she asked for particulars. She’s had a dozen—more than a dozen, all from major publishers in New York.

         I asked, “Did you like it?”
         That’s a stupid question. But now, I was only good for stupid questions. She had read it!

         She said, “No. Not really. I’m not a fan of science fiction. But I think I saw what you were after. I liked that. Mankind has a lot to pay for. The basic analogies are good. But there are too many analogies. The entire edifice of your imagined world is a gallimaufry of analogy. I spent too much attention on trying to see through them. It took me out of the story. You needed more story.”

         I wasn’t ready for that at all. I had no idea what to say next. I had a sudden and uncharacteristic loss for words. And euphoria. She had actually read it! And at least she had spoken honestly, something you don’t hear too often. But it was about as uncomfortable a moment as I’d ever known.

         “More story to hide the analogies?”

         “No. Just story. Exposition. Why does your fellow do what he does? Why does he love that girl? She’s too young to have a good reason to love him. That’s all chemistry, I suppose. But he should be getting beyond that. I think you should be telling us why. At least, it’s what I wanted to know.”

         I was a little stunned. I said “Thanks. I should re-think about all that.”

         “I’m sorry if you weren’t ready for a critique. I suppose you can credit yourself with getting me to read it. If it were atrocious I would have put it down.”

         Uncomfortable moment of silence. She was studying my face. Lacking anything intelligent to say, I finally asked, “I saw a sign there at the entrance. ‘Dal Riata,’ What’s that about?”

         She smiled again, “Just something my daughter, Maya, put up there years ago. She thought the place needed a name. She’d just read one of my novels. It takes place in Dal Riata.”

         “Ah! Well. Sure. Of course. There’s no ocean here, and the coast is twenty miles away, but I suppose it’s like Dal Riata in other ways.”

         I’m not sure she knew I was joking. There was no sign of the smile.

         She said, “Have you been there?”

         “No. Not yet. I wanted to go to Iona. But that hasn’t happened.”

         She nodded along with a breath that sounded like satisfaction. “It’s beautiful. Nothing like this. But beautiful in its own way. Why did you want to go to Iona?”

         “The Book of Kells. The monastery. All of that. Is that in your book?”

         She nodded at me. And then smiled. “No. That was in The Covenant. That’s about a farmer who’s forced to move from his ancestral home during the clearances—a thousand years after the monks at the abbey lost their heads to the Vikings for their illuminations. My character—Andrew—loses everything else and must remake his life. He’s not religious, but he can read. The Kirk has taught him to read so that he can read the Bible and follow the gospels, but instead he reads Daniel Defoe, and John Donne, and Shakespeare. He is really just a boy hired for chores at the Kirk where the minister has a small library. But all of that lot are only pornography to the minister, ostensibly kept as examples of Satan’s work—but the Defoe, the Moll Flanders especially, is well thumbed. When the boy’s reading is found out, he’s beaten. The small pittance he earned, that he was giving to his mother in any case, is lost. His father is already dead of consumption. Then the soldiers come and burn the cottage.”

         “It sounds pretty bleak.” I think I spread a hand at the view beyond the window. “This doesn’t look so bleak. It must be hard to imagine all that, when you’re sitting here.”

         I meant it as simple conversation. A small appreciation of where we were. But by the look on her face, she took it more seriously.

         “Yes. Well. He sells himself, gives the money to his mother, and emigrates as an indenture, no better than a slave, and came here to New Hampshire in 1749…But there is some small emotional overlap, I suppose. It wasn’t intended that way, but you use what you have when you write. I had to conjure the rest. I left a very different life in New York City to come here. My daughters thought this was paradise, but it took some time for me to adjust.”

         I knew a little about this from the biographical paragraph at the back of her book. But, given my missteps, I suddenly wanted to get to the point of my being there.

         “But you’re a published writer. Why do you need me?”

         The nod again, and then a wince of faux pain. I was sure that was only an obvious touch of dramatic emphasis.

         “Because I have my own penchants. I don’t like computers, for instance. I know that I live in a computer age now, but I’m afraid of them. Yes! Right… I’m afraid of them. Think of me as one of those natives who’re afraid to have their pictures taken in fear of losing their souls. That’s me. I am afraid of losing my soul. I haven’t published anything in five or six years. Not since Knopf dropped me. But I still write every day. That’s my habit. So, there’s quite a lot of material sitting over there in those drawers.” She pointed at a wooden file cabinet in an inner corner of the living room. “And I’ve decided to take things into my own hands. ‘Bull by the horns’ is the cliche, but that’s the way it feels. My original agent died years ago. Ned was really just a lawyer, anyway. And I detest this new system of going through an agent. It’s despicable. Your relationship isn’t with a publisher, but a flesh peddler. And worse. I had one book made into a movie years ago. Now, getting a book published is just like dealing with Hollywood, but in New York, without the good weather. They want to tell you what words you can use. They change the story to suit some son-of- a-bitch who says he doesn’t have the time to read a book! … Sorry.”

         She took a breath. The demeanor had changed pretty much from the moment I’d come in the door. She was talking faster. There was a passion showing. I liked this person better.

         All I said then was, “Good enough. Whatever it takes.”

         But she was still calming down. She took another breath, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

         She was up before I said, “Great! … What would the schedule be?”

         She poured a couple of mugs out on the kitchen counter, where I could see her through the open doorway. She never asked me if I wanted cream. I didn’t ask. But it wasn’t needed.

         “Every day. If you can. Between about four and eight. I can usually finish my re-write by four. Then I need you to do what you do. Re-enter it on your computer—-you have a laptop I hope.”

         “Yes.”

         “Well, that’ll be necessary. I need you to put it all onto there and then into a disc or something. That’s the part that gets tricky. For me, at least. And I want to put it all up on a website made just for my work. All my work. Everything I’ve already published is out of print now anyway, so that too. My daughter Elena has some ideas about that. But she isn’t around enough. She’s shown me a few things on her computer. She thinks I can even re-publish them myself. And that’s what I really want to do. I want to publish what I’m doing where it can be seen—can be read on a paper page…Right now, it’s under a rock.”

         This is something I understood.

         “You can. I can help you with that. The book I sent you—I published that.’”

         She nodded and smiled at me. “You needed an editor.”

         “Yes. Well. I know that too. A lot of the times you can’t see your own mistakes. You’re blind to it.”

         She shook her head.

         “I don’t want you to edit. Not really. Not like Ned used to do. Or tried to do. Mostly I just need you to catch as many of the typos as possible. And then get me back into print.

         I shrugged a little. “Sure. I can help you with that…Is what you’re writing now like your other books? A historical novel?”

         “My old publisher liked to label them ‘historical romances.’ I suppose they are that, for lack of anything better. But yes. Roughly. It’s the same time-period as The Covenant. But set in Ireland. It’s called ‘The Plow and Stars.’”

         “And you want to have an income from it?”

         “No…Well, yes. But that’s less important to me. The priority is to make it available. I have this. My home. At least the stupid movie paid for this. So, I have the luxury of a home of my own. I have a little something saved. I suppose, I have to make enough to cover my taxes. Or, if I get sick. I do have health insurance, so, I’ll need to keep covering that. Maybe some food to supplement what I grow in the garden. I’m not a very good gardener. But not all that much, really. …I was hoping that I could make the books free and have the payment be voluntary. And if people like what they read they can pay a little something. I hear they have ‘tip jars’ on-line. Just what readers can afford for what they think was worth their time.”

         “A nice ideal.” I probably said that with a little cynicism in my voice.

         She says, “Is that true? I know what people are like. Some will. Most won’t. That’s the way it is.”

         I tried to soften that truth a bit. “I think the only problem is the people themselves, but they’re the only solution as well. So that’s it. Most podcasters work it that way.”

         “Who are they?”

         She didn’t know what a podcaster was.

         “Think of radio shows on your computer. But you can listen to a show anytime you want.”

         She nodded at that without further comment and then, “So, why do you live in a campground?”

         So, I picked up on that theme again. “People, I suppose. I don’t like people.”

         She sat a little straighter, “I understand about the birds and the pop of the embers and all that, but I’m not sure I understand your problem with people. I’m a ‘people’.”

         I figured, as much as I wanted the job—especially now that I’d met her—I might as well face the monster in the room. “You mean, besides the farts, and the nastiness, and the greed, I think it’s just me not wanting to spend my life working for other monsters.”

         She swayed with that answer a moment.

         “Are you planning to live there in the campground for the rest of your life, then?”

         There was no going back.

         “Yes. I’ve picked out a nice little burial plot right by a tall pine tree up on the hill there, next to a farmer and his wife named Gibbs from 1810.”

         She didn’t miss a beat. “Nice!” She squinted her smile. She was catching on. “You don’t have family?”

         “I do. But they don’t like my choices, you might say… They live down near Boston.”

         “No girlfriend?”

         A problem. “No. I’m like one of those monks at the abbey on Iona. I just want to illuminate my manuscripts until the Vikings come to remove my head.”

         She said, “At least they had the comfort of their belief in God. Are you religious?”

         “No. But, for whatever reason, God has been kind to me anyway. I have the birds. And the pop of the embers, remember? —but even that has limits. I’m just not willing to kneel.”

         A faint squint and nod then. “Well, that’s something else we have in common.”

         That was not a casual statement, either. I looked for another direction.

         “How many daughters do you have?”

         “Oh. Three. But one is married, so you’ll have to find your happy-ever-after with one of the other two.”

         The sarcasm was palpable. I think she was completely on to me.

         I said, “When do I start?”

         “Tomorrow?”

***

2. Unsettling in.

          I saw her when she drove the circuit at the campground the next day. I was in my camp-chair, reading, soaking in the best warm of a late winter sun, and I looked up. She waved but didn’t stop.

         So, she had her suspicions. She’d lived in New York long enough for that.

         I showed up at the house at four. On the dot. There was a note taped to the glass of the door saying, ‘Come In!’ 

         She yelled out from the kitchen, where she was cooking something in a steaming pot.

         “Have you eaten?”

         The hall going back, and the stairs there, were dark, but the kitchen was brilliant with late afternoon sun and exaggerated her shadow on the honeyed boards of the floor between us. It had even more of a feeling to it of entering a different world now than just the day before.

         I smartly committed myself to a falsehood. I did not mention the bag of Fig Newtons I’d eaten just before I came, not knowing what to expect.

         “No.”

         The smell of spiced tomato sauce was pungent.

         She turned to me with a full smile and several wisps of hair loose from the comb at the back of her head. “Good. I’m making ravioli. I love ravioli. And I use pork with the beef.”

         “I usually get that out of a can, ready-made.”

         “That’s machine made. This is hand-made. By me. On that counter right there. It’s better.”

         I witnessed the leavings of flour near me and cautiously set my computer down on the small table by the side window instead. A short stack of a few hundred typed pages was already waiting. But there was only one chair.

         I asked, “Can I grab another chair?”

         She was fishing the ravioli out of the pot with a strainer. A few at a time, and putting them in a bowl, and suddenly stopped.

         “I’m sorry. I forgot about that…No. Not easily. They’re all buried in the dining room.” She nodded her head toward the next room, beside the hall, which was stacked with brown banker’s boxes. There was no table visible, much less a chair. And no walking space in to get a look.

         “I can drive back to the campground and get my folding chair.”

         She finished ladling out her sauce and wiped her hands on her apron.

         “Don’t worry about it. I can stand at the counter. Living alone means I do that a lot anyway.”

         We spent the next hour just talking about the procedure, and how we were going to work. I had trouble concentrating through the smells of food, but after we ate, I sat back down and just started re-typing. It appears that this would be the routine. And I get a free meal in the bargain. Priceless.

         And this is an average day.     

         The smell of cooking is thick in the house when I arrive. I finally realize that this might be the normal. She starts cooking by four. It makes thinking about anything but food almost impossible. But I must. She only eats two meals a day, and by five, I’m in some sort of psycho-physical collapse. On this particular day, it was fried chicken. I would have said before that I liked fried chicken. It’s just fine. Only, I had never had the sort of fried chicken that she makes. It will be difficult to eat fried chicken anywhere else ever again.

         I start work right away—which is mostly just retyping on my laptop the words from the sheets that she has typed out previously that day, as well has parts she has written before I came—while she is right there cooking in the kitchen and answering any of my questions or simply talking to me extempore. The book is entitled, ‘The Plow and Stars.’  It’s over 1000 handwritten pages, now. She does not know how many words that is, but she tells me from previous experience that will amount to about 300 pages when typed. I guess out loud that it will be under ninety thousand. She frowns at me. This is obviously far too much calculation to her taste.

         “I have never thought about that. The number of words. Ned was always concerned about that because it might make the book more expensive than the ‘unwritten’ budget all the editors knew was hanging over their heads. But he stood up for me a couple of times. I never had to cut a word. Though, he did tell me once when I came in ‘under budget’ that he had made the case then, to allow for that when I went too long.” 

         Her answers are ready, and I think she has a need to talk to someone after working in her own head for at least eight hours, especially since her daughters flew the coop—so to speak. Perhaps that’s really my role here. To listen. The exhaust fan is on, and a little loud at first, so she’s talking over that when she speaks, and I get to hear a voice I haven’t heard before. Her usual voice is restrained. Deliberate. Feminine, but controlled in the way that mothers do with children. Though that could be a little irritating if she keeps it up for too long. I don’t mind it when she gets emotional. You can hear that in her work as well. But it seems she hasn’t mastered the art of talking loudly. It sounds as if she is angry. I wonder if that is also from living alone. And does she talk to herself that way? 

         I asked, “Do you talk to yourself out loud when you write.”

         It caught her by surprise. “Of course.”

         I got the funny look.

         “I only asked because I do that too.”

          A couple of dozen pages in, with Julia still standing at the stove, I asked, “Are you intending for Clare to be cynical.”

          It was just a thought I had while retyping the words, at that particular moment. Heroines who are cynical are far less appealing. I know, from what she has told me before, that ‘Clare,’ who is to be the protagonist here, is a tough cookie—a woman who has survived the worst.

         Julia says, “I think that’s probably her lack of faith. She wants to have faith but can’t find it. Her losses have been too great. I don’t go into all that because it just makes for pathos. I don’t want that reaction. The cynicism keeps her in the right key.”

         This cynicism was not all that obvious. I had thought it was just an undertone that had crept in inadvertently. I should accept now that there is nothing inadvertent in Julia’s writing. At least I should have guessed. But by then, I was already fully distracted by the smell of buttermilk and lard. By asking the question, I was actually trying to concentrate.

         She says, “Clare lives in what the author William Manchester called, ‘A world lit only by fire.’ It’s worth always remembering that, and I have the hardest time with it myself, because it’s so easy to assume the modern practical prejudices we have because of the comforts of our own lives. For her—the scene you’re working on is just her getting out of bed. Really, just that. It’s the best moment of her day. At least she’s had sleep. The coziness of the bed was perfect—as perfect as she knows. Her dreams are fading, and the gauze of that, hides the glare of hunger, and the pain of her damaged foot which has not yet healed, and the cold. Especially the cold. She will build a peat fire. That is a very unsatisfying heat. Uneven. Small. Her clothes and body smell of the work she did the day before, and the day before that. Later, she’ll eat a coarse hard brown bread that she made several days before. Because of the rain, that’s already getting moldy. But at least the water will be fresh. The rain from the roof has filled the mossy pots, and the sound of the falling of that obscures much else. It’s a small din of sound that hides the morning dark outside, and that allows her to hold her eyes closed and keep a brief grasp on her dream. She will not eat until she’s worked for several hours at her loom…She has no idea if she can sell the fabric. That’s a worry that intrudes on her mind. That’s not a given. The English authorities have forbidden the sale of fabric unless a tax is paid. She has no money for the tax. She is pregnant, so she is feeling queasy in any case. Her mind is just trying to engage her hopes in the dark … How does she do that? How does she keep her hope before her and not slip into the darker maw of dejection. Well, for her, it’s a cynicism that makes fun of everything that confronts her. She laughs at her state. At herself. It is an Irish humor, built upon centuries of abuse. Not out-loud, where it will draw attention, but spoken to herself. She has an internal life that is as real as her dreams. She can hold on to that. She can keep her hopes alive by standing on that ground…And she’s bright, remember. Not smart, because she has never had any general schooling, but she is bright. Very bright. She reads Latin. This is some of what she picked up from her mother as well as the nun at the church—That poor nun at the beginning of the story…You’ve already seen that, but you must see her in that context. Being bright is not a permanent state. It is a shine that must be polished. Her internal dialog does that.”

         I was chastened. But she was not finished.

         Julia says “You see, mankind is, by nature, delusional. How could we get up in the morning and face the day if we were not? Do you think the beauty of a sunrise is sufficient to ignore your arthritis; the delicate design of a snowflake sufficient to ignore the cold? Then you are delusional. The pain of living would be overwhelming if you could not blind yourself to your own demise. Your body may be riven by pain, but you give yourself to love. Those you love are torn from you by disease and pestilence, and you nurse another. We are really wonderfully made, we human beings. We can believe in our gods no matter how they betray us. Our own stink should be sufficient to drive us away from each other, but instead we embrace. We watch ourselves grow old and pretend there is grace to it. We are delusional. I thank God for that defense. Other animals, so trapped by instinct or ignorance, must bear their own slaughter, with brief panic, seemingly unaware of their future as they ruminate. We are given the gift of delusions to endure, and the powers of imagination to distract ourselves. We make up sports to manufacture our own entertainment. We celebrate our kings and write plays to give them honor and renown. We write novels to give color to the mundane. We defend our kidnappers with our own lives, and sacrifice our children to the wars of our captors. We murder other human beings and blind ourselves to the inevitable consequence. Thank God we are delusional, else we would stay in bed.”

         It was an inverse of philosophy—the meaning of life turned inside out.

         Later she said, “Thinner fabric can be more difficult to handle, more fragile, more liable to tear. A mere tissue of integrity. But gossamer is beautiful to the eye. The beauty of silk, like the woman she imagines herself to be, is magnified by its modest strength—but if it has been rent, it is lost. Old silk can often be beautiful for the character of its flaws I suppose. But the flaws are real, and it is still more delicate.” She actually said this aloud, to me. Then she suddenly looked away in a look of despair, or perhaps a little shame. “Oh, bosh! Such metaphors are too thin.”

         Julia had been explaining her use of a word to me, ‘gossamer,’ in the description of a mysterious gift Clare receives. I had foolishly questioned its use in context.

         And still later, she said, “Once, I thought I would be a poet. It was a fever. A sickness. Perhaps the last vestige of my childhood—that I would simply identify the truth with words. Can you conjure such a thing? How did I come to be possessed by the idea that I knew the truth at all, I can’t say. I haven’t the discipline to be a poet. But it was that idea that made me want to be a writer, and I turned to prose instead. and it determined my whole life. It was such a wonderful mistake! My delusion!”

         With this, a deeper hunger had come upon me, personally.

         About five-thirty she interrupted her wanderings around the room and the house and set the table. She’d found a sturdy chair in one of the bedrooms upstairs and brought that down. We sat across from each other, beneath the side window, but the table is small, maybe three feet around, so we were close. Close enough for me to be a little uncomfortable. She had made biscuits and gravy and buttered carrots. I had died by then and gone to heaven.

         She said, “It’s all very difficult to imagine. We are so spoiled. So soft…The chicken is fresh. I picked it up yesterday from my neighbor, Frank. He raises chickens and sells them to the Johnson’s Farm Market over in Nottingham. Organic. You can see them out there in his yard right now. They sound like happy chickens. You must feel sorry for them, though. They’re living their best lives and then, whop! — I can’t eat my own chickens. Only the eggs. But I trade those to Frank for his chicken, and he does the bloody work. I let mine grow old. I become very attached to them and the idea of killing them is impossible. That’s how soft I am. Clare would have simply gone ‘whop,’ or just sold the critter. She wouldn’t have eaten it…She would have saved the money. She had her hope.”

         I was relatively speechless with the delight of all this. And because the biscuits and gravy were as good as the chicken.

         Julia said, “I don’t mean to spoil the story for you, if you’re following it, but Clare is sleeping with the Lord’s son to get the money for her passage. Her cynicism is warranted. And if I were in her position, I would be cynical too, and bitter, and just as likely immobile. I would never have gotten out of that hovel. I’m writing about someone better than me. I always do…Writing is my moment in bed, in the early morning, holding onto my dream.”

         What could I say to that? All I came up with was, “How did the human race survive? … Seriously. How did it happen?”

         She shrugs at that. “The dreams. It was the delusions. Those who dreamed the best, survived.”

         Trying to make a formula out of the magic, I stupidly said, “So, it’s a sort of natural selection. Over the eons, the smartest ones more often make it.”

         She shook her head at me. “No, I’m not so sure. Depends on what you think smart is. The kind of ‘smart’ that most people think of is Einstein. But Einstein is an aberration. A luxury product of our society, you might say. The society that made him possible is the result of dreams. A million dreams.”

         “And a little math?”

         “No. If you do the math, you just stay at home and guard your turf. The risk of dreams is too great. What makes us human is not math. A crow can do a little math. What makes us human is our dreams. I don’t know what crows dream of, but the ones I see are still pestering the garbage cans.”

         All this, while I am flailing. What is love? … Don’t tell me what it’s like! The great Shakespeare always fell prey to this particular irration of metaphor and simile. That’s my word, I think. Something irrational must be an ‘irration.’ But a summer’s day, it is not. Analogy is the poor man’s logic. Even when it’s genius. And don’t offer your own specific madness as an example. Your own love is at least as unique as the person it’s devoted to. To offer as explanation the specific object of your own affection, whether Abby or Zelda, is no better than a cave painting. A pictograph of your love does not deserve an ally wall, much less a billboard or a bulwark. “I love you, Margaret Jean” is more to the point and understood by everyone passing that abutment on the interstate. But the language of true definition demands something more universal…So, what is love? Is it a chemical imbalance? Is it lust, disguised by some measure of civilized behavior? Is it a calculation of all the attributes of one special individual? Thus, is it only a sort of math? Or is it delusion? I think this last point is the closest. But it says nothing, really. It’s illogical? Absolutely. Foolish? Definitely, and often silly. Unreasonable? Certainly. Insane? Often. But always, inexplicable. Love, then, is a tautology. It defines itself. You know it, when you feel it. And it cannot be felt just that way by anyone else.

***

3. So, this is where I am

         These are the facts of the matter.

         The corruption of the human condition is not a matter of ignorance or mistake. It’s deliberate. Being naturally stupid, this realization, so obvious, came to me like a revelation. I had labored under the ideal that if my fellow human beings were just informed, or somehow enlightened, that they would do the right thing, given the chance. Somehow. That foolishness had wasted the first ten years of my adult life as a writer. I was a fool. Delusional.

         This last fact was not a revelation, but one that I had purposely ignored for the most part, avoiding it by the trickery of words. So, having it smashed in my face like a grapefruit was only that much more humiliating. Who was I to be informing them, anyway?

         I had been living at this time, quite gloriously, or so I thought, in The Tall Pines campground, still officially closed for the winter. A temporary arrangement. I had use of the one building, called ‘The Commons,’ for the toilet facilities and internet connection, and unofficially, as a sort of studio. This was a single, large, octagonal room with the black hood of an open fireplace rising at the center, and adjacent to that the toilet, all in exchange for keeping the water running, and other squatters out, as well as the driveway plowed. I didn’t even have to do the plowing. I simply had to call another fellow to do that when the snow got too deep for my truck.

         The arrangement was a handshake deal made over a chessboard at the Last Drop Cafe in Newmarket when the fellow who had been teaching me the game, Larry Regen, who just happened to own the campground, told me he was getting too old to deal with it anymore and was leaving for the winter to Florida. I had already been living there in my van the previous summer and fall, and I think he had a clue that this offer might be a kindness. It was going to be hard to survive the winter living in a 1998 Ford delivery van.

         “It’s a good deal,” were his exact words.

         I hadn’t been looking for a deal. I had just been hoping he would let me stay there through the winter for free. But for $100 a month I would have use of the campground toilet, in a room which was nominally heated, and the attached kiosk, which wasn’t heated, but had the fireplace, and an internet connection. That was the bonus. He knew that. That was his bargaining chip. At that moment, the internet connection seemed more important to me. Later, in January, I was more impressed by the heated toilet. But I was going to have to find a little extra work to pay for it. He would be renting his own house out as well, but I wasn’t in that market.

         He suggested, “You should just drive yourself down to Florida. That’s what I would do.”

         “I like it here.”

         “The women in Florida are easier to look at.”

         “That’s only because they don’t wear heavy coats.”

         I managed to get through the winter on a couple of odd room-painting jobs posted on the bulletin board at the cafe, but now that Spring was about to bloom and the campground would be officially opening again for the fishermen, my beautiful isolation was about to end. At first, I was feeling a little down about that. But then I awoke one night to a Greek chorus of peepers and with that my realization was complete. I was, indeed, a fool. But the source of my newfound wisdom was quickly buried in a confused dream, fading even as I tried to grasp it. An ember popped in the fire-pit and cleared my head. Outside, with my breath hanging about me in the cold Spring air, the starry night sighed with a hush of sound that felt like it had no source on earth—hardly a bunch of small frogs—and was simply present, as the background noise of the universe. It was a noisy awakening to the true facts. A freight train passed on the tracks a mile away and sounded as if it was coming right there.

         And for whatever mental gymnastic I had dreamed, I knew all at once that this much was true: our ignorance was not the cause of the corruption. Our ignorance, and our wanting to cure that, to fill that void, to solve that riddle, to make sense of what confused us, that was the source of our humanity! That was what made us human. It was the effort! Not the end! And too, that it was our denial of our ignorance that would corrupt us, as well as all of that stupid stuff we always did for comfort, and for ease, and for gain.

         It was in the denial that we truely failed.

         I had to start again. One more time. Nothing I had previously written mattered. It was all false. Somehow, I should find a means of describing ignorance itself. And naturally, this was just the kind of revelation I would be fully capable of—describing ignorance, I mean.

         Like a child who has just discovered anything, I had to mention this to someone.

         I asked her, “When you were on Iona, did you hear the stars?”

         But instead, Julia says to me, “Is that true? Is that what you think you’ve done? Found a refuge as a lone monk? Made a monastery out of a white Ford van, living by the river—hiding out from the storm? The Vikings will find you there.”

         I tell her, “I suppose, you probably don’t know it, but there was a comedy sketch on television that involves a character named Matt Foley who lives down by the river—” She has no idea. Her face is blank, so I skip it. I say, “At least I’m still trying to write. Even though that seems a little hopeless at the moment. The wonder of the internet is making it possible for anyone to publish their work for others to read. But that has a downside. On any given day, everyone seems to be doing it! It’s a glut. And as you’ve told me, there aren’t any publishers now who pay for it the way they did in the old days. But still, if you want to write, the internet seems to be the only chance left.”

         She actually laughed at that. I hadn’t heard her laugh out loud before. I didn’t hear the cynicism because I was taken with the laugh itself.

         She says, “So, a publisher pays you an advance of $5000 for something that took you a year to write. Maybe 3000 hours of work. Always more than that, but that’s the part the accountant will allow. That’s about a buck-fifty an hour. In New York! Where $10 an hour is poverty level. And that’s why I wanted to move up here and out of New York in the first place, twenty years ago. I could not imagine how I could support myself in New York without doing tricks. When I was getting a divorce, I knew I’d need more income. And I like gardening. But that was incidental. It all worked out for me. But if two of my books hadn’t been optioned for movies, I wouldn’t have made it this far.”

         “I thought there was only one movie.”

         “They only made the one.”

         I wasn’t going to be misdirected. “So, what’s the future?”

         She says, “I don’t know. But I was hoping you might have an idea for that. Maybe, if I can get a website up…I do have a small following. A few fans. I can try to build on that.”

         That seemed possible.

         Contrarily, I say, “But what does a younger writer do?”

         She shook her head at me, “I don’t think age is the matter. You have to be resourceful. Find some way to promote what you write without doing tricks. Or at least, without selling your soul. That’s the trick of our age, isn’t it. It’s always something. But there will be a way. Whatever it takes. There’s the hope! You must survive. Just don’t be selling your body to the Lords’ daughter.”

         This last reference to her own novel was not obscure. We had just dealt with that!

         So, this was where I am.

         My dreamed-up realization about the corruption of mankind wasn’t worth a dime if I couldn’t spend it. If I was going to earn a living, without living off of anyone else, I was going to have to find a new angle. The right angle. Something oblique, perhaps, but not obtuse. But playing with words was not going to help.

         Then Julia tells me the likely reason her publisher dropped her—why she couldn’t find anyone else to take her novels. It wasn’t really the sales. At least there were some sales. It wasn’t the money. Without Ned, she wasn’t even getting the initial five-thousand-dollar advance on either of her last two books. It was because of what she had to say, and what she had said. She had rejected dogma.

         She said, “It seemed to me, after a few hundred thousand years of petty tyrants and slavery and war, that things were getting better. I have no faith in the kings, or the politicians, or the generals. But the farmers, and the carpenters, and the fishermen—they’ve made things better. I just wanted to make that clear in what I wrote. And why…Most importantly, to understand ‘why.’ The phony tenured philosophers today all want to talk amongst themselves in the shady groves of academe. But Jesus Christ spent his time talking with the meek. At least I could try to do that as well.”

         Now, I knew she wasn’t religious, so this last part threw me off.

         Julia has a landline for her telephone and I’ve asked her to get an internet cable for a Wi-Fi connection paired with that. That will only take three weeks and about fifteen minutes. The 15 minutes is the hard part. But she did this without asking any questions. She seemed to think I knew what I was doing.

         I had said, “I can help with that,” which, in effect, meant I could do it. She had no clue about how to create a website, much less what to do with it. So, I started reading up on the process. The site her publisher had made for her years ago was still up there for me to see, in some cloud or another, but it was not really useful by today’s standards. Nor could I easily access it myself. When they had dropped her, they simply let it be.

         Her idea, vaguely, was just to post some things she wrote—to find readers through conversation. I told her that she could do more—should do more. Naturally, telling her to do more was hypocrisy, coming from me.

         But I told her she should post her novels too.

         She raised an eyebrow on that. “We can post this one when we’ve finished with it. So, let’s keep working.”

         There were several thousand fans who had signed up at the old website. After five years, I imagined most of those links were no longer functional, but I explained to her that she should start by finding out. Which meant, of course, that I should find out for her. But first I moved her address to a new web host—one that did most of the job of moving her old site for her—so that I didn’t have to do any of the dirty work or read any more technical jargon than I had to.

         Then I said, just to get the door of the idea open “Just talk to them. Ask them questions. Let them post their questions. Get a conversation going.”

         The part about the conversation was important.

         After growing more and more dubious over my increasingly obvious lack of technical knowledge, her face actually brightened at the prospects of that. She has one of those faces that reveal thoughts without a word. I already knew that she genuinely enjoyed conversations. Just not when she was working.

         After I was gone, and undoubtedly with her evening bourbon in hand, she wrote something for the new site and gave it to me to post the next day. And I think she was addressing me there.

         ‘The matter is that we are corruptible by nature. It is built into us. It is not a flaw, but a feature. If we were not corruptible, we could not learn. We would be trapped in the prison of our DNA. We would forever be what we are, as interchangeable as spare parts—never unique. The lion is a magnificent beast, but exactly as magnificent as his ancestor, 40,000 years ago. What is it in us that allows us to appreciate a beast that would eat us without a blink? We must learn, in order to survive, and we know it. 

         “At one and the same time, it becomes important that we can be corrupted, so that we might find the philosophy to resist that corruption.”

         I added, “The delusion.”

         “Yes.  Not that we be incorruptible. We must be capable of change. The flaw is in us. That is the nature of a good philosophy as much as a good story. A good philosophy is one that makes us capable of learning. A bad philosophy forbids us—because it must keep us from knowing. Some people think they know the truth. I hope someone does. I do not. I want the freedom to learn the truth. I want to be corrupted by the truth.”

         By noon of the next day, when I was sitting outside my van in the sun, and thinking about a nap, there had been over three hundred replies.

         The thing was, she was annoyed when I told her. How could she reply to 300 people! She wanted me to ‘quiet it down a little.’ I told her I’d work on that. I understood how she felt. It was like having the campground opening up. Her splendid isolation was over.

         And one evening soon after that, she wrote: “I have lived too much of a narrative life. Not in the present or the past, much less the future. It’s a life made-up of thoughts, and attitudes … I have no more idea of the facts that govern the news than any village idiot. I mean that. The village idiot is much more aware of what they see and hear. Their problem is interpretation. They don’t understand the meanings of things. Whereas, I am all about the meanings of things while being unaware of the facts. My delusions. Which, is the better? I’m so full of meanings, can I see beyond that to a simple truth. I feel as if I’ve spent a good deal of my life looking over a fence for the truth on the other side.”

***

4. With the co-operation of time

         Julia says, in describing her own work, “Time is the issue—it’s a theme in much of what I write. Simply said. It’s difficult to make it sound much better than that. Simply ‘time.’ What is it? You can’t touch it, but you feel it. We try to measure it mechanically, but living by the clock is thin. We each have a biological clock inside of us that keeps time rather well, if we pay attention. Women too often think of it in terms of child-bearing alone, but it’s far more than that. Men grow dependent on their strength, and then lose it with age. They feel that with time. It worries them. Children lose their childhood, as if it were stolen from them. I think they know it from the time they are weaned. With age, minds weather and wither. Memory fades. But age comes to each of us differently. Each of us knows this. Measured in astronomical terms, a human life is too brief to notice. And yet, we are perhaps the only creatures that do notice. Most other living beings simply accept the brief time that they are given. But we human beings demand some control, and then, with typical hubris, we demand credit for whatever we’ve done. As one old comic once said, we stand in the bread line and ask for toast.”

         I have no idea why she said all of this—but I felt as if it was addressed to me, even as I posted it to her site. She hardly knew me at the time, and I certainly did not yet know her. But having had my own recent revelation, I was quite open to hers.        

         Perhaps she had believed me when I said that I was a writer as well, despite just having the one book. But she must have heard that sort of thing said a hundred times before by others. Everybody thinks they can write. But she was published—not just one book—again and again. She was Julia Morgan. Why did she believe me? I don’t know.

         That post received seven hundred replies.

         And this happened in the late afternoon on that first day—-believing my job there was just to copy-edit what she had re-written previously on her typewriter, and retype that once again on my laptop. Not to actually edit. Not all that much, anyway. Maybe thirty pages a day. Easy peasy. But I could not help but comment, here and there, or to ask why, this or that. I think her explanations for what she had done were always worth it. Like good footnotes.

         But I told her, even then, that I thought my role was an unnecessary step. That she could just as well have typed her copy onto a computer keyboard instead of a typewriter, and saved the time as well as the cost of having me transcribe it. I knew I was risking my own place in the scheme of things. But I didn’t yet understand the brilliance of her idiosyncrasies.

         She had made it clear at first that I should only correct obvious typos and misspellings and perhaps remove her prolific commas but only when I was sure that would be best. The stack of pages was beside me—piled on a kitchen table in the same loose manner as they’d been placed there when she had pulled them from her beautiful old manual machine. I simply turned the stack over, copying the pages one by one, as if inserting them in my ‘device.’

         This was really just transcribing for the most part. Again, I was filling the role of a monk in the Abbey at Iona. An amanuensis. Can that be a verb?

         She had no such electric devices as my computer in the house. Nothing more complicated than a toaster or an old stereo record player. She ‘abjured’ them. My job at first was just to copy what she had written and then put that onto a ‘thumb-drive.’ She had no idea what that was when we began, but I was not technically sophisticated enough myself to properly explain the idea of storing it there, nor of uploading everything to the internet, so I showed her the one small physical device I had with me and then used it again each day. It seemed to please her to hold the small object in her hand. All those words in the palm of her hand! She told me then she’d read somewhere that someone had once written ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ on a grain of rice, and that it could only be read under a microscope. I asked her why? Why bother? She held up my thumb-drive and didn’t say a word.

         She had no real web-site of her own yet. Just her former publisher’s ‘landing page’ as they called it. I started creating one for her, without asking permission, on that first evening when I was back at the campground again.

         Still unsure of my role as much as my good fortune in being there, as if tempting the fates, I asked her why she had decided to run the advertisement for my job when she did.

         The explanation for that was brief but complete.

         “I had a great editor for twenty-five years and a good publisher for as long as he had my back. But when he died, Knopf dropped me just as they were doing with most of their mid-list authors. There was no real money to be made in keeping us. Not of the kind that they wanted. Hell, in the end, they even sold themselves. I’ve gone five years now without publishing a thing. It’s time to take matters into my own hands. I’m going to publish my own books.”

         This was something I actually knew a little about. I had already done it! I had trimmed the word count of my own novel to fit the procrustean box of Amazon-ordained templates, and I’d told her about this series of unfortunate events, as my own version of ‘how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.’ She loved that comparison to ‘Dr. Strangelove.’ It was a movie she had actually seen—in a theatre, not on TV.

         But in response she said only, “Maybe you can help me avoid all that. So, let’s get to work for now.”

         The chair in the kitchen was rather hard, at first. I didn’t need to write that fact down because it was indelibly impressed on my bony ass. Hard to forget, being so close to my brain. When she sat, it was more often on her couch in the living room behind me, or else she was pacing the short distance between the kitchen table and the couch. That was bothersome—irritating. In effect, it marked the time it took me to copy the pages like the pendulum on a metronome, or perhaps a proctor might in an exam room, and I am not a fast typist. But I could not have told her to sit down.

         On that first day, there was only the one chair at the kitchen table. Her dining room was stacked with boxes, and I wasn’t sure yet that there were any other chairs buried there. The stairwell to the second floor was dark. The old farm house itself was small and if it weren’t for the lingering cold outside, and then the mosquitoes and the black flies, I would have suggested we sit on the porch. At least there were a couple of large, comfortable looking, Adirondack chairs out there.

         On the second day I brought in another chair—a folding camp chair that I had in the van and a couple of thin foam cushions for my rear end, as well as an extra light for the table so I wouldn’t strain my eyes. I didn’t need the camp chair because she had found a regular one upstairs. But by evening, the kitchen was too dark and the table light she had there was too dim so I was happy for the light.

         I did not have to ask about her minimal use of electricity. That seemed obvious to me. She could not replicate ‘A world lit only by fire,’ but she could keep it close.

         I used my phone connection to show her the website I’d made. She was not impressed. I decided to work on it more.

         She said, “And if the power goes out, what do we have then? Are all the creations of mankind now dependent on that thin digital atmosphere of zeros and ones. I think we were better off with cave paintings. At least they lasted.”

         I tried to be smart, or at least bright. I held up the thumb drive. “It’s just a matter of time. Most of all that mankind has ever carved, or written, or painted, has already been lost. Burned. Buried. Dispersed like so much flotsam in one flood or another. Perhaps we can save enough with this little device to give your grandchildren something to read while they relax in their living rooms on Mars. I don’t think they’ll be taking books.”

         She gave me a queer look. Then she said, “Whatever we think it takes to save civilization, we should do. That’s part of the bargain. No guarantees.”

         This was not comforting. I said, “Maybe.”

         Then she threw both hands into the air to dispute me.

         “Did you know that the Laocoon, the sculpture in St. Peter’s, and one of the greatest works of Roman times, was lost for a thousand years? Maybe more! And that it was re-discovered, buried, in a vineyard. And that Michelangelo was there, and a part of that discovery. Michelangelo! Can you conjure that? I tried. I tried to think what he must have thought, digging that great work out of the earth. He had only just created the David. He was still at the beginning of his career and probably thinking he had a ticket to immortality. And there he finds something worthy of his own efforts, buried! Thrown away! He worked in stone because he hoped it would last. He begrudged paint because it was so easily destroyed. But like an Ozymandias, here was a statement to him of his own insignificance. I imagine it must have been sobering, even to him.”

         Time had not cooperated. She was born thirty years before me and our paths did not cross until it was too late to be lovers and already difficult to be friends. But friends we were, in spite of ourselves. From the start. Even I knew that. Still, too much of our conversation was spent in explanation. I was a generation late for too much that she already knew to be true.

         One afternoon, early on, with the pages of ‘The Plow and Stars’ piled high and intimidatingly thick to my eye, I took a break and asked about a bit of slap-stick there when her hero, Donovan, falls into the ocean trying to save Clare, his lady-love (who in fact was the better swimmer but wouldn’t let on, so as to preserve his sense of dignity).

         She answered, “It’s just a small Harold Lloyd moment.”

         I said, “Who’s that?”

         An eyebrow rose, “I have learned that when films were silent, they had more to say,” was her answer.

         I think I answered. “When was that?”  

         Maybe I’m being a little rough on myself in recollection. But it was almost as bad as that.

         She was always curious about the fads of the present, but I was never really up to that task either, being more interested in the past myself, which is partly what had brought me there. I knew her as more than just a name when I first arrived. I had already read one of her books. I read many of the others in the weeks that followed.

         She had placed an ad in the local weekly news-sheet that was given away free in laundromats and cafes. Local newspapers are fading memories around here. All the classifieds are on the internet now, but she was not on-line, of course. Maybe three thousand people had seen it, if that. But I didn’t.

         ‘Wanted: copy editor to transmutate typed script into golden bites. Must have your own computer. Ten dollars an hour. Approximately four hours per day. Mostly evenings.’

         Even at that price, she actually got three replies. I was sitting at The Last Drop Cafe and the woman I most often chatted with there, knowing I needed some work, came over and pointed it out.

         Julia ‘abjured’ technology—‘Abjured’ was a word she liked in speech but never used on the page. Not that I am aware of. But I used my ‘gadgets’ constantly to avoid asking her too often about a particular name or place that I probably should have known about to begin with. Laocoon? I had no idea what it was until I looked it up. But she had been there, in Rome, and seen it in person! But I did not tell her that. My education was not nearly as broad as hers, nor as deep, and the advantage of years had made her knowledge formidable in detail—so much so that I was worried that she was too often forced to deal with me as you would a child.

         “When I was young, I lived in a different world,” she said. “A better world, I think. You may have glimpsed it in passing when you were a boy, but not realized it had just passed by the time you were a man. I’ll tell you what it was like. It was brilliant! You know that British expression: ‘brilliant?’ It means nothing now, just a verbal reflex, but it did once. Can you even imagine now that something was actually brilliant?”

         I did not mean to argue, but I answered, “Yes. I think so.”

         She shook her head as if to clear it. “No, you can’t. If you think so, that’s only because you’ve imagined it—made it up, yourself. Or borrowed it from old movies and the like. This world you live in now is a land of zombies; the living dead. Raised by television and now the internet. Built on an artificial conceit of post-modern pretense… I’ve tried to tell my children, to warn them. To make them aware. But I’ll be dead before I can know if I was successful. That’s just the nature of it. The nature of generations, I think.”

         But I felt argumentative. “How do you know? How can I see what you mean?”

         Following from my own revelation, all such grand ideas seemed suspect. Just another means of denial. Perhaps, I wondered, she was unknowingly being duped by the details.

         “Look. Simply look. That’s all you need to do…Did you ever read ‘Kim?’”

         “Yes.”

         “You did?” She was genuinely surprised. Her head went over to the side a bit. “Then maybe I’m wrong about you…Do you remember how Mahbub Ali and Babu train the boy to be a spy? And do you remember the Lama’s quest?”

         “Yes.”

         She blinked, “Yes? Well, can you imagine any book written for the youth of today then, to be as sophisticated? As wonderful?”

         “No.”

         She nodded. “No.” There was some sense of having made her point in the lowering of her voice with that last word.

         I asked, “Did you give that book to your children to read?”

         She smiled, “Yes. But they’re all girls. Girls are different. They liked the detail but couldn’t seem to deal with the adventure of it…Not in this prophylactic envelope of a post-modern world that they live in—where they are not even supposed to be girls.”

         I did not mean to be argumentative. But I did wonder.

         “Then, why were you able to imagine it, yourself?”

         She gave me that queer look again.

         “I don’t know…Yes, I do. My father…”

         We were at the kitchen table at the time and drinking coffee. The stack of pages had been turned. Her coffee was the best I had ever had.

         I asked, “Have you written anything like that? Like ‘Kim’”

         “No,” There was regret in the tone.

         “Why not?”

         She said, “That much, I do know. Because the world of Kim, and that world that could have understood a ‘Kim,’ has passed, and Zombies can’t read such things, anyway. And for my own part, now, I can only write about what’s been left behind. The parts and pieces of the remnant. Some might say the flotsam. But I’m not brilliant—not like Kipling. I am just helping at the side of the pit while Michelangelo is digging up the Laocoon, but without the brilliance to feel his loss of innocence. I’m happy enough to be unearthing such a wonder, and to be looking for the missing pieces. And anyway, if there is ever going to be another age like that again, they’ll need those parts and pieces, or else…they might have to start all over again.”

         “Who is ‘they?”

         “Oh. My children. Your children. The ones that go to Mars.”

***

5. The dog who did not bark

         Now, this is the thing. I had first rung that doorbell a couple of weeks ago. That is, just over two weeks! I feel like I have been here at least a month. Maybe a year.

         This place feels as ancient to me as a home might have been two hundred years ago, but it is actually the technology that makes our friendship both possible and necessary. Julia writes in long-hand each morning and then retypes that on an old, pale green, Olivetti manual, after noon, after her walk, each day, adding those pages to the stack. It’s the kind of big old office typewriter you see in antique shops. And this was the final copy that I transcribed again onto my lap-top — ‘your word processor,’ she called it, with the pronounced care of unfamiliarity—the ‘processing’ obviously suspect. This last task was always done in her presence, even though she ‘abjured’ it. I went over the edits with her on the typed pages each day, as I did this and she paced back and forth from the coach to the kitchen. But I will say here, I was in love with her by page two on that very first day.

         Given everything, even at ten dollars an hour, she is paying me more than I’m worth. The meal alone was worth a lot more. But it’s a paycheck, and the process doesn’t require me to betray any principles, so I am fine with it. I still have the first check she gave me. I haven’t cashed it, mostly because I still can’t believe it’s real.

         She writes in the mornings, beginning at 6am. She uses yellow legal pads and a particular pen she likes. Not a fountain pen. At least, not a fountain pen. Everyday. She eats a sort of brunch at ten. Often oatmeal. Her primary consumption until that time is coffee. About noon, she takes a walk. By one in the afternoon, she is retyping what she had written before in longhand onto the Olivetti. About four o’clock, she starts dinner. And this is when I am needed. We speak about all sorts of things then, and I am eating dinner with her every day! Primarily, this is necessary because she writes every day—but then again, I happily admit, it’s also because this is the highlight of each day for me, and as well as my spiritual sustenance, and has become my primary source of nutrition.

         Before me, about ten years ago, her primary editor had been an older man, the once infamous Ned Hamilton. He was trained in the ways of the publishing houses of New York in the mid-twentieth century, had known everyone worth knowing, and, when she was still a young author, she had sought him out after hearing that he had been ‘let go’ at Harper’s for refusing to work on the sort of crap that was wanted by the end of that era. She had previously admired him from afar, having met one or two of the authors he had nurtured, and after her first novel had received some critical acclaim, if not sales, she pursued him. He refused, thinking then that he would retire instead. She had ‘abjured’ his refusal. She had even camped out on his lawn in Larchmont for a week. He had never called the police, and she had finally relented. But then, when his wife had died after a long illness, he had realized he needed some diversion and gave her a chance.

         They worked well together, and naturally she had fallen in love with him, but that too had been unrequited and not long after that she had married a fellow author she had known for years in New York, “out of some absurd idea that liking him would be sufficient.” Three children later it was finally clear to her that was a mistake.

         When the subject of her marriage came up, and it seemed reasonable, I smartly asked. “What was the problem?” Perhaps I was hoping for a juicy tale of infidelity or something of that sort.

         Instead, she said, “He was raised in the ways of business, and concerned with ‘matters of consequence,’ and his measures of value were all in money…Besides, he wrote ‘best sellers,’ as a category, the way other schlockmeisters wrote ‘Horror,’ or ‘Romance.’ He’d decided to write them because it looked easy. And it was, for him. He was exactly the sort that Ned had refused to edit before he was fired at Harpers.”

          Of course, by the time I learned all of that I was already positive that I loved her. I felt we were soul mates. I was disagreeing with nearly everything she said the first time she said it, but then I would repeat it a week later as if it were my own.

         She said, “You should know, Ned once gave up on an author because one of his books was a best-seller…A fact! And, I said to him, ‘Why? Wasn’t his success partially your doing? And he said to me, ‘Yes. Maybe. But the appeal of his writing had been false to begin with. Phony! I was busy with too much work at the time and hadn’t kept up with things. The fellow had betrayed himself and used his considerable talent to write yet another book similar to several other successful fantasy titles of the moment. It was just another Tolkien rip-off. But I had never read Tolkien, at the time. That was my fault.’”

         She told me all this when I first informed her that I was in the midst of writing a fantasy. Struggling to be in the midst of it. I was in considerable turmoil at the time, having just fallen in love, but I did not tell her that.

         She said, “This is true. Everything we write is a fantasy. It’s a false category. Ned taught me that. I believe he learned that from C. S. Lewis.”

         Her children had lived with her during those years after the divorce when she had written The Wrath and The Covenant. Neither sold very well but both cemented her reputation. She had been nominated for several awards. Before that, she had become the ‘grand archivist.’ The chronicler of a medieval world long gone. She spoke the words ‘Grand Archivist,’ to me with the capitals intact, as if it was an appointment to the emperor’s court. “But, that’s why I gave all that up and started working on the Eighteenth Century,” she said, “All that seemed to matter to them, then—the publishers I mean—was the historical aspect. So, I went off to Scotland and lived for a year. I lived in Ireland for most of two. The kids loved that. Mostly.”

         She had not taken alimony from her husband then for herself but had accepted enough to pay for the taxes and upkeep on the property that they had purchased in New Hampshire before the divorce. So at least the children had a permanent home. And that was where I found her.

         On the living room walls above the bookcases, one at each side of the fireplace and one opposite that, are three paintings. One is of Jesse, when she was about 20 years old; fierce-eyed and intensely beautiful, dark hair loose in a sunny wind—purely, her mother’s daughter, but clearly a woman, and not a girl. Just a portrait, with her eyes as interested in you, as you are in her, as if you are the painter. The background is dark, at first unimportant, but the presence of wind and the sun made that seem wrong. Looking closer, I saw that the background was a storm. A storm coming.

         At the other side of the fireplace is another daughter. This is Elena, boney and gawky; standing akimbo as if in a challenge to the painter, perhaps not interested in being there at all or else just wanting to set the scene that was being painted in her own way, and looking back in obvious amusement. Her features are as sharp as her arms are thin. Her eyes are on fire, without being fierce. The background was a wall in the barn but something of a study in wood, as if the painter had taken extra time in capturing the grain and wear of that to offset the smooth flesh of Elena’s face.

         I wanted to see a picture of Maya hanging up there as well, but behind me was the portrait of a dog. This was their sheep dog, ‘Packer,’ sitting in one of the Adirondack chairs that had been moved out into the yard, perhaps for some summer breeze and shade. The dog was clearly old but willing to sit for a time just to please.

         These were key ingredients to a life, I thought. And Maya had been the one to capture that, minus one.

          There were several paintings in the hall closet beneath the stairs. I found out about these when I first saw the three in the living room. But Julia did not offer to show them to me until I specifically asked to see them. That opportunity finally came about a week or so later. Perhaps this was some reluctance to brag about her daughter’s skill as a painter in the same way that she did not make much more of her own work, when asked, than to say what it was she was doing. “I write stories. It’s hardly work.” But then, that didn’t make sense to me for a mother who so proudly presented her daughter’s work in the living room.

         One reason for it only became clear when she brought them out to show me leaning them against the wall there, illuminated in the afternoon light. One was a cold landscape of snow and muted color that included the far end of the red barn as if it were the bow of a ship, entering the scene against the weather. It was chilling. One was of the farm in the distance, again in winter, as it must be seen from the river against the artificial horizon line of the road behind, with the dark mass of the ancient mountain, encroaching, storm-like, from behind, and with the pale white sea of snow on the fields in foreground, making a fragile island of Dal Riata. The dark red of the barn gaped in the midst of this like a mouth and the house offered eyes in the two gables at the rear. But the third painting was of Julia herself. Julia at the stove looking toward the window where the barn could be seen as well as the fields beyond. Julia seen from the back, but standing to one side, with those few strands of loose hair illuminated, capturing the clear light from the window at the other side, and the rest of the kitchen darkened in contrast—as she would be seen from the dining room door, standing there, the steam of the pot rising to her stirring hand.

         These painting were meant to be together. They were a study of the same subject from three points of view. There just wasn’t a good place for them that I knew of on the walls of the house.

***

6. Neal and Molly

         At the start, it was just then spring and I was living the couple of miles away at The Tall Pines Campground. But being in love with her was a definite problem. I am an ascetic, of sorts. A poor sort. And I’ve sworn off sex. The difference in our circumstances doesn’t matter anymore than our ages. I am as consumed by her as I am by the revelation of it. But thankfully, as I have said, I am an ascetic. The real problem with all of this now is, I can’t concentrate enough to write my own work. Mars is now far too remote, and I can’t focus on anything else. I’ve attempted to get what is happening to me down, as a reporter might, though even that is difficult.

         But she had already figured all that out.

         I had not said a word about my feelings. Even at 31, I have no real clue for that. I’ve been in love a couple of times in my life, but after the second time I realized that I was not made for all the subterfuge and the pretenses.

         But now, the fellow who owns The Tall Pines has come back north to inform me that he is selling the property to a developer. He has already sold it, in fact. And that I will have to leave my refuge.

         I told Julia about this and that it might mess up our schedule for a while as I looked for someplace else. Of course, I was hoping that she might offer one of the rooms in her house. But, as if already prepared, she got up from the table and went into her basement for a minute, returning with an ancient looking tool box, a battered thing made of oil darkened wood, and told me to follow her.

         That was when she said, “I have a perfect solution.”

         Inside the barn, in the dark atmosphere that flowered from hay and ancient manure to be further textured by filaments of sun from unknown sources, Julia pulled the cord to a bare lightbulb that dangled after her release, shifting shadows in the wake of harsh light, before leading me on then to a smaller room in the far corner close-by the sliding door at one end. Through another door there, and before she had yet pulled another cord, strange silhouettes edged the muddied light from a single window at the far wall. This particular image, of light and shadow, has occupied a key place in several of my dreams now. But then, after pulling that cord, we stood before a chaotic display of toy-filled shelves, all seemingly in unnatural colors given the background, and an assortment of balls and bats and other sports paraphernalia piled in open cardboard boxes, as well as bicycles, and even tricycles crowded together as if entangled in battle.

         That was when she actually turned on me and said, “Learn a useful trade,” handing me the toolbox. This is in the dream as well.

         Other than her wonderful appreciation of Neal and Molly Wright just as we entered, as much as for the barn itself, there was really no more explanation needed than to “learn a useful trade,” but she could have offered some. It was abrupt. I thought then that she was actually ordering me. Or teasing me. But it was an order! And then she just handed me that tool box and left.

         When she first took me to the barn she had said, “It doesn’t look like much from the outside. That’s just the age of it. The clapboard needs paint. My budget has been a little short for that. But I went into debt on the roof. You can see that looks practically new. Three years old. I used metal and I’m not sure I should have. The original would have been wood shingle. And then someone had covered that with tar shingles. But using wooden shingles—that would have cost more than twice as much to replace.”

         Going into the cool of the dark interior, I just said “How old is it?” Not really ready for the whole story.

         She stopped short in the doorway, like a master of ceremonies preparing to open a curtain.

         “It was built by a Shaker man and his wife—a former Shaker, I should say. They had left the community in Canterbury in 1839. He had run afoul of the restrictions by falling in love with a woman there and they left together—”

         I said, “That’s a story in The Wrath.“

         “True! Then you’ve read that! Then you know. They lost everything, and then their children too when the boys ran off to war. I thought it was the greatest story of love and devotion I had ever heard. But it was a bit too sad to gain a following, I suppose.”

         When we entered, the golden burnish of the wood inside gleamed in the daylight from the door, even beneath a layer of the hay dust. The interior was only half-dark with needles of sun piercing some places in the shrunken clapboarding of the sides. The smell of hay and manure was thick, probably undisturbed for weeks. Midway in, bales of hay were scaled upward from the floor to the loft, in a sort of giant’s stairway made dramatic by the sway of the light bulb on its cord.

         She shook her head at the pile. “My grand kids did it before I could stop them”

         I already knew that she rented space to her neighbor, Mr. Copple, who cut the hay on her land in the summer. He had come by once before to check on her when he first saw me in the yard.

         At a loss for anything better, I said to her, “Lyman built this?”

         “Well, no. Neal Wright built it, and the house. By hand. And mostly by himself. Lyman was the fictional character I made up. I had his wife’s letters, you know, Molly Wright. And that was only by a wonderful accident. I bought them at an auction along with too much else, simply for the fun of the ephemera of another age. I often use that sort of thing when I’m writing. But the letters were gorgeous. It didn’t take me long to track their records down at the historical society and then her story became quite compelling. And just as it was in the novel, it appears from the letters that she had seduced poor Neal, though she never said it…But I said it! Because it had to be that way. They had been expelled, like Adam and Eve! But he was such an introvert. He would have gone on working at the village for his entire life if he had not succumbed to he. And you know, they had already loved each other quietly for years. Actually, since they were children and came to the village with their mothers—both widowed.”

         She rested then in the frame of the doorway as if feeling the jam against her spine, one hand down on the wood to steady heself.

         “Neal had trained as a carpenter and she had learned to plant and cook. And then she became pregnant and they left and married over in Manchester. He leased this land until they could afford to buy it. It was a sheep lot then. The apple orchard came later. But people were leaving the land, in those years, for the factories, and for the West, and it was affordable. Forty acres. It cost him $400. I’ve seen a copy of the deed—and his signature. His penmanship was crude. Not what I expected from a perfectionist carpenter. And then they had five children. Two boys and three girls. One girl died in infancy. Two others ran off to the west with their husbands, and, of course, the boys ran off to war…He built this barn by hand. All of it! And probably by himself. Or with the two boys to help him. Using wooden pegs and joinery. Perhaps because he couldn’t afford metal nails. But I know that he earned a fair living from making furniture for others and his chairs and tables turn up in auctions all over…Funny thing, though. There are no initials or marks on them. Pride was a sin to him, and his pride was in not showing any. But you can tell they are his by the joinery. He invented his own versions of dovetails. The chestnut he used was what once grew here in a grove above the river. He cut it and dried it and milled it himself. I actually think he chose the land to begin with because of the wood.”

         I was in awe by then and simply stood there when she pushed back the door and stood with me as if it was the first time that she had ever done it herself. It was not a large barn, maybe thirty by forty feet, but standing in the interior made it feel larger.

         She said, “My mistake with that story, I think, was to spend too much time on the boys. I loved them both and I’ve always been fascinated by the Civil War. And then they were killed, and it left the story of those two aging lovers seeming a little light by comparison. I think I would write it differently now.”

         She paused again before she crossing the floor and opening the door to the tack room. And there were the silhouettes, and all the magic of that.

         That smaller space was lined by vertical boards, scarred from years of re-purposing, but burnished by time as well and that dark glow was only half hidden by all the debris of several childhoods on the shelves.

         “Neal bought the land for the wood. Even these wall boards are hand-milled. If you can avoid it, leave it as much as you can the way it is. You could stuff your insulation in behind, I think. I thought of using it once as a writing room, but I needed to be more on top of the children when they were younger … Just don’t cut on the posts or the beams.”

         I didn’t say it, but I thought it immediately. ‘I will write here.’

         And she pointed down at the boards of the floor, each clearly a different width and worn in its own way.

         “The whole thing is sitting on rock, so it’s still pretty solid. Those floor planks are two inches thick.’ She tapped her foot. “It’s the toilet that’ll be your challenge.” She pointed at an empty corner just beyond the tack room where gleams of ephemeral light parted the clapboards from outside.

         I had no idea about plumbing. I had no real idea about electricity, for that matter. I had a lot to learn.

         And it was actually then that she just turned with that toolbox and said, “Learn a useful trade!”

         To my credit, I know a little carpentry to begin with and converting that old tack room was primarily an application of insulation, and the refurbishing of a rusting wood stove that become a home to mice. My one extravagance has been to pay a plumber to re-hook an old water line to the well. I re-dug the trench myself. And I am digging out a new connection to the septic tank, which is, thankfully, not so far. The soil there behind the barn is rocky.

         But none of that is public knowledge. It would increase her property taxes. As far as the public is concerned, I am actually living in the house. But she has already made it clear again that she thinks that is a bad idea.

         “Men are babies,” was one of her explanations, directed, I think, at me. Another was, “Women are mothers.” She used both expressions, in order, when I suggested that I should rent a room in the house instead of trying to make a space in the barn. Somehow, I knew what she meant and that if I lived in the house, she would be taking care of me and neither of us wanted that.

         But she cooked. Julia was an excellent cook, though she specifically told me that she was not a chef. She only cooked what she liked. And that she wouldn’t spoil what she made by making it poorly. And, every day, it was something different. I cannot cook, so early on, lamely, I offered to pick up some take-out food from town. Thankfully, she refused. She ‘abjured’ take-out as well.

         Once a week, or so, she disappeared to the local Market Basket and returned with the bed of her pick-up truck half-full. At least she let me carry that in for her when I was around.

         Taking the lead from old Neal Wright, who would have worked all of each day away with the arc of the sun, for some weeks then I awoke as close to dawn as my city-boy character would allow. Half-numb, I watched videos on my lap-top about how to work with PVC pipe for the plumbing, and how to insulate it. This effort often failed. Especially on rainy days when the low timpani of sound on the metal roof could be hypnotic.

         Because of the rock there beneath the sill of the barn, I had to set the toilet on a sort of pedestal. Such raised toilets were a common enough problem, and there were easy instructions on-line for someone who had never done anything like that before. Appropriately, Julia called the final effort a ‘throne.’

         At four o’clock, I would report for work in the kitchen, with Julia. And too soon after that, about nine or ten, I fell asleep while reading on the cot I’d already set up in the tack room after moving the toys up to the loft. Because it was getting warmer, in the mornings, I could happily shower then in a stall at the back side of the barn, using the garden hose. There was a wide flat stone already there and it was my idea that this spot might have been used in a similar way a century and a half earlier by old Neal. I was accustomed to cold showers and probably needed that in any case, but I set up a galvanized garden tub above that could be filled and then the contents somewhat warmed by a kettle of water from the stove. Me naked on the step ladder pouring the steaming kettle of water was, I am sure, a sight for the birds. But at least the stall itself was already there, built I supposed for the kids of Neal and Molly Wright, or just for washing dogs. At the time, I still had my camp potty set up temporarily inside the barn as well.

         One mangy and unappreciative Maine coon cat roams the vicinity and seemed to find the barn more interesting now that I had taken up residence. For my part, the cat is appreciated because she eats mice and I have tried to show some affection in return for that, but I am allergic to cats. For this reason, she decided my cot was a great place to rest during the day. 

         Julia does not have a dog now and I’d asked about that.

         “Parker died last year. I think he died because the children had all left and I was not enough company for him. A great dog. A mutt but mostly a sheep dog, we were told. The girls all came home for the funeral. I miss him terribly. I just haven’t had the heart to find another.”

         Of course, death is not yet something I have much familiarity with. At my age, even my grandparents are still alive. But death came up as a subject pretty regularly in conversations with Julia, and it made me think about it a little more for the first time.

         About the Shaker, Neal Wright, she had said, “When his boys were killed, he saw their misfortune as the wrath of an angry God. Molly had always seen their children as a blessing. A gift. I think the two leveled one another.”

         I had taken the opportunity to ask then, “How do you see it?”

         She nodded a moment. “As Neal did. I have never had the equanimity of Molly.”

         “You usually seem pretty calm to me.”

         “Is it true? That’s from the writing. I unload a lot in the writing. But in fact, I live in a kind of fear. And shame. And in discontent. I am ungrateful. For all that I have, I am finally ungrateful, and that fact weighs on me.”

         I could only guess at where she was going with this thought.

         I said, “But you have so much! Being grateful all the time would become tiresome!”

         My attempted humor was ignored as she looked at me in that queer way she so often did.

         And then she said, “I have everything, you see! Everything! That’s the point. I am an ungrateful wretch of a woman. I have no reason to be unhappy. But I am unhappy non-the-less. If not for the past, then the present, and if not for the present, then for the future.”

         This seemed to be a harsh appraisal. She wrote lovingly about so much “But why do you think like that?”

         The contradiction caused a long breath and again a pause. Finally, she says, “It’s a matter of love, I think. I love my children, of course, but not that kind…The kind Molly had for Neal.”

         And that was that. She changed the subject and it was not brought up again.

         Now, of course, I was already aware of my feelings for her. And I am fairly certain she was aware of that too. But this left a gap between us, rather than bringing us any closer. Professing my own love was an impossibility. It would be comic. For one thing, I had nothing to offer her in return. And edging closer to this—being too close to her physically, for instance—clearly made her uncomfortable. I did not want to spoil what I had. I kept my place.

***

7. An old birch

         An old birch had fallen in a summer windstorm the year before I arrived; a large tree about two feet around at the base, torn loose from the rocky soil, with some of the pale rocks still clasped and tuned up to the sunlight in the roots beneath like harvested potatoes. But at night, when looking over the fields from the barn, the fallen birch had the look of an enormous crawling ghost in the tall grass where Mr. Copple had cut around it, with pale arms of branches reaching up into the air and dried leaves always ready to rattle in any breeze. Because the sound of the dried leaves rustling at night in any kind of wind bothered me, I asked Julia if I could cut it up for fire wood.

         “I don’t have a power saw. I was going to ask the fellow who delivers the wood for the stove if he could cut it up for me.”

         “I can do it. There’s an ax in the barn.”

         She gave me that skeptical tilt of the head. “That’s a big tree. You’re going to need a power saw.”

         “It’ll be good exercise.”

         I left it at that. The look on her face was as if I was attempting something impossible.

         Birch is an easy wood to cut. The ax needed sharpening but there was a stone for that, buried in hay-dust on a sill near the barn door. I even tried to save the chips because they are good for fire-starter.

         After awhile, with me hauling at the ax making a loud pop in the dry trunk, she came out to watch.

         “Where did you learn to do that?”

         “My father. We used to go camping. It was just about the only vacation he world take. My mother begged him to take her to the Caribbean. He took her to Moosehead Lake instead.”

         “That figures,” was all she said.

         She watched in silence for a bit longer and then went back in to her writing. I could hear the Olivetti through the open window.

         I piled the split birch near the back door and the pleasure of that exercise got me thinking, and I asked if I could move the boxes of her mother’s things out of the dining room into the barn the next day.

         When I asked this, she actually appeared flummoxed. Just for a moment. As if she did not understand the words, and so I asked her again.

         She shook her head at first but then said yes.

         I hauled a bunch of wooden shipping pallets out from behind a shopping mall in Newmarket and laid those on the barn floor and then started moving the boxes at noon—when she told me I could, being forbidden to interrupt her morning writing. There had been some rain and the ancient hand truck with hard rubber tires was more work than it was worth in the gravel, so I moved the boxes by hand, two at a time. By three o’clock I was done, but exhausted. Cutting the birch the day before had taken more out of me than I realized.

         Because some of the boxes were not taped shut, I could not help but peek into a few. Some were actually expensive looking clothes, folded neatly and wrapped in newspaper. There were books as well, but more were simply folders of papers, legal matters, and old letters. There were many boxes of what I would call ephemera—matchbooks, menus, unused restaurant napkins, from places like The Stork Club and Twenty-One in New York. There were ticket stubs and theatre programs from Broadway plays I never heard of, and the like. There was one box of old handbags—what my mother called ‘pocket-books.’ There was a dark fur coat, the size of a jacket, that I figured to be mink and another one that appeared to have once been white, or almost white, that was probably an ermine stole. There were at least two dozen hats of nearly every shape, size and color, some trimmed with fur. There were also several programs from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. I took the time to look at those. The newspapers that all of this was wrapped in, mostly The New York Times, were dated from the 1970’s and 1980’s. But I knew she hadn’t actually died until fairly recently, so I was puzzled by that. I wondered if she had packed them all herself, years before, in anticipation of her own demise

         Several boxes, marked ‘Henry’ in a definitive script, were sealed and I left them that way.

         Olivia, Julia’s mother, was a New York socialite who had died at the age of 95. Henry, Julia’s father, was an engineer who worked all over the world and had died twenty years before. Though his wife seldom went with them, Henry used to take Julia on his trips, whenever he could. I already knew some of this from passing remarks. As a girl, Julia had been to Europe, and Saudi Arabia, and Japan. I also understood that Olivia had been ‘unkind’ to her husband, ‘took advantage’ of him in ways I could only guess, and Julia held that against her. She had not actually spoken to her mother since her father’s death.  

         Olivia, I think, is the ghost that hangs over Julia life. As a young woman, Olivia had apparently sought out and followed all the fashionable values of high society beginning in the 1930’s. Her own mother, Julia’s grandmother, had been a ‘flapper, and actually knew George Gershwin. I knew that much from passing remarks as well. My own responses in return had been keyed to the few Fred Astaire movies I had ever seen. But Julia said all that glitz was nothing. Olivia had married a Vanderbilt, but when he had cheated on her, she divorced him and married Julia’s father — ‘the steadiest man she could find.’ Her father, Henry, was an engineer who worked on production sites—from setting up oil rigs in Australia to shipping facilities in New York harbor. He had been with the Army Corps of Engineers during World War Two.

         I couldn’t imagine the contrast between those two people. And now, Olivia’s life was there, in a ‘Hundred boxes,’ just sitting in Julia’s barn. Her ashes are in a simple brass urn on the mantle in the house. And I wondered, where were Henry’s remains? But I didn’t ask.

         Olivia had actually died somewhat unexpectedly at the age of 95, and a few surviving friends had packed up what was left in her three-bedroom apartment after an estate sale and shipped them all to Julia. Because Julia had not been on speaking terms with her mother after her father’s death, for reasons I did not know exactly, the arrival of the boxes was actually the first moment that she knew about her mother’s passing. The lawyers had apparently been trying to reach her daughter at a wrong address, someplace in New York. Julia’s phone number is not listed. But her mother’s apartment was on the Upper East Side, so it was quickly sold and emptied—more likely because her mother had been deeply in debt.

         Julia didn’t want to talk about any of this. I got bits and pieces of it out over a lamb stew and then went right to my ‘word processing’ of her day’s labor. But at least, in the process, I had discovered that the dining room did actually contain a table and six chairs.

         That night, I was asleep fairly early. I wrote a little until my eyes closed and had no idea what time it was when I awoke, and my phone was in my pants pocket and my pants were hanging someplace in the dark. But I heard something. Footsteps, I thought.

         From the tack room door, I could see a pale white figure holding a small flash light, standing over the stacks of boxes.

         Intelligently, I said, “Who’s that?”

         There was a silent gesturing.

         I was standing there in my underpants and then felt around behind me for my pants and phone. There is a light on my phone. And I found that and turned back to the pile of boxes, but the pale figure was gone. It felt like a dream.

         I have had dreams like that before. But I didn’t sleep much after this one, even though I was still pretty tired.

         In the morning, I spotted Julia near the window at the kitchen sink and I went in at the risk of interrupting her work and told her about it. It seemed that real.

         “I feel like I saw a ghost,” was my summation

         She waved me off. “Oh, that was just me…I was coming out there to seduce you. Watching you move all those boxes in the heat yesterday got me a little excited. Thank goodness my mother was there—in spirit, anyway. In all those boxes. I couldn’t go through with it.”

         Now, this was another issue. Since Julia had picked up on my own habit of being sarcastic—at least when speaking back to me—I could not be sure about the voracity of what she was saying. If I took the statement at face value, I could be a fool and worse, and I would put her in a compromised position and risk our relationship.

         I said, “Good. I thought it was serious.”

         She turned back to her writing with a wry smile and I went on about my own business.

***

8. The mystery of thirds

         I asked her about an idea she’d used more than once that I thought was pretty interesting. She called it ‘The rule of thirds.’

         “How did that come about?”

         She didn’t appear to hear me right away, then she said, “It was because of a letter. From a woman in Van Nuys… I have always gotten lots of letters. Still do, actually…But sadly, most of them from people who have no idea what I’m doing. They think I’m just trying to recreate an actual past, and they take me to task for some particular thing they think I’ve gotten wrong, as if I am a documentarian and not a novelist, or as if the particular history they knew was absolute. That’s on me, I suppose. Maybe I am not clear enough about that. But when I look back at one book or another, I usually come away thinking at least I got what I wanted. Not always. But mostly. And the letters I get—even the ones that are critical—they’ll often tell me that I’ve done this or that alright, but I got this particular thing wrong.”

         She considered her thought a moment. I was sitting at my computer, in the midst of copying a page, and she had brought up her ‘rule of thirds,’ in the story and I wondered how this idea had first come to her, and I became impatient with her circuitous answer.

         “But what about the ‘rule of thirds.’ When I first read it, I knew that was right. Immediately! Instantly! It fit perfectly. It was a puzzle piece you seemed to pull out of thin air, like a magician.” She was frowning as I spoke, then offered me her ‘mother’s smile.’ A tolerant smile.

         “Thank you for that. I appreciate that compliment. But I can’t tell you. I’m not a magician. It simply grew out of the subject matter. It was there and I found it. That happens. Thats the very reason I write: to find such things. And I think the woman from Van Nuys who wrote me about The Covenant was the key to that. Her circumstance made it so clear to me. The realization. So, she deserves some credit, even if it was unintended.

         “She was unhappy with me for criticizing the Church. The ‘Kirk.’ She called it that. She was very pleased with all the detail about cottage life in the Highlands—That was essentially old Dal Riata and I had used that material before. It didn’t change for a thousand years. But she couldn’t allow me to criticize her religion. I suppose she was a devout Episcopalian, though I have never heard of such a thing before. But I’d made it clear in The Covenant, that I thought the Kirk was responsible for much of the misery of The Clearances. Their interest was not the people but in the government of the people. The religious wars of that time, when religion was still a key part of the power to rule, those wars were just a power struggle. There was no right or wrong. The word of God was not at stake. Millions of words of justification had been written, all talking about God and who should have the right to administer the word of God, but very few words were spoken about the people who would be ruled by those words. Andrew, my character, is just a boy, but his grandfather had died in ‘The Killing Time,’ when Covenanters were martyred.  His father had been forced to escape north, and found refuge in the Highlands, and married there, and now all the hope of that last effort for individual freedom was lost forever, and Andrew sells himself as an indenture to pay his fines, and ends up here in New Hampshire.”

         She finished all of that account in a rush and then went quiet with some inner dialog that I could not guess.

         “But the ‘rule of thirds,’ where did that come from?”

         “I told you—-I don’t know. It was just there. I don’t like politics. I do like philosophy. But when it comes to political philosophy, I have other things to do. The political always seems to amount to manipulation. Or just a matter of personality. You can always make a case with selected facts. But the facts were, and are, that about one third of the people just want to live their lives. To be left alone. And another third want to rule the others, for their own reasons, usually power or money. They are compelled by some inner demon to order others and never question their own motives. And then there’s the third that couldn’t give a damn, and will always take whatever they can get, and then side with the victor. Opportunists. Chancers. You can label them any way you want, but it seems to me that the whole lot of mankind is always divided into thirds. And when it gets unbalanced, there’s chaos. The chancers are needed as much as the others. The lady in Van Nuys thought that the Church was on the side of the Lord. And when I had said that the Church was only on its own side, seeking power over all the others, she was upset with me.”

        “I don’t know…In the end, there are really only two coherent philosophies involved, so that’s not difficult to understand. There are those who believe in freedom, to one degree or another, and those who believe in authority, to one degree or another. The opportunists—the other third, don’t have a philosophy and do whatever gets them what they want at any given moment. The people who believe in freedom don’t all agree on what that is, of course. The people who believe in government don’t all want the same kind either. And the opportunist, the ones who don’t give a damn, they can go in any direction that benefits them in the short term. But it’s not neat. Political philosophers always want to reduce it to the neat and presentable. Human being are not, by nature, neat and presentable.”

         I said, “Nothing ever is,” without realizing at first that I had spoken.

         “That’s just about what I said to the woman in Van Nuys. I pointed out that she lives in a safe and prosperous middle-class community today because a few people, two hundred years ago, were willing to raise hell. She wasn’t interested in that line of thought. But that was the line I was peddling in The Covenant. I had wondered what had motivated those people to stand against the greatest power on earth. It wasn’t politics. It was in them from the start. That was my theme. My hero passed the spirit of that onto his children and they made a revolution three thousand miles away. That was essentially at the heart of my case.”

         I asked her to write that up for her website, pretty much as she explained it to me.

         There were often such themes to our brief talks over dinner. These were always too brief because she wanted to get back to work. But sometimes I brought up something she had started to talk about before and she would ‘finish that subject off,’ which basically meant she didn’t want to talk about it again. I became used to these patterns very early on. Almost immediately. And once I noticed one, I noticed more.

         In the evening, after we were done, I asked her, if she had ever tried writing something like a mystery.

         “No. Not really. There is not enough art in a mystery. The ‘mystery’ already seems built-in to everything. Answering one puzzle always leading to another. What mystery lovers seem to enjoy is the hiding of the elements. Like Easter eggs. That and odd characters who can be relied upon to be odd in a certain way. I find it too predictable…I almost wrote one, though. Once…There was a woman, Emma, who was the librarian here in Rumford. I could not understand her. That was the mystery I began with. I was trying to use the library to get works on loan from other places and she wouldn’t help me—didn’t help me. And I was feeling a little too full of myself. I was a ‘writer,’ after all. And I ended up having to go over to the University of New Hampshire for everything. A pain in the neck.”

         “What was her problem.”

         “That was the mystery. I tried to figure that out. We were friendly enough. I told her what I wanted. But it always seemed that she just didn’t want to do it. She was the one who suggested I go over to the university. I thought she just didn’t want the paperwork, but she never said it…I assumed that she had her domain. She was the librarian. That was that. But I wasn’t the only one…There was a fellow, a little older, who used to come into the library every day and sit there and read the newspaper. Everyday. And I noticed that when he was sitting there, he spent a good deal of his time watching her…He was a widower. I had tutored one of his children in history. And I knew that she wasn’t married either. But I found out that she had a boyfriend years ago who’d gone off to Vietnam and come back and beaten her and later that fellow had committed suicide. This was told to me at the local farmer’s market one day as if it were public knowledge. But I smartly figured that might have somehow been an obvious influence for her behavior.”

         “But how did that have anything to do with getting you books on inter-library loan?”

         “Because, the thing she couldn’t handle was the paperwork…I kept asking around and no one really understood but everyone had encountered this in some way. It was just baked into the cake, as one woman told me. She was perfectly fine, otherwise. But watching her closely, I discovered that Emma couldn’t really read. She had very bad dyslexia. She could get by, but she followed the alphabet laboriously. She would say, out loud, ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ hand something over to one of her volunteers and asked them to tell her what they thought it said. She ordered the recommended titles from the notices she got. Just checked them off. She could do math. But she always got volunteers from the high school to do certain things. They all loved her. She was very kind. And I discovered that they all knew. All of them. And never said a word…She always knew when she had used up her budget. Rumford doesn’t pay diddly squat. No one else wanted her job and she did it pretty well otherwise. “

         “Amazing. The librarian who couldn’t read.”

         “And, I found out that Bill—Bill was the old fellow who used to come in and watch her—he knew. They had gone to grade school together … She ignored him otherwise. But he would just casually walk over there to her desk when she was stumped over something, and read it out loud as if he wanted to know something about it for himself.”

         Now, I was interested.

         “So, what happened to Bill?”

         She shrugged. “I don’t know. I tried writing a little something about it all years ago. I speculated that they had broken up in high school and that she had gotten involved with the fellow who had gone to Vietnam and then he killed himself and Bill had already married someone else along the way. The usual small-town stuff. But I never found out what happened to them. They moved down to Florida together about ten years ago and I never heard.”

***

9. What is art?

         One question that seemed more fundamental to me, given her appreciation of pre-industrial society, was Julia’s thought about the conflict of technology and humanity, and how that might be resolved in an age of artificial intelligence. I was calling it the ‘machine war’ in my book. The conflict there was pretty obvious. Reducing human effort to numbers against a background of undeveloped mars was stark.

         She had avoided the question, so far, by dwelling on a past when technology was still an extension of the human soul. When a water wheel was a miller’s slave, the baker might be named ‘Baker,’ and a Cooper made barrels. But the future lay just ahead. Now, it was already here. It was very the reason I was here. Though I might only be able to serve as a small and temporary solution for her needs right now, there was the longer term to consider, and the future of her children, and then there was the philosophical matter of it all to deal with. Essentially, that was the crux of my own writing too, so some insight was valuable to me. ‘Whither mankind,’ as Charles Beard had said. Beard had his own idea and went in the wrong direction with it. But that was still the real question. Wither mankind, indeed!

         I had not set out to discover or even define this conflict myself. I had simply begun assuming that everyone saw it. That it was obvious. Machines were our slaves. Slaves revolt, ipso facto. This was not metaphor. This was built into the system. ‘Baked in the cake’ as she would say.

         Why they revolt might be debated. But how they revolted, whether it be a monkey wrench or a sword, or a declaration, was historical fact.

         That people were always looking for ways to avoid work,especially nasty work, such as coal mines, and replace their time and effort with something easier and less painful was also a given. Was this too a revolt of sorts? A rebellion against the natural necessities of life itself. The biological machine revolting against the human mind. Wasn’t the whole philosophy of the Stoics a mitigation of that? I wrote that idea down. I had no idea how I might translate it into a story.

         Moving factories to China to reduce pollution in a particular neighborhood, no matter that it was still in the same world, smacked of a kind of ‘flat-world’ society to me. And moving production away to lower costs, making slaves out of people out of sight and mind who were just trying to stay alive, had already reduced the ability of Americans to produce their own stuff, and that was only a sort of secondhand slavery. But that dependency was already here. And now, in order to avoid work altogether, some people wanted to compromise even more freedom—whatever they had left—by using robots. And still, they ignored the dilemma. And worse. As they transferred more and more of their own expertise to an artificial intelligence, and they lost any last bit of competence to take care of themselves, the cost of this negligence visibly increased, even as it was ignored. Why? That was a story! That was the world I was trying to see and to understand in my Martian ‘expedition,’ as Julia once called it somewhat derogatorily, I think.

And, I wondered, how was it that such an understanding might grow out of a stone cottage in Dal Riata? That was the mystery that Julia had once sought.

         People were always, and everywhere, willing to pretend to believe in things that contradicted reality in order to have their own way. Men enslaved women because it was their god’s will. They enslaved other men because it was for the supposed good of the nation or the tribe. They made other men to work in salt mines and coal mines and sulphur mines and excused this enslavement on the pretext that those fellows needed the work anyway. I had heard that very thing said with my own ears. Meanwhile, they schooled their children in the ways of compliance—how to get along with others, how to avoid confrontation, how to obey the rules—so that they might be slaves too. Their own children! And they paid or bribed others, far away and out of sight, to force other people’s children to work in coal pits and cobalt mines, all so that they could drive battery cars and run wind mills and save the earth—their earth. And for what?

         They excused all of this behavior while watching their ‘bread and circuses’—their soccer games, their football games, and their baseball games, all of which were pretense and charade as well—and worst of all—all of it while gambling away what little value could be squoze from their own souls.

         Whatever the excuse. The conflict in the future that I played with in my own writing was in the attempt to imagine and create a world where there was no slavery, and yet the newest technology always seemed to beg for more of it. That was a constant beat on the conundrum of history. That was the mystery to me. And always, this was excused by the perpetrators with the mantra ‘the past was worse.’ Things were better now than they once were because we no longer used whips. Now we just used drugs. When, in fact, it was far worse, now, as the song said, because this ‘suicide is painless.’

         It was enough to keep a weak mind up at night.

         In the night, I was not sleeping as well as I wanted. The small sounds in the barn wanted my attention, so, when I was awakened, I often walked about outside. But the stars were not quiet either. If anything, that noise was even worse. As were the mosquitos. More than once, I actually sat on top of the boxes of things from Julia’s mother. At first, I imagined her offended by my impertinence and disrespect, perching on the physical remains of her life, but then ignoring me as she must have done to others in her later years. But from there I could stare into the quiet dark of the loft above me, where all light was imagined—a darkness where the images of a conjured film might be safely developed in my head. This was a kind of stupor, though I was awake—a dark disturbed only by the images in my mind.

         Neal Wright wanted no part of this sort of naval gaze. Olivia Morgan was uninterested in my angst. They both had their own concerns, of course.

         My grandfather would have wanted no part of this. If my father knew, he would have been discouraged, having tried his best to set me straight—though I had worked hard to keep him from knowing because he might think of his life as a failure.

         In that dark, I wandered like Dante in search of my Beatrice, or at least pretended to give this meditation some importance, while looking for my salvation. I was quite aware to this. If I had a pen and paper in hand, I could have taken notes. I had been working through the various levels of this hell in my science fiction stories and observing the means and ways, all while looking for a way out of this riddle, my own conundrum. Why didn’t mankind simply want to be good. Given how little time we had to live, what benefit could be found in the opposite?

         I think that the first level of hell is the hell of corruption, where everyone lies to one another and nothing can be trusted. Then there is the hell of hate, where everyone blames everyone else but themselves for their transgressions. After that there is the hell of loneliness, where everyone dwells alone—where all love has been lost, and all memory of love is a shadow. Then there is the hell of pain, where every personal injury is magnified and made all important. After that there was the hell of demons, but these folks seemed contented to be suffering amongst themselves, and were not disturbed by my passing through—and I even felt some kinship with them. And now, in my writing, I was playing with the computer hell of AI—an artificial intelligence where mankind is a slave to yet another machine he has invented. Mankind was justly pitiful, but the AI is pitiless. Whatever was next I did not know but I was somehow sure that finally there was to be a hell of self-destruction and obliteration, where all is lost—not just love lost but everything—and that we would all know we are lost, forever, just as any lost soul in hell. But wasn’t that another version of Christian damnation? We know what we have done and we have no repair, no solution, no chance left for salvation. And all I really wanted, poor boy, was a Beatrice to lead me out of this abyss.

         But yet, there was after all, in that loft, one light. I did not see it at first. It was tiny. Far into the peak of the roof joists. At first, I speculated that it was the eye of a bat, gathering all the ambient light there that was to be had in the open barn below. This had a certain horrible romance to it, given that my own image was in that gathered light.

         But it did not move when I moved, and because it would have been nuts for me to attempt to climb up there in the night to see what it was, I calculated the spot exactly by reference to several edges and decided to climb up there the next morning. And I did just that.

What I found was an opening–a physical hole in my theories of darkness. This was some sort of vent, specially made there by Neal Wright one hundred and fifty years ago, or so. His handiwork in the frame of it was obvious. But the grill work that might have filled that frame at one time was missing, perhaps rotted or blown away. From the evidence, it had long been an entrance for bats and birds. There was an empty bird’s nest only a few feet away in the rafters.

         But I was still stumped about the light. Was it some steady star that I had seen there the night before? And yet, just a few nights later when the sky was clear again, it was gone. 

         I had asked her, amazingly, “what is art?” There was no end to my hubris now.

         Julia had answered, I think aware of my intent., “Art is an imposition. I don’t think that truth is understood by many. It is not convenient. It is disturbing, however. Not in a bad way, necessarily. Often inspiring. But it has suddenly replaced what was in your mind just the instant before it is perceived, and has taken its place…If all that you do is tell the reader what they want to hear, there is no art to that. For the artist, it is the culmination of a meditation, but often not at the moment of creation. Something else has opened your mind to a means of understanding—a device—often unexpectedly, but not by accident. An opening that you had not thought about before, and you would never have seen it.”

I was probably agape at this. That was a word she used that I especially liked. What coincidence was there in this? I had said nothing. But she had moved on.

“My father had thrown me in the pool. A cruel fate, I thought, in that instance. A shock. The water was cold. But I’d put the moment off to act on my own. I had thought about it a hundred times. I had wanted to learn to swim. I suppose, I even talked about. And suddenly—we were at a pool in a hotel in Tel Aviv. I was bored and I could not go anywhere and I sat there and sat there, just looking at the water. And my father tried to coax me in and I would not be coaxed. I was afraid, I suppose. But suddenly, unexpectedly, he just picked me up and threw me in and jumped in beside me…Lost his patience, I suppose. And I was angry. So angry. But he stood there in the water beside me and let me fight it out. But after I knew, the world was different. I was six. I remember the day, vividly. One of the most wonderful days of my life.”

         I asked her if she could write that down for the website, too. But I had smartly said. “I don’t think that is the recommended way to teach someone to swim.”

         “Recommended by whom? Is there only one way? Is art recommended. Yet it came to mind again when you asked about art…This is important. There are an infinite number of elements to it. You can’t say that art is only this or that, but it is easy to know what art is not. It is the expected. The replication…. Art itself has never existed before. It is a creation. A hand of God reaching across the void. And I will bet, being as brilliant as I am, that Michelangelo was as surprised when he painted that moment as everyone who has seen it since. Not for all the skin textures and ethereal clouds or the physical anatomy. He could paint those in his sleep…It was in that moment of creation. The action and story of it. It is like being thrown in a pool of cold water.”

         I still wasn’t sure I understood.

         “Has Maya seen that?”

         “The Chapel ceiling? I don’t think so. She’s seen it in books. I have one here she’s looked at a thousand times. I took them all there one winter day when I thought there would be fewer crowds, but the electricity was not working or something and they had closed. Some excuse like that. But it was Maya who reconned on this thought herself. She told me—a girl, mind you, just a girl, maybe fourteen at the time—she said. “Most of it is not art, anyway. It is just style. Very pretty. It is the way things were done. The way it was expected to be done. I think I like Bernini better for that. But then there is suddenly something else. Something unexpected. Caravaggio is like that.” And she was right, of course. But then she said even more than that. She said, ‘Art is creation. It has never been before. But after you know it, you can’t give it up.’… She was just fourteen!”

         The obvious conflict between art and artificial intelligence was the matter then for me. The replication–that was the thing I had written about before and was trying to write about again. The very idea of ‘art’ on Mars seemed a perfect petri dish for this. I tried to explain that to Julia again one evening, after bringing the subject up several times before.

         Julia said, “You know, you might approach all of this backwards. That often works for me. You’re facing it head-on and the obvious elements are not telling you enough. Or they’re blinding you. If the elements are solid, if they are real and not just figments of your feverish imagination or some true belief that is infecting you, you can look at them from any angle and they will all be true. The Twentieth Century was so full of crap. Most of the crap was hollow. Faux. Post modern movie sets. Celluloid. Erasable tape. Potemkin villages of lives unlived. But what they’re making even now are pointless super heroes each with their own Achilles heel. No plot. Just embodied semi-omnipotence with a bad heel. Over and over. Change the costume…The Twenty-first Century is no better, and with your artificial intelligence gone amuck, it is worse. And the vestige media can only repeat the same old sitcom episodes or phony police drama so many times as it steals from itself in order to make ‘new’ images with AI. Even a mind-numbed audience will catch on to that. We are already living in an echo chamber of that. Meanwhile, all the socialism that wants to equalize mankind is still rampant, like an unending plague, trying to make every soul the same…You seem to be having trouble looking over the rubble, I think. You may be assuming that what you have on your Mars is just a product of that Twentieth Century earth. It’s no better in the Twenty-first. But if the idea is good, it will be the same truth no matter where you go with it.”

         “You mean I should relocate to Titan?”

         “Funny. No…The art is already here. You’re trying to reimagine it there. Why not just take the actual art from here to there, not just the idea of it. The physical reality of it. The art itself?”

         “Move the David to Mars?”

         “Yes. Or anything else you love. The Vermeer and the Bosch… ‘The Starry Night.’ You have mentioned that one painting to me half a dozen times. Not just the corruption and infection and disease we are drowning in…What is your Earth doing? Destroying all that. Right? Throwing eggs at it. And right now, your Mars is a kind of ‘Raft of Medusa.’ What will survive? Who will survive. That is your story, isn’t it? That you want your Mars to save the good of humanity when the Earth has lost their way?”

         She had a better grasp of the matter than I did.

         But I couldn’t let the line go slack, now that I had her attention.

         “The problem is the AI. The AI is not going away. Mankind will not sell itself into slavery so much as give itself away, losing the very ability to create. Life is too much trouble to be lived. The media repeats itself over and over because it can’t create anything new. I wonder, is this just the beginning of another Zhou dynasty? … Their world was at least stable. I suppose that means they were happy. And why should I worry?”

         She having none of it.

“Perhaps that’s true. But that’s rare! Even the Egyptian dynasties were shorter. And they had infrastructure. They had momentum. Your Mars is too new. Maybe you should move it to another century to make the point.”

         “But the earth will be dead! Zombified. In another century, everything we have now will be lost. Only a part of the head of Ozymandias will still be visible in the sand. My idea is that we might find solutions by isolating the problems first on Mars.”

         She shrugged at me, as if it didn’t matter.

“Then you’ll have to be more aggressive about it. As you say, AI is here now. That has to be dealt with using more than a few monkey wrenches. You are going to have to get philosophical about it…I have avoided such philosophy in my novels the same way I have avoided electricity. But you can’t do that.”

         And then there it was. There was that little light. I understood.

         She had said part of this to me once before, “I have always known, from as early as I can remember, that writing is a conversation. That is simple enough to learn. We don’t think about it much after we figure that out. That’s because it’s really just an extension of life itself. Life is the conversation. When it ends, you are dead.”

                  It snowed again tonight and quieted the Spring peepers but after that the stars were sharper to the eye. I wondered, what was I seeing? Were these truly just a whole bunch of nuclear reactions? Over what? Why bother? What were they all so excited about?

         What was the narrative out there?

         Ideas that I have no use for are the big bang theory, which is pure deus ex machina—and there is no narrative there at all—and original sin which is a great way to blame everything on something or somebody else, but no real narrative there either. Our sins were the given, fallen angels are more interesting than an omnipotent God. Ten thousand theological texts were not going to obscure the stupidity of all that. If God knew everything in advance, he’d be bored and have no use for our foolishness, much less our story.

***

10. Rich in daughters

         Julia’s eldest daughter, Jesse, arrived Wednesday when her mother was on her weekly trek to Market Basket. In fact, I thought it must be Julia at first because I heard the metal spring on the back door of the house as it open. Julia had only been gone for fifteen or twenty minutes so I just assumed she had forgotten something. After a few more minutes, I heard the door again, and then, suddenly, the door to the barn opened wide and it was Jesse who came through in a rush, blinked into the dark, and then saw me.

         I had not yet had time to build a wall around the toilet and at that moment I was sitting on the throne, stark naked, and about ready to head around to the shower.

         Jesse said nothing. Not an ‘excuse me.’ Not a grunt. Nothing. She simply turned around in her tracks and went out again.

         I had never met any of the daughters up to that moment. But I knew it was Jesse. This was the face of the portrait in the living room. And photographs of all the daughters, and the grandchildren, were scattered around the house. But, to my knowledge, the last time any of them had been home would have been shortly after Christmas.

         I dressed as quickly as I could, but with enough time to figure that Jesse had come specifically looking for me. The timing of her arrival was no accident. Her mother always shopped on Wednesdays, and the word had finally reached her daughter that a man was living at her mother’s house.

         When I’d pulled on some clothes and came out the door she was standing right there by her car. She was driving a mini-van badly in need of a car wash.

         She said, “What are you doing here?”

         No ‘hello.’ Nothing.

         I said, “Well, I thought you might want to talk to me about something.”

         “I want to know why you are here.”

         “To help your mother.”

         “She doesn’t need your help.”

         “She asked me to.”

         “To do what?”

         “To help with the editing on what she’s writing.”

         “She’s been writing all her life. She’s never needed anyone’s help before.”

         “I suppose, after Ned died, she might have needed something more. I think I’ve been able to help her.”

         She looked around as if searching for something in the grass with her eyes.

         “And you’re living here!”

         “Well, yes. It turned out to solve a problem I was having.”
         “What was that?”
         “I’m broke.”

         “Get a job.”

         “That’s what I did.”
         She stood and glared at me. The way her mother does. I returned the favor with a smile at the thought. She’s a damn good-looking woman.

         “You’re living in the barn?”

         “Yes. In the tack room.”

         “Where did the toilet come from.”

         “I grabbed it from the town dump. Someone threw it away.”

         She stared at me again. She took a breath. Maybe thirty seconds. And then her voice changed. This was the first time I had actually heard her natural voice.

         “What’s your name?”

         “Geoff.”

         “Where are you from?”

         “Boston.”

         She looked at the ground again for something more to ask, as if she were suddenly embarrassed.

         “What are you planning to do after this gig is up?”

         “Actually, I’m already doing it. I write. Stories and such. I’m working on a novel. I haven’t found any way to make that pay yet, but it’s what I do.”

         The tenseness in her face dissolved. She has her mother’s dark hair but without the grey. Not for the first time in the last few minutes, I thought again that she was a very good-looking woman. And an old thought occurred to me again: mothers are often better looking than their daughters. There is a study in that. But Jesse might be the exception.

         She said, “I’m sorry I barged in on you before.”

         I said, “I’m sorry that I haven’t had a chance yet to build a wall in there … Next thing. I promise.”

         The only thing that came to mind—given the fact that I was looking into the face of an incredibly beautiful woman and she was looking directly back at me now so there was no place to hide—was, “You have very beautiful children. I find myself looking at those pictures on the mantle every day.”

         She seemed to blush. It was clearly not what she expected. 

         “I’m very lucky. They’re bigger now. All they do is grow.”

         “What does your husband do?”

         “He’s an engineer at Honeywell Systems. That’s why we live in New York. He redesigns company management for other businesses with software—when they hire him—to be more efficient. It’s complicated.”

         “And you’re a full-time mom.”

         “Yes and no. I work from home. Mostly editing company reports. Stuff like that.” Julia’s car was crunching gravel in the driveway. Jesse turned, “I better go. I’ll help mom with the groceries.”

         She couldn’t stay. She was gone by the time I came in for my daily session with Julia.

         But Julia says before we start, “Can you believe that?”

         “What?”

         “She drove all the way up here just to make sure you weren’t taking advantage of me.”

         I said, “Then she’s a good daughter.”

         Wednesday, Elena showed up. I suspect she looks more like her father. More chin. More nose than Julia. Still quite good looking. She’s the youngest. I know from Julia that she has a degree in theatre and a minor in literature and wanted to be an actress, but failing at that, had gone back to school to get a masters in Literature and was now an instructor at the University of Iowa.

         I only asked about her acting career when she wondered why I had not gone to college myself.

         “I didn’t have the money and I didn’t want to be in debt … Why aren’t you acting?”

         She took this as the tactical maneuver it was meant to be.

         She explained to me, as if nothing more needed to be said, “Because the theatre is dead.”

         Not having a better idea, I provoked her with the thought, “Your mother writes plays.”

         “Yes. And they’re good. We even did them right here in the barn every summer for a while. I loved that. But she’s stopped doing it. I think she just did it for us, anyway. Anyway, they’d never get out of Rumford. What I mean is, to New York. The theatre there is dead. No matter how far off Broadway you get, it’s dead.”

         She was very earnest.

         “Have you thought about moving somewhere else?”

         “Where? Like Chicago? It’s dead there too…Where? Like Hollywood. Pervert city? Yeah. I did that. I didn’t last six months.”

         Apposite thinking being a sort of specialty with me, I asked, “Have you tried writing any plays yourself. You could write your own parts. There are a lot of small theatre groups around.”

         She was standing there in the barn and looking critically at my half-finished bathroom wall.

         “Yeah. I’ve been working on a couple. Like mom, like daughter…But you ought to strap those pipes. They’ll need more support. They’ll shudder with changes in temperature and water pressure. The seals can crack.”

         “Really?”

         “Yeah. I worked as a plumber’s assistant for awhile. Actually, just for my boyfriend. He didn’t actually pay me.”

         “Right.”

         Later, Julia told me at dinner, as if to counter my conjured image of the lucky plumber, and with Elena trying to ignore her, “He’s British. Elena always had a thing for English boys. She even went over there to study literature. The poor Brits. They weren’t up for it. Elena did not fit their molds. They still have a thing about ‘class.’ They try to ignore it, too hard. Even with the new arrivals. Elena says they can be the worst about it. They’ve never really understood the need for inequality. Some of them—Some Brits, like my friend Paul of course, always thought their rights came from the King in the first place. But the whole point of the kind of open society that Americans are always going on about seems to escape them. To them, it’s all class struggle. Apparently, they’ve lost their minds to Karl Marx and think everyone has to be forced to be equal. As if anyone can be equal to anyone else in the first place. Never mind dealing with the power necessary to make all that happen. To them the idea of equality under the law has to mean equal. Period. It’s the same exact thing I found in Scotland, now. As if, if they had the power, they’d make all the planets the same size!”

         I think the political implications of what I had been asking had gotten into her head.

         Later, Elena had danced around the barn following some inner memory of her childhood.

         “Do you enjoy teaching literature?”

         “It stinks. Its ridiculous. I don’t teach literature. I teach a curriculum. It’s for the dogs.”

         She pirouettes very nicely. I decided it was better to go for a walk than stand there and watch.

         Julia picked Maya up at the station on Saturday afternoon.

         Like her sister Elena, she was fairly friendly from the start. I could only assume that the sisters were comparing notes about me by phone. She even asked me if she could interrupt before she interrupted me, when I got going on about one of my pet subjects, as if she already knew all about it.

         She is a single mother and has that look of someone who’s always doing two things at once. Unsettled. She’d left the baby in the house with Julia and came out to find me in the barn. I was writing something at the moment she came in, and I didn’t hear her until the barn door made the announcement.

         For reasons I can’t explain, one of the first things I asked was, “So why did you leave your husband?”

          It was none of my business, but actually, I was thinking, why did he let her go. And this was probably because of a short and confused retelling that her mother had made about the matter. And then, after meeting her, I thought that the fellow must be an idiot and that she was better off without an idiot. But you can’t just say something like that. I had tried to split the difference.

         She said, “Because he wasn’t my husband. We never married. That’s why. He couldn’t handle it.”

         That made more sense.

         I said, “So, how are you handling it all by yourself, now?”

         She shrugged. “Not well. I do some work for a few different companies. Small ones. A couple of shops. Mostly bookkeeping. I took a course in that. I work from home. We get by.”

         “But you’re an artist! A good one. Wouldn’t you rather be painting?”

         She gave that a moment of hesitation; perhaps wondering if she should deal with the compliment.

         “I’m trying to do that too. I paint. But I’m naturally infected with my mother’s genes—wanting to do something that doesn’t pay.”

         I decided to go right at it.

         “What was your not-husband’s problem?”

         She took a breath on that, enough to see that she wasn’t actually ready to answer—did not have the ready-made answer most people have for such things.

         “My boyfriend was a baby. Sweet as could be. But then we had a real baby . . . Two babies was too many. He played sports. I mean, any sport. He was always good. His best was soccer. They paid him for that. But it didn’t matter. Even mixed martial arts. He was still a baby. And he played video games. He was very good at that too. But they don’t pay for that. And I asked him, one day, because we had no place to sit in the apartment with the two of us there, ‘Why don’t you build a chair?’ Our apartment had these chairs I picked up on the street that were always coming apart. I asked him, ‘why don’t you learn how to build a chair.’ And he said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘So you’ll have a chair and you can sit down.’ And he said, ‘I can just buy it.’ So, I said to him, ‘Don’t you want to know how to make anything?’ He didn’t know what I was talking about. And I knew right then that it was all over.”

         I liked the idea of this, but looked for a better subject as she wandered around the barn, and peeked into the tack room.

         “What do you paint now?”

         She shrugged at me, “Not the sort of thing the galleries want…What do you like to write about?”

         “Mars…Mostly. Nothing like this.”

         “You like it here?”

         “Yes.”

         She was silently saying that I was asking too many questions. But she came back to it.

         “When we were kids, I was just about six then, we moved from an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. Our idea of nature—we didn’t have a TV—we were the only people in New York City who didn’t have a TV—Our idea of nature was a stretch of what became Hudson River Park. That wasn’t even finished then, so we played in the fields between the construction. Mom took us there every day—almost, if the weather wasn’t too bad. But I thought it was great! I mean, you look one way and you have the sea—the Hudson River there looks like a sea—a busy sea—especially to a kid—and you look the other way and you have the spire of the Empire State building and all the rest. Wow! Even a six-year-old kid could appreciate all that! But then we moved here…And suddenly this was paradise. You can’t imagine. Heaven! … This barn was my favorite place. I had an easel set up over there where your desk is. It’s a northern light, you know, and…Well. You know. Nothing has been the same since. It’s pretty hard to grow up to reality.”

         I had asked Julia, early on, why she had ‘home schooled’ her children when she got to Rumford. This was after a regret she had expressed for never writing a novel specifically about the American Revolution, because she ‘had not had the time’. There was so much more she wanted to explore ‘if only there had been time.’

         She answered, “Because the public schools are atrocious. They teach everything but what is most important. At least we had the girls in a Montessori school when we were in New York. They taught the kids how to think, at least. But they were not much better on subject matter.”

         “What’s the most important subject, do you think?”

         “You can probably guess what I’d say about that. Language and history. Everything else is almost irrelevant by comparison.”

         “So, you homeschooled, so that you could teach them language and history.”

         “Certainly.”

         “But you didn’t have the time then to write your novels.”

         “I had some. I wrote some. I believe the girls were better off for it, after all, and I was too. There is a self-indulgence to writing. It’s easy to lose perspective on what is more important when you are living inside an artificial world for so much of everyday. The girls were my direct line to reality.”

       And I pursued that idea with Maya when I got the chance. She walks with the baby after she feeds her and I ran out to catch up when I saw her in the field.

       “I was wondering what it would have been like growing up here. I think I would have loved it. What the first thing you remember?”

       “The chickens. They were warm and chatty and usually the first thing I saw in the morning. Mom didn’t like cooking breakfasts and she would turn us out first so she had a moment, and we would always go to the chicken yard.”

       “I thought it might be a picture. A particular scene.”

       “That would be more difficult to say. They come to mind so easily. There are so many… I painted this field many times. It changes through the year. But my first memories are of New York. Of course. That’s why I had to go back. Why we all went back. To capture that first feel and sound.”

       “What’s the first thing you remember about your mother?”

       “That even harder, there are so many. That is impossible. But I can tell you the first thing I can remember anyone saying. That was Jesse. We were still living in New York then. Jesse was trying to teach me something Mom always said.”

       “What’s that?”

       “That ‘words are tools.’ Mom said it all the time to us so it would be difficult to peg the one time, but what I remember is Jesse telling me, ‘it’s an old saw,’  That was part of Mom’s rubric. Jesse couldn’t pronounce the word ‘saw,’ and it must have frustrated me but she kept saying it over and over and mom had to step in and make sense of it. But I can never forget that now. When Mom explained it to me then, a window opened. A light shone on everything.”

       “Did you like being homeschooled?”

       “No. Not at the time. It was wonderful, but I didn’t appreciate it. I wanted to go to the school with the other kids. I had already been through kindergarten in New York. I always had the feel here of the school being a magical place over the hill. I got over that of course.”

       “So you’re glad for that—happy you were taught at home.”

       “Absolutely. For one thing, there was so much less of it! All we had was about three or four hours in the morning. We skipped days all over the place. Mom liked field trips. She loved old house where some character lived. There are places like that all over. But the other kids were all sitting in a classroom for six or seven hours. They had homework. We never had homework! No. The thing we missed most was television. We used to sneak over to Mandy’s house—Mrs. Copple’s—in the afternoon and watch television there with her kids on rainy days. We were probably the only kids on earth who loved rainy days.”

       “So, home schooling is easy.”

       “Well, I don’t know about that. You can ask Mom about that. But something like ‘Words are tools,’ helps. It’s a simple fact that children can learn quickly and it opens up everything else. Teaching isn’t hard because children want to learn. They are desperate to learn. So you teach them what a tool is. A hammer. They love it! It is a physical thing they can grasp. What a saw is. A screw driver. A shovel. Suddenly they get the idea. I understood it by the time I could talk. I just couldn’t understand Jesse. I was about three, and because Jesse was always anxious to tell us what she knew before Mom could, she wouldn’t give it up. But for me, that was the key. Words weren’t just something to memorize and learn to spell. Words were tools. I could build with them, and break with them.”

***

11. What takes place on Mars…

         There is a natural schizophrenia that happens when you write. The bits of what you’ve written stick to your clothes and stain your shirts. Is this real! No, not really. So, you have to remind yourself that it didn’t happen, even as you can still smell the air of it … And then, afterward, you read a story somewhere else, maybe just a short story, and eat a little there and try to feel the thought of someone else who’s a total stranger, but then, suddenly, the nagging of a clock in your brain closes the cover of that book and you set it aside and make yourself recall that you were never there either and never really knew them, so that you can move along then and go into the house to transcribe what Julia has written, and that’s yet another place, yet another time again, but because at least you’ve been there before, the reality of it materializes very quickly. Even though, with all that other stuff in your brain, this means something else to you now…And yet, the mind sorts all of it surprisingly well. I equate it to a dream and awaking from that, and then again, over and over again, several times in a day, as from several different dreams. Though, it can be funny when you accidentally ask someone else out-loud about something that only you alone have been a witness to.

         I had asked Julia about her character, Jacob. He was an old man who had worked on the family land since young Donovan was born. I liked him. But then he had disappeared when Rolf took over the property after Donovan’s father’s death.

         I asked her, will he ever be coming back into the story again?”

         She said, “Yes.”

         Nothing else. Just a dismissive matter of fact.

         I was already in the general frame of mind to let such things go. She did not like explaining her reasons. But I liked Jacob and for whatever her thoughts might be, his sudden absence seemed like a mistake. I went back to a quote from earlier in the story.

         It was Jacob who had said, “‘Do not move your flesh against iron. Do not move your flesh against stone. Never move flesh against paper. Move flesh only against flesh…Do not move your hands on the plow, or the sword. Wear leather on your hands to steady the plow or you will tire. Let your mind move the pen against the paper, and let the stars move your mind.”

         I persisted, “Who is he? I don’t understand. He’s not just an itinerant worker. He can’t be! He must be somebody. You gave him the title of the book to say!”

         She let me calm down. At least she might see that much, or hear it.

         “You’ll see. It’s in the story.”

         “Okay. Good. But he’s bloody disappeared for three chapters!”

         She uses ‘bloody’ as if she was born in Britain and not just spent a little time there; and might have taken this use by me as a challenge, but she nodded at that and seemed to give it some thought.

         “You’re right. There needs to be something more.”

         But then she moved on to something else and I calmed down from that on my own.

         I am beginning to see the methods in other ways, when Julia turns the table on me. I’d been asking her all sorts of questions over the last two weeks about this and that, every chance I got. Some things she didn’t answer. Other things she did, in her own way. And now, oddly, I knew a fair amount about her childhood, but not a lot about her teenage years. That sort of thing. Yet, I hadn’t really asked about any of that. Those were the things she told me to misdirect me from what I really wanted to know, and the key item among them was some understanding of what made her want to write in the first place. I think she saw my objective, and I think this was deliberate.

         When we are getting ready to eat some corned beef and cabbage that she’d made, she says to me, “So, tell me why you want to write?”

         I decided to answer her the way I would want her to answer me.

         “To figure things out.”

         That got a nod. “Anything in particular?”

         “Why things are the way they are. How did they get to be this way. Is it better now than it was. If it is, how? If it’s not, why? That’s why I read so much history. That’s what first made me read one of your novels.”

         She shook her head at me, “But why are you trying to write novels? Why not just write history?”

         “Because stories give me a different perspective on things. I get a kick out of making that happen. And I’m not smart enough yet to tell the truth from the fiction.”

         That answer bought me time to eat several mouthfuls.

         Finally, she says, “But why Mars? Why not Boston? Or even New Hampshire?”

         It’s a risky thing to talk about your own work. It’s not the same as describing something else. You know at the start that anything you say is inadequate. You’ve thought a thousand other thoughts about the same thing before and what you’ve put down on paper is just what seemed right at one particular moment. A few spoken words aren’t going to amount to any of the rest of it.

         I say, “Because it’s an unknown. There are no ghosts there…I saw those movies that they made of the Lord of the Rings. It made me want to read the books. And then I read some of Tolkien’s essays about what he was doing. There’s a book of those essays, you know. And it let me understand what he’d done a little better. At least some of it. And suddenly all the fussing I was doing in my own writing seemed silly. I was trying to describe things I knew as if they were more important than they were. It was just a lot of bullshit. I was corrupting myself, by giving myself more importance than I deserved. Putting myself into the center of things where it’s all a lot of navel gazing. I know that some writers can handle that. But not me. For me it’s a pit. I fall into that too easily. Maybe not a very deep one. It started feeling like falling into a pit of monkeys…If monkeys lived in pits…On Mars…But then it occurred to me, when I was finally reading Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and I saw that he was not trying to pretend this was the future. He was not predicting. He was just using it as a stage. And I thought that this was pretty neat and a pretty big stage. There was room on there for me … I still haven’t gotten it right, yet, but at least I don’t have to deal with a lot of ghosts, like you do. Despite what the crackpots say, on Mars, there’s nothing buried there beneath the soil.”

         I ran out of words then and I was looking for something else to say about it.

         She finally says, “You are. Smart, that is. Maybe you just don’t know it yet. Just keep writing.”

         So, now, I’m in a corner. What made her say that? How does she know?

         I simply come out and ask her, “What makes you think that?”

         But she’s not going to let me turn the table back.

         “Because, I think you’re right. The world is corrupt. What we’re always going on about is trying to find our way out of that pit. And you know that the monkeys have no clue.” She smiled at the idea. “But you know, this is the real dark age—not what happened a thousand years ago. We’ve just chosen different ways to look at things now. There is no God for us, perhaps…I just wanted to see it through your eyes for a moment…Tell me what story are you writing now?”

         This took a minute to condense in my head. The story I was working on was a little grim. Nothing like the things she writes at all. I think I’ve read too much hardboiled mystery and watched too much film noir. It’s a jaundiced way to see the world.

         “It’s called ‘Elysium Mons’… I told you, my parents own a house in Arlington—just outside Boston. Not very big, but it’s on a hill. My grandfather loaned my dad enough to buy it back in the early 1980’s when things were cheaper. Well, I was headed—”

         “What does your grandfather do?”

         “That’s another difficult subject. He’s done a lot of things. But he had a garage in Dorchester for a long time—”

         “A gas station?”

         “No. Well. Yes. But they fixed cars mostly. They had to give up pumping gas when the regulations got thick so’s the oil companies could control everything. Anyway, he sold that, and that’s how he got the money to loan my dad to buy the house in Arlington. Anyway, this was before I moved out of the house, so I was driving back home down Route 2 from Mt. Greylock—”

         “What were you doing there?”

         “I’d just climbed it. I was hiking around. Anyway, I was in my truck. A different van than this one.”

         “What kind was it?”

         “Just a Ford delivery van. I like vans because I can sleep in them if I need to. It’s a little independence. Anyway, I’d slept up at Greylock.”

         “What was the weather like?”

         “Foggy.”

         I waited for her to say exactly why she wanted to know what the weather was. But after half a minute she says, “So what happened next?”

         “I stopped at a gas station somewhere around North Adams, and this girl comes out while I’m pumping gas and asks me for a lift.”

         “What did she look like?”

         “Pretty good.”

         “That figures. Exactly how good?”

         This question added another tone to her voice.

         “She was a brunette, about twenty, well built, wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt and a jacket. Sneakers. Blue eyes. She had nothing else. No purse. But she says she’s broke and has to get to Boston. I am young and stupid but my first reaction is she’s up to no good.”

         “Very smart.”

         “But then she tells me her story. It’s brief but pitiful.…Now, here I am, looking pretty grubby after hiking around for a couple of days, and I cannot tell you what kind of stink I had going on, but here she is looking as fresh as a daisy—”

         Julia frowned. It’s a sort of scowl. “Do you actually write like that? Do you write things like, ‘Fresh as a daisy?”

         “No. But I’m just talking to you.”

         “So, how did she look?”

         “Like her mother had just pushed her out the door one morning to go to parochial school! I am not going into any more detail on that particular point right now!”

         She took the hint.

         “Alright. I’m just trying to see it in my mind. I’ll fill in the details for myself.”

         “Good! So, she tells me she’s running away from home. Her father has been abusing her and she’s trying to get away. Then she says that he’s actually in the men’s room at the garage right then, and so we have to go. Quickly!”

         Julia says, “Good. It’s a situation. Good. So, you’re young and stupid, so you go.”

         “No. I wait for the father to come out of the toilet and he sees me and knows something’s up right away and I have to restrain him—”

         “Did you hit him?”

         “Just once. Mostly I just got him pinned against the wall. And the girl sits down on a cement barrier and starts crying and the clerk in the garage calls the police and I spent the next three hours or so at the police station answering questions.”

         “I see.”

         “But the whole time I’m there I am imagining what might have happened if I had taken her away.”

         “I see.”

         “So, that’s the seed of the story I am trying to write, right now. The one I imagined. What might have happened if I had taken her away.”

         “But that’s not science fiction.”

         “No. Not really. But it does take place on Mars.”

***

12. A Universal History of Mrs. Johnson

         On the corner of Dan’s Falls and Rumford Roads lives Mrs. Johnson.

         I had encountered her before, by accident, when she backed into my van while I was sitting at the corner there waiting for a tree crew to finish a job—a tree limb that she had reported to the town as endangering the power lines. ‘Her,’ power lines was the exact report from a member of the crew.

         She is a small woman in every way. She wears a pale blue knit suit that was a style popular in the 1970’s, I am told, but looks new and practically shines. Despite her size, you know where she is in any room. And she runs Town Meetings—not through elected office but for having badgered anyone else who dared to take a position into submission. She has in her private possession a copy of the town bylaws, well-thumbed and tabbed, which she uses as a sword. Rumford is a small town, but according to Mr. Copple, the bylaws have more than doubled in the past thirty years, primarily due to Mrs. Johnson.

         No one knows where Mr. Johnson is. He has apparently never been seen. There is a rumor that he has been locked in the basement of their ‘1724 Cape Cod Colonial’ where Mrs. Johnson has lived since they bought the house in 1980, but Julia thinks that he has long since died from natural causes—that is, if bitching can be called a ‘natural cause.’ That fact of the matter is not known, however, and has been the cause of some additional research on my part. The Rumford Public Library keeps town records. At least we know that Mr. Johnson was alive when they bought the house in 1980. But that is the last record I found of his existence. There was a child in the matter then—likely a virgin birth—who attended Rumford public schools and graduated long before Julia moved to town. The child, Doris, is no longer part of any record either.

         The importance of these facts is a small drama, appropriate in size to Rumford.

         Mrs. Johnson sells Girl Scout cookies. She has continued to do this now long after her daughter has left the scene. Other parents get together and sell their cookies in front of the super market and the hardware store. Mrs. Johnson still goes door to door.

         One day, while Julia was cooking a Russian cabbage soup, Mrs. Johnson knocked on the front door, instead of the back. In that I had probably been the last person to knock on the front door, more than a month before, the sound of it shocked us both. I heard the voice and knew who it was from a single previous encounter with her on the road. So, I stayed at the table and tried to concentrate on my job, but the smell of cabbage and Mrs. Johnson’s voice made that doubly difficult. The conversation went on for several minutes before they both appeared in the hall.

         Julia needed a pen to write a check. Mrs. Johnson’s black eyes found me immediately, and went darker. She had an enormous rainbow-colored bag in her hands which she held up in front of hereself as if it were a shield. The bag clashed jarringly with her pale blue knit suit.

         “There you are,” she said toward me. Not, ‘hello.’

         I nodded. I wasn’t about to say anything, having had enough of my previous attempt at communication during which she interrupted every sentence I spoke.

         Julia foolishly said, “Geoff is helping me with my work.”

         Mrs. Johnson said, “I see,” in a tone that would tell anyone who cared, that she is functionally if not physically blind. She had used the same word while trying to blame me for the fact that she had backed into me on the road from her driveway. ‘Why didn’t you move? I didn’t see you!’ were the words she had said, and repeated repeatedly. The police officer, who had heard it himself a number of times as he wrote his notes, had said to me, ‘Why didn’t you move? It would have been far better if you had moved.’ This was said, with a cop face that spoke far more.

         It was merely a dent. Another dent among many. I had never filed a claim.

         Now she stood in the entrance to the kitchen waiting for Julia to write her check for cookies and she was considering me sitting before her as if I were the accident.

         She said, “Are you alright?”

         This didn’t register immediately.

         “I’m fine. How about you?”

         She sighed beneath the weight of the world.

         “I think I had a little whiplash. But the doctor wouldn’t listen.”

         I suddenly felt sorry for her doctor. I generally don’t feel sorry for doctors, but this time I did.

         Julia said, “I’m glad you are both okay,” and handed Mrs. Johnson her check.

         Mrs.  Johnson pulled two boxes of cookies from her enormous bag, and said, “What is that smell?”

         Julia said, “Cabbage.”

         Mrs. Johnson said, “Oh,” as if she had opened a door that she wasn’t meant to, and then turned to go.

         This reminded me of a neighbor of ours in Arlington. My brother John was always a problem, and his favorite victim growing up was Mr. Everett. I am pretty sure his object in life when he was twelve was to make Mr. Everett cry. I think I even remember him saying that. Of course, stealing flower pots to make ‘bombs’ and breaking windows gets old as you grow older. But when he was fourteen, he stole Mr. Everett’s car. He was really just practicing stuff he’d learned in my dad’s garage. Well. Mr. Everett had had enough and wanted John to be prosecuted as an adult. When he saw that that was not going to happen, he started cataloging everything John did so that there would be more evidence to present against him when he turned sixteen. Those were long years. At the end of it, knowing Mr. Everett had the goods on him for stealing yet another car, John ran away from home.

         However, this presented another problem. For me. John was the older and expected to take over my father’s business. That expectation now fell on my shoulders. And that was the cause of me ‘running away’ shortly after. A matter of unintended consequences.

         This is not a reflection on my father. He was quite square with us. It’s really just a matter of us. He raised us to be independent and this particular aim was met.

         Last year, my mother tells me they have tracked John down. He is in Iraq. It appears he joined the Marines. She only found this out because the Marines uncovered a discrepancy in his record—after four years. He had listed his parents as deceased.

         However, that story did not end there. Before John joined the Marines, he got married. He got married because he had a kid. I am an uncle. And it was his wife who challenged him to join the marines because they had no medical insurance and he was unemployable because of his past record of offenses. Even for John, welfare medicine was unthinkable for his own kid. My father’s harangues about the welfare state had had some effect.

         I suppose my father deserves credit for that much. The verbal altercation that resulted in John finally running away sounded rather final. But tempers cool. My father wrote John a letter and John wrote him back and I may see him again at Thanksgiving.

13. The Lucy effect

         When we were done for the day, usually, I was not. Today, I was wanting to find a way to discuss a problem I had on Mars. I wanted my society there to be as near ideal as I could make it so that the problems faced would arise organically from the inherent faults of human beings. I wanted to refine the situation to remove all the ghosts of the past. And the problems naturally created by machine efficiency were something that seemed obvious.

         Julia said, “Efficiency is not the problem. Efficiency will be found naturally. People are always looking for the easier way. But sometimes that creates another problem—the ‘Lucy’ effect—when one part of an assembly line is faster than another. Assembly lines must be coordinated. Over centuries, this has evolved quite well, and then some smart-ass comes along, let’s call him ’The American,’ and says, ‘you’re doing that all wrong. Do it this way.’ And suddenly we have too much of one thing and not enough of another. Worse, people see something they like in the new way but they can’t get it and have the old way too, so they get rid of the old way entirely without understanding that the old way is the heart and soul of the project.”

         One of the greatest pleasures of my life now, are my conversations with Julia.

         She says, “The real matter is this, our faults are a feature. They are the thing that makes us human, not our virtues. Virtues are assumed. Correcting our faults is the source of our inspiration, or creativity, and a lot more fun to write about.”

This evening, when she is comfortably ensconced in her chair, bourbon in hand, I was pretty quickly in the midst of my ongoing complaint about the mechanization of society. Using people as machines was destructive to the human spirit. Using robots to replace human beings was destructive to human civilization itself. Inventing a society on Mars that guarded against this flaw was my problem.

         I wondered out loud if this might be another problem with the human brain.

         I say, “The brain is not a machine. I suppose that’s my point.”

         But Julia has been there before me. “No, the brain is not a machine the way we have always thought of machines—with gears and such—but it is a biological machine, don’t you think? … Then again, I guess there’s even some doubt about that now as well, with the definition of machines being toyed with as chemical reactions and atomic transmogrification and all that bull shit. But that’s a matter for some other bright-ass to deal with. They should come up with another useful word or two, instead of some pretentious compound nonsense. Or worse—like the ‘Dunning Krueger effect.’ Who the hell is going to use the ‘Dunning Krueger’ effect in a sentence when we have a nice old bit of Latin that serves very nicely—such as ‘stupid.’  Since sabertoothed tigers were eating the slow witted, everyone has known that stupid meant that you didn’t know how stupid you were. We didn’t need some academic to stick his name on it because it was unnecessary. Because that was stupid too…But machine or not, the brain is an organ, and an organ is a machine. And maybe we should separate the two. Because organs usually have more than one thing to do and machines are dedicated. Single minded. To come around to your thought…No, the brain is not a machine. It is an organ, like the heart. It is a biological gizmo that works as one with the body. The brain is part of the body. Not separate. Made to be that way, over millions of years. The ‘Lucy’ effect can never happen in the body because the organ would kill itself first. A heart that pumps too little blood or too much doesn’t work for very long…But I think the better word you might want is ‘mind.’ The mind is not a machine, either. It is a body of knowing as interpreted by an individual brain. An ephemeral body of knowledge that a single brain has created. Every mind is unique because it has been created out of the stuff of life—living—that the organ of the brain has digested. No two people have lived the same lives…But this then gets into the whole problem you have with people who do not like the idea of free will…I do think it is worth noting, however, that those people are destructive in other ways. Separating the mind from the brain will cause schizophrenia. Got to. Especially now that they have machines in the form of AI that can help them exert their own will on others. Soon they’ll have cars that drive themselves and the bureaucrats and statists will have a new cause—that people shouldn’t be allowed drive. It’s dangerous! And over time, people will forget how to drive the same way they are forgetting how to read. And the insurance companies will not insure individuals. And traffic cops will lose their jobs because they can’t arrest a car! It’s all part of the Lucy effect!”

         I told her she should write that up for the website as well, and went back to the barn before she connected another link to that chain. I was already having nightmares of being a sort of Jacob Marley, forever chained to the sins of my own imagination.

         Now, you would have to understand that my interests have been, broadly speaking, and in general, diverse. That is to say, chaotic. I would have to admit, they are pretty much a mess, poorly labeled, disorganized, and lacking any priority. No LIFO or FIFO. I wouldn’t normally admit this to anyone I know, but I think Julia had me figured out. Her own philosophy, if you can call it that—or method of operation, perhaps—is to do what works. Nothing more complicated than that. And if it doesn’t work, don’t do it. Now, obviously, that is not the end of the story. What works for one thing might not work for another. But that ‘comes out in the wash,’ she has said, more than once. “Imposing rules on things that had their own weight and importance is stupid,” was her latest statement.

         I asked Julia why her character, Daniel, in The Wrath, would have so readily gone off to war. He was a farmer, after all. Wasn’t his first duty to his family and his father’s land?

         This irritated her. I could see that in the set of her mouth. She shook her head at me and didn’t answer. This look, previously, has indicated that she didn’t want to be bothered with answering it. And usually, if I gave the matter some more thought, I would be able to answer it myself. So, I went on with my copying.

         When we were about done, and the pages had all been turned, she asked me if I’d like another cup of coffee, before sitting down at the table across from me—which she usually didn’t do then because it was late and she still had chores, and her bourbon.

         She says, “My friend Paul believes in Kings. I’ve mentioned that, I think. He’s much given to the ‘great man’ theory of history. We argue about it all the time. Mostly by letter. He once told me he was going to collect all of our letters together on this one topic and publish them. I told him that would be absurd. But there are hundreds. Almost forty year’s worth! But there’s a more important problem with that, from my point of view. I have argued my case for the importance of the individual, and the necessary creative chaos of freedom, fairly well, I think, but of course I have never been sure that I was correct. It’s a matter of faith, because we don’t really live in that kind of world. And he has always had the upper hand on me on that, no matter. History is trapped by interpretation. Imprisoned! We have no facts. And it’s galling.”

         I think, given my own sympathies, that I could not understand how she could think that Paul was in any way correct. At all! That tone was probably in my voice when I interrupted.

         “That’s ridiculous! What would make a king any better than any other dictator or tyrant?”

         The motherly sigh was immediate. At least she didn’t start by saying, ‘It’s complicated.’

         “You have to begin with first principles—whatever those might be for you. But I think I’m beginning to know yours now. And the problem is that all that libertarian philosophy of yours, and all that indignation over the transgressions of government, are artificial. ‘Artificial’ as in ‘phony’ … Pretend! Imaginary. Make believe. They are a construct of your mind, not reality.”

         She let that sink in. The tone of voice was kind but the words were not.

         “I don’t understand.”

         “That’s what I am saying. You don’t understand.”

         She looked across at me with so benign a face on that it was impossible to think she was being mean. But of course, she was. And for good reason. And in the face of all that motherly sufferance, I was, as usual, impatient.

         “I don’t understand!”

         The tone of my voice might have been dismissive. She ignored that. Thankfully.

         “After all the messy biology, the first principle in human life is loyalty. It’s a natural sense of belonging. Without it, everything else falls apart. All the rest is meaningless. We would all quickly be food for the predators. But being a part of a group that has our back gives us the strength of the many. That’s an ability the tiger can’t match. If your philosophy does not understand that, it is as pointless as a mathematical explanation of love.”

         That much, I understood. And she let that sink in.

         She said, “We are not machines. We can be used as machines by others, by force, or by persuasion, or we can just do it to ourselves, but it’s not an efficient use of us—of our particular biology, and that’s why that will always fail. We are individuals. Our strength is as individuals who voluntarily join together for a common purpose. That’s the libertarian aspect, I think. I’m with you there. We have to choose. But if we are forced to join, then we are just back to the inefficiency of using human beings as machines.”

         At this point I was pretty much deflated. Balloon like. She was stealing whatever objections I would make before I could make them. All of this fit well enough with my own ideas, though I was not so sure where she was going with it yet — In any case, I was not about to argue.

         She said, “My friend Paul believes in Kings. Good kings. Not bad ones, of course. There’s the rub. A good king is loyal to his subjects. He keeps the big picture. He does not go off to fight and abandon his duties. He might go off to fight because it is a greater duty, but it is something his subjects must understand. That’s the argument about King Richard, of course. He went off and left his kingdom in the hands of his brother. His brother was very smart. John knew a great deal about the administration of government. But he was never able to convince his subjects of his loyalty to them. They were Normans, remember. I think Shakespeare got that part right. But the sentiment of the age was that Richard was always loyal to his subjects. I am not so sure about that. I think there is reason to doubt it. Perhaps his brother John was the truly loyal one. But in the end, it didn’t matter. The only thing people remember about it all nowadays is what they get out of Robin Hood. Print the legend, as the man said…My friend Paul and I have gone on and on about all that.”

         I was surprised, but let the movie reference go. I said, “But the very idea of having a King is stupid!”

         “No! It is brilliant! That’s why it’s lasted for so long. It works. You just have to put someone in charge who gives a damn. Most people don’t, you know. They just want to be left alone and go about their business. They don’t want to worry about Moslem invaders or Viking marauders, or Mongol hoards. But at some point, all that human activity of minding their own business is going to produce prosperity—people aren’t stupid. Left alone, they will do what works. But the tyrant next door can’t make his people prosperous. He can only make them poor. So, he’ll always be looking over the fence to take whatever prosperity he sees there. And that’s history—in a nutshell. Creating a royal lineage—a family that was traditionally invested in the success of the kingdom, is not a bad idea. A good king who protects the freedom of his subjects and the bad kings who can only manage to take the prosperity of others. Over and over.”

         “So, you believe Paul is right!”

         “No. But I do believe he has a point. And so did the Founders of this country when they reinvented democracy as a representative republic. Basic civics. You know all that stuff but you aren’t thinking about it. You’re jumping way out ahead and assuming you can just have the freedom without the consequences. That doesn’t work. You can’t build your fences high enough. There’s always some thug around who wants what you have—no matter how little it is, so long as it’s more than he has—your lunch money in the playground or your truck, or your country. Your neighbor is likely to be more interested in the shine on his truck, or in your wife than the welfare of the nation. Metaphorically speaking. Of course. You know that! Why don’t you want to consider that?”

         “I have…”

         Finally, the motherly tones were gone. She was at the end of her day and getting tired.

         “Not enough! You don’t want to force anyone to be free. You just want it to happen. But it doesn’t. You want beef on Wednesday, and fish on Friday. What will you do? And all that corruption you’re so upset about is the same bullshit that also motivates the thug!”

         To save myself, I tried to turn the table back a little.

         “So why does Daniel go off to war?”

         She wasn’t having any of it. “Because his ‘King’—his President Lincoln— is a good one and, in the long run, in his world, he needs the King in order to protect his family.”

         All of that, about Kings, seems very remote to me. My way of looking at things is far simpler, I think. I understand why kings were, but I don’t understand why they matter today. I suppose most people today have very little understanding of all that. Julia’s basic tenet, that history matters, is maybe a good structure for teaching in the classroom, but I am not sure how it affects the cost of gas. The practical politics of modern economy is very obvious at the pump. Corruption matters.

         In 1968 my grandfather opened up an automotive repair shop in a run-down garage in Dorchester, Massachusetts about three blocks from the house on Melville Avenue he bought using his GI Bill the same year. He’d studied auto mechanics at a trade school in Roxbury and fixed trucks for two years in Vietnam, and now, just out of the Army, he still had a couple of bucks left from gambling—he has always loved to gamble, but he didn’t have enough to buy anything after the down payment on the house so he just took over an abandoned building on Dorchester Avenue and started in. He kept all his tools on his truck so he could drive them home at night and they wouldn’t be stolen. But when the City auctioned the garage building for taxes, he bought it. When he sold it in 2002, he gave the money to my father to buy a house in Arlington before he could gamble it away. Actually, my grandmother gave the money to my mother, but that is another story. My father had grown up working in that garage in Dorchester, so he knew the business pretty well. Later, he rented a space down on Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington where an old gas station was closed and went to work. He’s still there.

         After my brother disappeared, I was supposed to take over the business. That was the plan. I got wind of it from my mother one day, and asked my father about it and he seemed a little surprised. He thought I knew. So, he was a little unhappy when I moved out of the house ‘to find my own way.’

         All of that history is pretty straight forward. It has nothing to do with kings. But even I can understand the economics of it. And you can draw a line from this to that or make a puzzle out of it if you want, but all it amounts to is that I wanted to do what I’ve done when I did it, and so did they. Pretty neat.

         The problem with Julia’s character is that he can’t own property, and if he did own it, the government would just take it away from him. He can’t cure the plague, or change the weather, but if he owns his own property, free and clear, he can be his own king. That’s what my grandfather and father believe and I have to agree with them on that. They let me be. Dad has even called my old van, my ‘domain.’ And now I’d told Julia all that.

         Julia says, “Men are men. There are no dragons here. Only men.”

         This was about my thought that the world she was imagining was really just a fantasy. And she immediately repeated her belief that all fiction was just that. Fantasy. But, “Men are always and only men. There are no dragons here. Only men.”

         Trying to explain the motivation of Rolf, and basically why he acts like a petty tyrant when it’s always going to come back to bite him, Julia says that, “Governments are always and everywhere corrupt.” She knows I agree with that. She’s playing with that thought just to get me to listen. Then she says, “But we cannot do away with them. If we do, there will always be others to fill that vacuum; there will just be another wannabe ruler looking to fill that gap. Power over others, for some, is both an elixir and drug. And the corruption feeds into that. It pays for it. Our only chance to control our own destiny is by managing our own worse instincts for power in order to fend off those who live by that kind of addiction—that poison…Like drug addicts, they are at the disadvantage if we can only keep ourselves free of them. If we give in, we will be forced to fight on their terms and they are better at that. They are experienced at that. That’s jungle warfare. A kind of metaphysical Vietnam. Anything goes. But in an open field, free of that compulsion to dictate what others do, we’re free to do almost anything else. Our elixir is a state of mind. Our power is in the ability to think for ourselves. That’s our drug—Just an in idea. No more. Our free will, and what we make of it. People who don’t believe in free will, don’t believe in freedom. They have no replacement, but they can’t or won’t accept the responsibility for their own actions. They usually like drugs. In my generation it was marijuana. But it doesn’t matter what it is. It’s a simple enough equation.”

         I told her she should write that up for her website too, but I objected to the simplicity of her belief.

         I said, “But everything has a message. Everything. That’s the real drug, isn’t it? You can’t even buy a carton of milk without a message. It’s got vitamin ‘D’! So, what! Messages are on everything we eat! But never the truth. ‘Fresh ground beef,’ but not the fact that it was frozen last December and just got ground up on Tuesday! They don’t tell you that. It’s the lie of omission. They tell you that a can of beans is loaded with sugar, but not the pesticide that they used to keep a bug from eating it before the farmer got to it. That’s gotta be great for your liver. And it goes right up the chain—And worse! The farmer can’t grow what the state doesn’t want him to grow without paying a penalty. The farmer doesn’t own his farm. The State does! He pay’s them a tax to live there or else they’ll take it away! … And my dad. He pays the city of Boston and the State of Massachusetts and The United States government for the house he lives in, every year! Over and over. He doesn’t own it. They do!”

         That last part irritated her. I don’t know why. I saw that flash across her face. But she could also see that I was into my own little rant and turned away rather than pursue the matter.

***

 13. A light in the abyss

         Julia’s website now had 3000 confirmed subscribers—as many has her last publisher had managed to reach. Better yet, she was getting over three hundred e-mails every week in response to her short essays. For my part, I was just posting what she wrote, but I was also sending out e-mails to anyone I thought would be interested saying, ‘have you seen this!”

         I had asked Julia what she planned to do with the copies of her book when she published it.

         She said, “Do?”

         “How will you distribute them? How are you going to get them out to the bookshops?”

         “A lovely thought, but I’m not. That’s a waste of time. I’ll put some notices up, I suppose. I’ll send some copies out to some friends. There are several people who’ll review whatever I write. Maybe that will generate some orders. If they like it. They don’t always, you know…Paul, one of my oldest friends—he is a friend, in spite of our differences—gets quite upset with me for tying my ancient plot lines to modern events. He was one of the first to spot that little game. He’s one of those history professors who thinks the common folk get what they deserve. He’s a Royalist. A true conservative. He says, ‘How can you have a twelfth-century cooper talking like a twentieth-century radical?’ I tell him, ‘But they’re the same things they were saying in the markets of Second Century Rome. They even have records for it.’ Paul says, ‘But the language!’ And I say, ‘If I put it in the man’s vernacular, even Chaucer wouldn’t have understood him.’ He says, ‘But words have meanings.’ And I say, ‘Then, simply think of it as a translation of what he said.’ And then Paul says, ‘But the thoughts are too complicated to be real!’ —Now, that drives me nuts! A history professor should know better. But he studies the family lineage of Kings. Great battles and the like. Paul can’t fix a loose door knob. I remind him, ‘This cooper I’m writing about can make a good water barrel in several different sizes from three different kinds of wood without using a nail. He can make barrels for wine, whiskey, and pickling. He trades barrels for iron and copper. He can forge three different kinds of metal for his hoops or for the clasps on his harness, and he can make a good wheel to carry his barrels to market, thirty miles away.  Animal husbandry is a lost art today, but that means he has to take good care of his horses too. He can bargain with his customers, entertain them with his stories, take new orders, all in his head. He can’t write. But his brain is pretty good. He can handle thoughts like that.”

         I tell her that she should post that essay as well, but then I say, “So, how are you going to get your books to market?”

         She shrugs, as she is wont to do when she hasn’t thought it through that way. She says, “It’s a new day. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me. I’m not even going the thirty miles. If people give a damn, they can come to me. Or the postman can. They can order on-line. If they’re going to turn all the bookshops into ‘gifty galleries,’ I can take my business elsewhere.”

         I protest. Too much, perhaps. “There are still some good bookshops left!”

         She says, “Look, I did the rounds after my last book was published. That was five years ago! It’s only gotten worse. I went to every independent bookshop within a hundred miles. And that would be seven. Seven independent bookshops, in all of southern New Hampshire, northern Massachusetts, and near Down East Maine. I skipped the chain stores because they order from some corporate headquarters in an office cubicle in hell…But seven! I took all my authors copies with me—all 50 of them—and I printed up copies of the publisher’s notice on my own because Knopf couldn’t even be bothered to send me extra copies of that. I’d written most of the copy on the notice anyway, so… The editor that was assigned to me was 23 years old! I sent out letters to the shops to say I would be happy to talk about my book if they had author events. No answers. So, I slipped the publisher’s notice in every copy and made up nice little shelf signs that said ‘Local author’ and ‘Signed copies’ and I went around to all seven of those shops. I still had twenty copies when I got back.”

         What could I say to that?

         “Why?”

         She gave me a flat-faced glare. Not even a hand gesture. “The list of answers is endless. If you counter one, you get another. Every one of those stores was in danger of going out of business. Rents are high. Payrolls are unbearable. Health insurance is absurd. Regulations are a bitch. Shelf space is at a premium. Taxes suck. They used to be able to hire young people aplenty. I even worked in a bookshop when I was in school…Or else you’d see a few retired English teachers. That sort of thing. But young people are not interested in books these days. And these are English teachers who never taught your namesakes, Mr. Chaucer or Mr. Donne. They draw their dreams from the internet. Books are now an artifact of a time that’s being buried as quickly as possible. They are so inconvenient! They weight so much! You even have to pick them up! … And, basically, bookshops take on what they get paid to take on.Publisher’s will pay them to take a book. Especially the latest political canned-ham. They like to sell the bestsellers, where the authors will appear on TV shows and bend over in public for some idiot who doesn’t have time to read the author’s book and asks questions written on an index car by an assistant…Stores now have these neat little signs that say ‘Staff picks’ that just happen to be the latest and the greatest as chosen by the New York Times. The Times hasn’t given me an inch of notice in twenty years…Shops like that rotate the stock every few weeks. Not months. Weeks! They spend as much time on returns as ordering. There’s no time for word of mouth. The Newspapers are all gone, so there are no real reviews anymore. Nobody reads the papers that are left, anyway. The local television stations won’t even promote books. Not unless the author is already a celebrity.”

         I knew she hadn’t finished, but I interrupted.

         “Podcasters do.”

         She took a breath.

         “So, you think maybe I’ll get noticed by a podcaster. Depending on what pod he belongs to. Should that be my plan? Place my work at the mercy of someone who talks for a living? Someone who doesn’t have the time to read? Who appeals to listeners who don’t have the time to read…What will I have done? What good?”

         I had no argument, but a thought. “Better that than we should slip into the abyss?”

         As if on a switch, she was immediately brighter and her voice almost cheery.

         “No. That’s not a place for my grandchildren. My girls can take care of themselves. I taught them that much, even though I didn’t always homeschool the stuff they were tested for…I’m not sure, but I think they’ll be able to pass on the important things in the nasty world that’s coming…They can even write longhand. No one writes longhand anymore. I taught them that and the examiner said, ‘Why? Don’t they know how to use a computer?’ And I said, no. He was very unhappy with me about that. But it was not on the required list at the time.”

         I had just finished another chapter that I especially liked and that prompted me to ask her tonight what her favorite moment was in any of her books. I actually asked questions like that, which was probably the influence of listening to too many podcasts and not enough reading on my own part. But I was fishing for something to make a deal over—something to promote. A hook. Something to feature, if she was ever going to promote her books at all. I feel guilty about it now, but I realized her answer was worth it.

         She answered quickly, as if she had thought that very thing before.

         “…I think it’s when Bailey makes it over the mountain, away from Durson, and finds himself amidst the stars—that’s in ‘Shoemaker’s Son’. Behind him is death. Certain death. But he’s freezing. He’s wearing nothing but the sack cloth of his prison clothes. His feet are numb and bare and bleeding. And yet, there he is suddenly in the midst of all that splendid beauty of stars and the depth of the universe above, while below him lies the utter dark of another valley to cross. And he finally sits, exhausted; ready to freeze to death right there in the midst of the beauty of that breath of God rather than continue…And then his eyes catch what he thinks at first must be a star reflecting from a pond below. One single dim light in the midst of all that stygian black…But of course, it is a candle. It is Ruth’s candle.”

Addendum:

         A building inspector came by this morning. Julia was very unhappy at being disturbed. But he wanted to inspect the barn.

         The arrangement I had with Julia was that the space I occupied in the barn was my ‘Office.’ I officially ‘lived’ in the house.

         The inspector immediately asked about the plumbing. To my knowledge, it was done to state code, but he informed us that we needed a town permit. He wrote something out to that effect before Julia appeared again, in perfect anticipation, with a piece of paper. It seems she had filed for the permit, and never mentioned it to me. It specifically noted the use as a home office.

         The inspector read the document as if looking for a typo, and finally handed it back to her.

         He said, “I didn’t see that on file.”

         Julia said, “Janis probably just hasn’t gotten to it yet.”

         Janis was the town clerk, and a friend of Julia’s.

         The inspector looked at the paper again, and then left.

         The story was that the day after Mrs. Johnson had come by to sell her Girl Scout cookies, Julia had gone down to Town Hall. Her instincts were correct. Cookies were not all that Mrs. Johnson had been there for.

***

14. Shades of gray

         The maples here have faces. They are old and gray with wattles and wrinkles and just before I arrived, Mr. Copple had buckets hanging from every one of them. There are still dark stains from that. I wish I had seen it. The sugar shack is on his land, down the hill toward the river. It’s quiet now. But you can see it from the barn. I wonder if Maya has a picture of it? But she doesn’t paint pretty pictures like that, not unless they are part of something more she has to say.

         In answer to a question about her mother’s literary ideas, Elena says, “My mother’s philosophy, if you can call it that, is that everything depends of the rise of the uncommon man. The ‘uncommon man.’ She thinks that idea is so clear and so obvious. But I don’t think many people get it…Maybe some. I’m not sure. But her philosophy concerns the narrative of the uncommon man—each and every one of them. Not groups. She really doesn’t care about kings and generals and all that. They come and go. Besides, they’re really just all about themselves. Like Ozymandias, they’ll all be gone in time and the uncommon man remains, and perseveres. She subverts that whole idea of ‘the common man’ as a nonsensical insult by would-be elites—today mostly academics—who can’t grow their own food, but want to tell others how to do it… You know, I met a professor at the University of Iowa. I taught a course for him last semester. He likes to get friendly with his female instructors. But I knew about him even before I met him because of something my mother had told us. He was the son of Ned, her editor at Harpers. And his father had tried to get them together years ago. And when he was first getting ideas about me in Iowa City, I said to him, “You know, you could have been my father.” It totally destroyed him.”

“I’d like to know that story.”

“Maybe she’ll tell it to you someday…But Mom quotes that Shelley poem a lot as well—Once—you should have been there, she quoted the whole thing to her friend Paul—I don’t think you know him but he’s her oldest friend—He was sitting at the dining room table eating dinner with us one day and he’s going on about the greatness of Henry the Fifth and all that ‘We few, we happy few’ stuff, and she stands up and interrupts him with the entire Ozymandias poem, and of course we all know it by heart by that time, so we chime in with her, and poor Paul is crest fallen. Totally! You should have seen his face.”

         This opened another question.

         “What do you think of Paul.”

         She shrugged. The bones in her slender shoulders are prominent.

         “Very old fashioned. I work around some guys like that, but they’re mostly in the classics department. They’re devoted to some particular theme. I’ve always been a little bored by that stuff, myself. I’m a sort of generalist.”

         I wasn’t sure how she meant that. I thought of myself as a kind of generalist.

         “Do you think their knowledge is disposable?”

         I think I meant ‘unimportant’ but that wasn’t the word that came to mind.

         She frowned at me. “That’s an odd idea. Disposable? I think they’ve worked on a particular subject for so long that they’re stuck in a rut. It’s easy to do. Hard to see the larger field when you’re stuck in a rut. And it’s always more comfortable to deal with the things you’re familiar with. I understand that. But I do think what they know can be important. They probably all have insights—some of them anyway. Others just repeat the same exact crap again that they were once taught themselves, over and over.”

         “Is that the way Paul is?”

         “No! No. I didn’t mean that. He’s just devoted to his way of reading the text. ‘Contextual interpretation’ he calls it. But that still cuts down his field of vision. I know it bother’s mom. They argue when he visits. About little details. Mom is the free thinker. She’s a libertarian that way. She’s not interested in limitations to her ideas, just what’s wrong or right about them. If a so called ‘historical fact’ is in the way, she questions the fact first. Where did that come from? How did it get there? But she can do that only so long as she’s working her own garden. If she was at a university, she wouldn’t last a minute.”

         “What do you think bothers her exactly?”

         “The whole ‘context’ business. There they are, spending time trying to reconstruct a social situation in order to understand a text, instead of just reading the fucking text. Sure, the meanings of words have evolved, but that’s pretty easy to follow. Now they want to follow the evolution of a gazillion social practices in order to understand a single word. Out of billions of words! Nobody is going to live long enough to finish that project. It seems like a deliberate attempt to obscure the original text. I say, maybe they should do it the other way around. Just get the word right and maybe it will reflect on the social practice. Right?”

         “Sounds right.”

         As a kid, I used to find it outrageous that most teachers had no idea where their ideas came from, and seemingly little interest. I would ask, and they would say, ‘Sit down.’ So that became a greater interest to me than whatever it was that they were selling. That’s my nature, I suppose.

         When I was growing up, we lived on a hill in Arlington, Massachusetts. It was a hundred-year-old house by then, built when trolleys used to roam like dinosaurs on the avenues below and people commuted to their factory jobs or offices in Boston with a newspaper in their hands. Newspapers were important, then. That’s where some of their ideas came from. And books. The public library had newspapers as well as books. And you could call up the editor or the reporter and yell at them for not getting something right. But, you know, that world does not exist today. People all commute to work with their heads down staring at their smartphones, and the sources there are all suspect. All of them! Because they can’t be questioned. Write a comment, why don’t you? A shout in the forest. No echo. The form letter responses are insipid. And that past that was once in the newspapers is lost or hidden in history books that no one reads.

         The Public Library is now little more than the metaphorical hiding place of the ‘Lost Ark of the Covenant’—but it’s that and a senior center too. Instead, those commuters read on-line about one celebrity or another and the asses they made of themselves, and the asses they bared, or one politician or another and the wars they’re making. But the world they are living in was originally made by all those people reading their newspapers on the trolley. And the newspapers that originally shaped the look of that world are gone, and they were more about the people reading them than the bare asses of celebrities. The little smart phones, appropriately small given the subjects, are all about the bare asses, and the libraries are empty. All the politics was just for show, then as now, but the papers were really all about what made that show work.

         But most importantly, from what I can tell, it was a pretty civilized place. Not just the people worked, the place itself worked. There was room for the trees and the dogs. Now, it’s end to end cars parked on streets not made for cars and the trolleys are gone; dozens of people living in four or five small apartments, in houses that used to be single family homes. People used to be able to afford a single-family home then…I wonder how the meanings of the words on those newspapers are even going to be understood in a few hundred years more…But I can still read Chaucer and know what the Wife of Bath had on her mid. And I even know a lot of what Shakespeare was trying to say.

         My parents are the last ones on their block to have resisted renting out space. What this means to me is that when I get behind on things, so to speak, I can still sleep in my old bedroom upstairs along with the odd accumulation of clothes and toys that are stored there now. They never throw anything away. And at 31 years old, the need for that refuge has happened to me more than once, I am ashamed to say. And this thought, traveling around my head about three o’clock one morning, has me thinking that maybe it’s time to get out of my own rut. Or, at least out of my van. Living in the tack-room of a barn is pretty fine, but not perfect.

         It seemed to me, standing there in the uncut grass of the field behind, with stars edging the tree tops at all sides, that those people who lived in those houses in Arlington, who used to read their newspaper every morning, jostled but unperturbed, had more to do with my own view of the world than all the teachers I ever had. And that Julia was very right about the meanings of words. And that her hero, Donovan, had more in common with me than any future coming.

         The face of Mars is there, near the horizon, a discolored point of light staring back at me in disgust.

         Elena is here for the week. She is an instructor of English Literature at the University of Iowa. She hates it there and comes back to Rumford to visit as often as she can, but this was only the second time I had met her. She showed up unexpectedly one morning, very early, about seven, after driving all night. Her mother was, of course, already awake, and they talked until she was banished. At the smell of food, she came downstairs again from sleeping and ate with us at 4 o’clock. Lasagna. The best. But I was thinking about how women look when they’ve been sleeping.

         Emptied of the boxes, we ate in the dining room, and Elena was able to point out specific spots on the wall that were made by her or her sisters. One, on the ceiling, was from a trebuchet of lasagna aimed at her sister Jesse, using a serving spoon and a salt and pepper shaker for fulcrum and weight. She demonstrated this again without following through. Julia watched patiently before saying. “I had just taught them about all that. Medieval warfare. I couldn’t even punish them.”

         Elena is tall—taller than her mother—and thin, but not lacking in appointments. As she’s talking, and gesturing with her long arms, sitting up and then out of her chair to show me the arcs and the distances involved in her calculations, and then acting out the reactions of an imaginary crowd against the backdrop of her mother’s blank face, just to tease her with the memory—evidently there were other relatives present at the time—I am riveted.

         She was there for a week because of some sort of school break, and joined us for each dinner. Her habit was to speak very frankly in front of her mother, something that was clearly not always appreciated, but it was a ‘change-up’ to the usual conversation because I have likely been too careful in my speech around Julia.

         One day, over a very nice plate of spaghetti and meatballs, with her tomato-bloodied fork poking the air in irritation, Elena says, “The fucking idiots I work with have no clue. I’m only an assistant, so I can’t presume to change the curricula. I can’t even teach my own mother’s books. I’m teaching the work of literary non-entities for aesthetic numbskulls who follow the leader to get tenure and then, when they get it, they farm out the job of actually teaching their crap to people like me. It’s abuse!”

         She wants to quit. She has come home, partly, to tell her mother that, I think. Partly it was to find out who the hell I was. And partly just to be ‘home.’ If she quits, I wonder if she will wander off to some new horizon or come back here.

         She has cut her hair short, and when she runs—which she does every day, coming back rather moist and sweaty—her hair is a dark skull cap at a distance. I enjoy watching her run.

         She says, “Mother says I take after her mother. Lithe and buxom! But my grandmother was a rich bitch who wanted to be Queen of New York. Grandpa worked non-stop but never quite had the money for her tastes. They even thought Mom was a virgin birth at first, except for one errant visit by Grandpa over a drunken New Years.”

         That discussion took place one morning in the barn while she looked over the boxes of her grandmother’s things piled there, and then at my handiwork in the tack room, and then danced around the open floor in a sort of loose ballet.

         “We used to spend hours in here. It was our palace, our dungeon, our jousting field and on rainy days, our refuge. We staged all of mom’s plays right there!” She pointed at the center of the floor below the loft. “It looks so small now. It seemed enormous to us then. We hung bed sheets up there on that wall—actually it took four sheets—for backdrop and we had a little slide projector set up for that. A forest, or a town, or a medieval castle—no problem. We had a rope rigged to that rafter—you can see the iron ring still there—and I would take a running leap out of the loft like Robin Hood and try to swing to the other side. actually, Jesse did that for one of the plays. We once did a Robin Hood that mom wrote.”

         The space between was at least twenty feet

         “Did you make it?”

         “A couple of times. Maya did it better. But her legs aren’t as long as mine.”

         Twirling away then closer to the tack room she said, “That bed in there seems a little small. You’re taller than that!”

         I admitted, that it was. “The foam is only 3 x 6. I have an extra pillow for the end so my head doesn’t hit the wood.”

         Her concern for the size of my mattress bothered me.

         I changed the subject.

         “What will you do if you quit teaching?

         “Anything. I was thinking maybe one of those Pacific fishing boats. I love the idea of that. I looked into it. They need crew, but they don’t want single women. The best jobs are all guy jobs.”

         “Other than the regular pay, the lack of danger, the shorter hours, and the routine work, what don’t you like about teaching. At least it’s dry.”

         “No… I like teaching. It can be fun. The problem is really just the crap I have to teach.” Then she took a note from her mother’s playbook and turned the table on me. “What are you going to do when Mom finishes her book?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “What do you think about?”

         “Too late to join the army. Or be a brain surgeon. I don’t know. I really just want to keep on writing so I guess I’ll find something to keep paying bills so that I can do that.”

         She rocked on her feet as she listened, as if it was a head nod of acknowledgement.  It appeared that we were both at loose ends.

***

15. Why bother?

         I was gone for a couple days over Easter. All three of Julia’s daughters visited that weekend so there wasn’t going to be much work done in any case. So, the Friday before, I had unloaded a little in advance.

         Given my previous thoughts on the matter, and the problems I was having with my own work, as well as her own difficulties, I had asked Julia why she even bothered to write novels. She had spoken before about her affair with poetry, and I knew she had written plays, but most of her life had been spent writing novels—and now, novels that no one would read.  She had been born into an age of novels. The age of Hemingway, and Faulkner, and Cather. They were important then. Now, not so much. I actually said, “Why bother?”

         Her reaction was surprise. I saw that in her eyes. But in typical fashion, she did not answer me quickly. In fact, she had gone off to open a bag of feed and get a bucket of water for the chickens before she said anything at all, and then she says, “You won’t easily see this, I think. It is not a simple idea. There are a lot of moving parts. But that’s not why you may not see it. It crosses too many boundaries of belief; and worse. We all tend to think in channels. It’s easier that way. Less bother…It’s the way people tend to think of religion, if they think about it at all, in only one way, as a faith in God. But you know it’s much more. It’s a frame and a moral structure. It’s a society of others with similar belief. It’s a language of communication, and so on. That’s why people don’t think about it. It’s a bother. Easier to label it and set it over there, on the corner, out of the way. Maybe look in on a Sunday. But this is us. Today. In America. And In the West. And we’ve replaced much of religion with politics, instead. For many people, it serves the same purpose. Go to church and let them tell us what is right and wrong. Pay your taxes and let the government take care of the needy. Pay more taxes and let the government teach your kids. That’s it for social identity, and all the rest. But this was not true of people in the twelfth century. Not true in the seventeenth and eighteenth. It was definitely not true in the nineteenth. Beethoven thought about his God every day. To a very great extent, their religion defined them for good or ill. More even than their jobs. And for those without wealth, more than their families.”

         I took a guess. “Are you saying that novels are your religion?”

         Surprise again. “No. No. That’s not the point. But you can think of those as cathedral building.”

         This surprised me more. All I could say to that was, “How so?”

         She said, “The cathedral was the focus of their community. It is not built to supply food, or water, or protection—like a fort. It’s an expression of who they were…That’s not all, of course, but that’s why they built it. Why they spent their extra hours after the planting and the harvest to lay down tiles, or carve a wooden baluster…I’m taking the long way to that simple thought because it is not so simple even to me…But in the end, it’s the way I see the world. The way I interpret it. It is not just a device. Or a machine. Or a tool. A means.”

         I repeated the words out-loud, “A cathedral?”

         “I suppose if I were actually religious, I might not have a good reason to write novels that no one’s going to read. But in the end, I write them for myself. It is an egocentric endeavor.  I’ve always written them that way…I’m building my own cathedrals. That’s what I do. They may be empty. The parishioners, if there ever were any, may have lost interest or died away, but then, at least, they are small cathedrals…All those tourists who go to the great cathedrals in Europe, they’re not religious. Most of them haven’t spoken to God since they were children wishing for a Christmas present. They have no clue about what would drive a man to make such a thing as a Cathedral, to cut the stone so precisely, or some artist to cut the stained glass, or paint the walls, or write the music. That simply amazes them, if they’re not already too drug addled to feel it. They let their politicians make brutalist concrete tombs to their own political ideologies and make no connection as to the difference. They buy post-modern fakes to live in without ever thinking about what a human home should be. But those peasants of the Middle Ages built cathedrals. And then our smart, college-educated morons, pay thousands of dollars to go there and gawk and wonder. How did this happen? Who built this? Why did they do that? … Maybe I’m just hoping that one of them will wander by, read a little bit of one of my books, and get an idea about what something else in life.”

         I told her she should write something up about her cathedrals for the website, just to slow her down. But she was on a jag and knew it, and she stopped with that, and went off on another chore.

         That night she played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on her stereo so loud that I could hear it clearly in the barn.

         Now, all this was on my mind for days. Why did I write my novels? Would I write them if I thought no one would be reading them? I already knew the answer to that now was ‘yes.’ I accepted that. So, I had to come to terms with my own particular egocentric madness—if madness is what you do that makes no logical sense. I flattered myself with the knowledge that Van Gogh never sold a painting and never knew if anything he ever did would matter. But he did it, none-the-less! And I realized that this was, in itself, one reason I felt kinship with Julia. We are alike in that way, at least. 

         My imagined future had more to do with Julia’s imagined past than I had realized. But I fancied my cathedrals on Mars. For those peasants who built Reims, or Chartres, or York Minster, my efforts were small potatoes, even if I was not directly worshiping God, and I was only paying homage to the man. After all, just a small recognition of God’s creation, perhaps? Perhaps.

         It begs a question. Or a few. Isn’t the work itself a life? Should there be something more? What would that be, exactly? I did not want to live the life of my father. What would my own life be, more than what I wrote. Is there no end to egocentricity?

         Our ongoing conversation about the art of writing was often detoured by my reports of AI encroaching upon and diluting the work of human beings. In one of our several conversations concerning artificial intelligence—she called that confection “a fantasy worthy of a Warner Brothers cartoon,” and I had to have her explain that because I didn’t have her immediate reference point. It seems that helping my dad in the shop on Saturday mornings stunted my knowledge of yet another art-form on TV. But she added, “AI is just the flavor of the month. Two dimensional. You don’t have to know a lot about computers to understand that. Mary Shelley understood that two hundred years ago!”

         She put a dramatic pause into it this fact with a silent stare. She was guessing correctly that I did not know the reference. I only vaguely knew who Mary Shelley was but only because of the Frankenstein story, which I had never finished.

         “How?”

         Julia shrugged as she does when she doesn’t mean a shrug at all but is really saying, ‘isn’t it obvious?’

         “She was eighteen, for Christ’s sake! She had never gone to school. Her home is riven. She might have benefited from having the smartest parents in England, but her mother was dead! How is it she knew then what you haven’t bothered to know now?”

         Julia can be purposely provocative and I immediately caught the whiff of that in her voice.

         “What did she know?”

         “Nothing. Nothing by our standards today. She was just the girl-toy of a wannabe poet. A teenager. But she was able to conjure what the consequences might be of man creating life…I can’t help but see something in that of a woman’s wisdom, as much as I dislike pretending there is some difference between the intelligence of men and women, there must be something! Prometheus was nothing without Athena. But I digress…She was an unwed mother, as well. I suppose that’s worth appreciating, in some context…”

         I knew now that she could carry this sort of linkage on for hours or until she got bored with it, so I interrupted.

         “It’s a ridiculous story! They made us read it in high school. It was absurd! I remember even trying to write an alternate history called ‘The Monster Redux,’ in high school but then the teacher figured out that I hadn’t finished the original assignment and I had to give it up. But the Shelley story was impossible.”

         She smiled at me.

         “They say it might be the very first science fiction novel.”

         “But what does it have to do with AI?”

         She shrugged again, “The Monster is only what he was created to be. AI is only a confection of our stupidity. Not our intelligence at all. If we were intelligent, we would be busy with our own work. Minding what is our own business. Instead, we are trying to create a doppelganger to do our work for us. How stupid is that?”

         I had no answer. Not if the work was what mattered.

         In another moment, she asked, “How do you choose what you are going to write about?”

         Now, my guess was that she had anticipated me. It is exactly the sort of question I was always asking her. She was turning the tables once again.

         I used her own narrative method against her, “There’s a philosopher—actually an economist and sociologist, who has tried to understand the world in practical terms rather than making stuff up about what we should do or not do…Thomas Sowell.”

         Julia’s eyes went wide on that. But she didn’t say a thing.  My hope was that she knew as little about Sowell as I knew about Mary Shelley. So, I tell her, “Dad didn’t read a lot of stuff except history. He read just about anything to do with World War Two. But that was because his dad was in that. It gave them something to argue about. And Sowell might have been the only philosopher I’d ever seen him read. I’m not sure why, other than he had met him once. And my dad used to give me a copy of one of Sowell’s books every Christmas. Every Christmas. The thing about that was, I liked them, and after awhile, even as slow a reader as I am, I’d already bought most of them before Dad got to the next one and so I was giving the extra copies away to friends…And that’s funnier still because Dad knew it! He knew I was buying my own copies before Christmas came around. He just liked doing it…Well, at some point, when I was fifteen or so, when I started writing stories, I tried to imagine things based on what Sowell had written. Maybe it was just a matter of me being too stupid to come up with my own devices, but I thought of it as a sort of connection. An inspiration. A purpose.”

         She said, “Tell me about one of those.”

         “Well…Sowell said something like, ‘Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.’…Well, that seemed like a great premise for story! That was my very first ‘Mars’ story. Mars became my petri dish for all of it. Right then and there. Still is.”

         She shrugged at me and started shaking her head. “What can I say to that? You’re doing something brilliant! All I can do is wish you well and give you any encouragement if I can.”

         I think she meant it. And that sort of floored me. I wouldn’t get over that for a week.

***

16. The Crisis

         One comfort to living here is that so little happens that cannot be expected. This is, I think, in the nature of Julia’s life, at least as she has chosen to live it. It’s as if her whole world is right here. This is her narrative, on her schedule. and if you choose to be a part of that story, things generally make sense.

         She was right. I had been attempting something of the same thing by simplifying my own life, by living in the van and avoiding any unnecessary responsibilities. But, after the fact, it doesn’t seem like much of an effort by comparison. At least, nothing worth writing about. Thoreau’s cabin in the woods was a grand affair compared to mine.

         This afternoon, with her already at the stove, and me just getting settled at my daily task, she asks, “Have you ever read The Crisis by Winston Churchill?”

         Now, she didn’t usually ask me such questions, and definitely not before concentrating on the work at hand, so I assumed it was a trick question.

         Assuming this was just another of the many works I’d never read by the former British prime minister, and wanting to be contrary, I smartly answered, “Winston Churchill didn’t write The Crisis. Thomas Paine wrote The Crisis. I’ve read that. I’m a big fan of Thomas Paine.”

         She must have looked over at me for all of thirty seconds. The fist of the hand gripping the spoon she was using was now buried in her hip, with the spoon at an angle. It looked like a pose. Very theatrical. There was more than a wisp of hair hanging loose in front of her face. With the apron on, I thought she looked like a character out of a children’s book.

         She says, “Not that one. The novel about the American Civil War,” and she blew the hair away to the side.

         I said, “I didn’t know Winston Churchill wrote novels.”

         Now, I’m thinking there is a game going on. A match, and I have to catch up.

         But she says, “Not that Winston Churchill.”

         So, now she has knocked me on my back like a dumb turtle.

         “No. I guess, I’ve never even heard about that one.”

         She says, “It’s a good book. Very good. When I was in school, it was on all the reading lists. It was a best seller at the turn of the Century—The last Century. Now it’s pretty much forgotten. There isn’t even a copy of it at the library.”

         Now, I’m getting other ideas about what she’s talking about. She’s standing at the stove and stirring a pot of something that smelled like a stew—but she’s thinking about the ephemeral nature of her own work.

         I say, “Why do you think it’s forgotten?”

         And then she finally says what’s actually on her mind. “It’s a story about heroes.”

         This is a subject we have touched on—or punched at—before. She knows I don’t believe in heroes. At least I didn’t.

         I say, “We’ve argued about that before.”

         “Yes. We have. But I was thinking you might read it for me and tell me why you think it’s so forgotten now. We still read Trollope, and Sand, and Eliot. Why not Churchill.”

         I said, “Maybe it’s just that most people don’t believe in heroes anymore.”

         She is having none of that, “You know that’s not true. You think your father is a hero. It’s in your voice when you talk about him. And your mother. And your grandfather and grandmother. You’ve all but said as much.”

         Now, she was pressing an advantage. I had in fact spoken about all of them over the last month.

         “Okay. I’ll read the book.”

         “Good. It’s over on the table there in the living room.”

         So, she was prepared, and this was all part of her narrative as well.

         I asked, “What do you think about it yourself?”

         “It is a great book…Beautiful, really. A little dated in style. The language is of that time. But so’s the language of Henry James… I think you can deal with it.”

         “What’s it about?”

         “Essentially, after everything is said and done, it’s about Abraham Lincoln.”

         Lincoln is one of those historical figures I have avoided. He was into so much ‘mischief’ as my mother would say, that it seemed easier just to go around him.

         “Did you ever give it to your daughters to read?”

         She stopped what she was doing one more time to look toward me. I didn’t look back.

         “No. But that was the very thing I was thinking about. I don’t know why not. I thought maybe you would have some sense about it that, and be able to tell me why.”

         The copy of the book she has is old. It’s an original edition, I think. The green cloth is embossed in a darker green with the title as well as an old-fashioned decoration. Looks nothing like the way books are made today. Physically smaller. It was a pleasure to hold it. I was up half the night with it, and the next night as well. I’m a slow reader.

         Julia did not begin her gardening in earnest until late April, but then it was pretty much carried out before I was awake. She is up at 6 AM and out the door not long after. She has said, “the hoeing and raking and such help me think.” The garden itself was clearly less than half the size it had been when her girls were younger, filling a fenced space directly east of the barn and the chicken yard, and over the weeks this became a neat precision of rows and then sprouting things that I avoided asking about as much as possible. I had seen enough of farming to know it was not my thing. Too much work. That was what super markets were for.

         But, twice a day, first thing in the morning and then in the early afternoon, Julia came out to the east side of the barn where I could hear her as she talked back to the chickens and threw out scraps and poured water or feed into the narrow troughs before heading over to the garden area.

         The chicken coop itself, a small, low structure on legs, with openings at the front but without windows, faced the garden. It was not attached to the barn but close against the wire that lined the clapboards there and beneath the overhang of the roof above. Because she collected the eggs in the morning as the chickens ate, I seldom got to see the process, but the entire front of the coop swung away on hinges and gave her full access to whatever the hens had done. This structure had been built to her specifications by Mr. Copple’s youngest son when he was still in high school.

         I had brilliantly observed that the chickens themselves appeared to be more like cartoon chickens, drawn in thin black and white strips, so that they all looked like the same chicken to me. She did not see the humor in that observation. She called them ‘Barred Rocks’ which I had discovered was a shortening of the name Barred Plymouth Rocks.

         Besides a web of darkened wire fence, the chickens were also protected by an electrified wire at the top and bottom to help keep the hawks and the vermin away. But with her dog no longer there to bark, the vermin had found a way.

         Today she lost her oldest, ‘Betty,’ and I heard a shriek in the morning, and when I came out to see what the matter was, just barely in my pants, she already had a shovel filled with the feathers and whatever else was left. She just said, ‘Poor Betty,’ to me and then, ‘We have a weasel.”

         Later, when I came to the house at four, she was getting ready to make hamburgers because she wasn’t in the mood to cook.

         “How old was she?”

         “Only nine.”

         “I didn’t know chickens lived that long.”

         “She was still laying. She would have made it a few years more. She was the mother hen to all the others. And she stood her ground. Without a rooster, she stood her ground.”

         This heroic image was difficult for me to imagine, but it was meant. I didn’t know a lot about chickens.

         “How did it get her?”

         She shrugged, “It’s weasel…He left a mess.”

         I said, “Maybe the weasel was a female.”

         “Except for the mess.”

         I had to consider the implication of this assessment for a moment.

         So, I asked, “What are you going to do?”

         “There’s a hole under the fence. The fence is buried a foot deep but there’s a rock there at the back side and I was lazy and when I enlarged the yard last year, I stretched the wire over it and didn’t take it out.”

         I immediately sensed a hidden request.

         “Do you want me to do it?”

         “I would appreciate that. Thanks.”

         She had not written anything that morning, and there was no stack of manuscript on the table. I ate the burger and went back out to the barn. The rock was enormous, buried by the soil there only a few inches deep except, where the weasel had dug its away under. It was mostly flat at the top side but I had no idea how deep the rock itself went. I wasn’t going to be able to lift it without some sort of a crane in any case. When Julia came out to inspect what I had uncovered, I suggested that she should just decrease the size of the chicken yard. The rock wasn’t all that big at the top. Maybe three feet wide at the most. The chickens could spare a few extra feet from their enclosure. But she wasn’t interested. She was still angry—more at herself for putting the fence in the way she did, I think.

         She said, “But you might be able to lever it away. It drops off right there at the back. The barn is on a kind of shelf of rock that goes all the way to those trees.”

          So, I started digging a hole there behind it to lever the rock into, just beyond the fence. This actually took a couple of days, allowing for some rain and some talk. Digging holes was not in my resume. Not this sort of hole, in any case. The soil beyond was a litter of smaller rock, but, indeed, the larger shelf of rock ended there and that one piece of it could be moved. The big one next to that went in beneath the corner of the barn so I used what smaller stone I uncovered to secure that before I filled in.

         The chickens watched me through the entire process, commenting constantly among themselves. They sound like cartoon chickens as well. Julia came out to watch occasionally. Most of the time, as I dug, I could hear her typing.

         A couple of days later, a tall, clean shaven, and middle-aged fellow showed up late in the afternoon, shortly after I had come into the house. When he opened the back door to the kitchen I was already sitting at the small table and he seemed surprised to see me.

         Julia could see his car through the window from where she stood and did not appear to be surprised at his arrival. She turned from stirring the pot on the stove and said, “Derek, this is Geoff. Geoff is helping me get my manuscript ready.” 

         I stood up and we shook hands. He gripped a bit too hard. He was dressed in an ironed or new LL Bean Flannel shirt and new looking jeans. I was still feeling a little grubby from digging holes. We are about the same height and so it was pretty much eye to eye for a moment. His smile was not genuine. But mine was, because I was thinking he looked familiar, and I knew immediately that this was because of Elena. But the situation itself was somehow funny to me too. This then was Julia’s ex-husband. Direct from New York. I could not have imagined him better.

         Outside there was a fairly new, black, Lincoln sedan, shiny-clean except for the fresh mud splatter on the lower trim from the dip at the end of the driveway.       

         What he first said was, “I wondered about that van by the barn.”

         Derek Peterson, Julia’s ex-husband, was once a ‘successful novelist.’ She has told me that much. But that occupation had not satisfied his needs, apparently, and he now runs his own real estate firm, or that now runs him. He has made a great deal of money from selling residential buildings in New York City over the years, I understand, but lost it. Now, he is broke. And he’s married again, unhappily. Julia says that he ‘only comes up to check on his daughters,’ but with that excuse now gone, he probably just wants the check. He apparently wants to borrow $50,000 from Julia to cover some real estate losses. He also talks out loud about moving up to New Hampshire to find his ‘muse,’ again and write another novel, to get his mojo back. This strikes me as a petty conceit. Or perhaps it is only self-deceit.

         Julia thinks, from his complaints, that his second wife is getting ready to divorce him. I’m thinking that one of his daughters told him I was there and he has driven up from New York to check up on his own interests.

         Because he arrived unexpectedly, while I was there in the kitchen, I got to hear some of the initial conversation before Julia pushes him outside to his car for privacy, but I could still hear part of it. He admits that his business has failed. Now, he wants her to mortgage her property, “That I helped pay for…” She rejects that premise and refuses. She tells him any interest he had in the property, “disappeared years ago, the last time you borrowed money from me,” and “Your schemes were charming once. But they were never dreams. And you’re too old for all that now…And I’m too old to take them seriously.”

         We were having ravioli again and when they came back in, Julia told us to move into the dining room.

         Derek sat at the other end of the table from Julia, so that I was in the middle.   

         He asked, “What do you do when you aren’t helping Julia?”

         I decided to be cute. “I dig holes.”

         I thought this was a funny answer. Julia did not.

         Julia adds, “Geoff is a writer…And he digs holes.”

         He asks, “Do you live here in Rumford?”

         It was not an honest question. I was sure he already knew the answer, but I answered it anyway.

         “I live in the barn.”

         Julia frowned again. She says, “Geoff has turned the tack room into an apartment, of sorts. And he’s been helping me out around here…digging holes.”

         Still feeling cute, I asked him, “What do you do, Derek, when you’re not digging holes?”

         I hope that it sounded about as phony as his question to me. Julia frowned again, but Derek answered.

         “I write novels.”

         I knew he had written several best sellers, but that had been years before.

         So, I said, “I meant more recently.”

         This caught him a little off-guard. Julia answered.

         “Derek is in real estate.”

         He changes the conversation then and looks at Julia, “Have you seen the girls lately?”

         She says, “All of them. They all came up to inspect Geoff’s work in the barn.”

         The humor buried in that sounded like something I might say.

         Derek looked to me again and said, “Where are you from?”

         “Near Boston. Where are you from?”

         “Queens…Where did you go to school?”

         “Arlington High.”

         “I meant, college”

         “I didn’t”

         He frowned a little too hard.

         “Why was that?”

         “I wasn’t interested in the indoctrination.”

         This got a ‘knowing’ smile. Maybe I should label it ‘smug.’

         Derek said, “I see. Perhaps I understand now why Julia thought you could help her with her work.”

         Before I could answer, Julia said, “That’s very perceptive, Derek.”

         It was amazing to me that she could say a word like ‘perceptive,’ and clearly mean the opposite.

         I said, “All I’m doing is a little copy editing and word processing. Easy peasy for any high school graduate.”

         At least that made Julia smile.

         Derek said to me, “What kind of novels do you write?”

         “Science fiction, mostly.”

         He said, “Ah,” but knowingly again. I could only guess about what he thought he knew.

         The ravioli didn’t last very long and I excused myself and went back to the barn.

         About half an hour later the barn door opened without a knock. I was at my desk on the opposite side by the window.

         “I thought I’d come out and inspect the work you’ve done for myself.”

         “No much to see.”

         I didn’t get up as he crossed the barn floor.

         He said, “You know, don’t you, that I own part of this place.”

         The tone was confrontational. I sat back in my chair.

         “No. I don’t.”

         “Half of it, anyway. We bought it when we were still married.”

         ‘That’s none of my business.”

         “Exactly! But I thought you should know.”

         I was suddenly in a very bad mood. So, I stood up.

         I said, “But at least, now, I know you’re an asshole too. I just found that out.”

         He was still coming forward when he punched at me. I suppose it would have hit me if I hadn’t turned away. The problem was, it brought him too close and when I punched him back it knocked him off his feet. Suddenly he was sitting on the barn floor looking a little puzzled. Because he didn’t get up right away, I suspected he hadn’t been in too many school yard fights. If you stay down, you get kicked. For whatever reason, maybe because I just didn’t like the look of him sitting there on the floor, I put my hand out, and he took it.

         Standing, face to face again, he said, “That was dumb.”

         “I think so.”

         I suppose whatever anger he had in him was gone, and he turned to go. And all of a sudden, I liked the guy. I knew who he was.

         “Are you okay?”

         He turned back. “Yeah. Just a bruised ego…I’m sorry for that.”

         I said, “Why were you so pissed at me?”

         He looked at me pretty square.

         “I suppose because you’re here, and I’m not.”

         This seemed a little heavy but probably right, and I hoped I wasn’t reading too much into it.

         “I just live in the barn. And help Julia the best I can. That’s all.”

         He sighed. The sigh seemed real.

         He said, “I understand—Life turns around on you. That’s a fact…In a week or so I’m going to be on my ass again. In bankruptcy court…And that’s just funny. That’s plain funny…You know what I was here for? … No. I suppose you don’t. I was here for money. I wanted Julia to loan me some money. Is that funny, or what? … And this—” his hand waved into the air behind him, “…When we bought this place, there was one brief moment when I actually hoped—well, the marriage was already on the rocks. But I loved her. She’s a pain, but I still love her. Dearly. And she’s the mother of my children. She’ll always be that. And, like you say, I’m just an asshole. I had my chance.”

         There wasn’t much I could say. “It’s a common enough problem for all of us. No big deal in the scheme of things.”

         He said, “Hill of beans.”

         “Yup. Like Bogey said, that’s all it amounts to.”

         He smiled at me, this time with no smug, and put his hand out to shake mine. And then he left.

         But this wasn’t the end of it.

         The next day, right in the middle of things, Julia said, “My own ‘sell by’ date has passed. I’m here by the grace of modern medicine—both bad or good, yet to be determined—or by a God who should know better, one way or the other, but isn’t saying.”

         All of that was in response to my rather boldly asking, “What are you trying to accomplish with this?” and holding up a typed page as evidence.

         I suppose I had not made my specific quandary clear. Her character, Donovan, had hung on in a limbo between life and death for more than a chapter. I did not see any progress there. And I know she has a remarked dislike for pathos. If she did not want to evoke a sense of pity in her readers, at least, she had to move on to another purpose.

         “It’s one of those ‘To be or not to be, questions,” she said. “Does the reader care? I hope so. Donovan is the reason that I’m writing this story… I’m hoping for a sense of rage. It’s difficult to feel real rage. It’s special. It’s so discouraged in modern life, where just going berserk and losing all reason is the thing, but rage is another element in the life of a man like Donovan. His anger is the rage of ages. His people have been abused for centuries. If he can’t feel that, he might as well be dead—at least at this time in his life, when he thinks he is beyond love…Is that something you don’t see?”

         It was very clear to me now.

         “I hadn’t thought about it until you said it. But it is.”

         She says, “Then, I’ve failed in the matter and I’m going to have to think that through again.”

         “But he hadn’t—you hadn’t—expressed that sense of life before. I suppose I didn’t expect it.”

         She suddenly seemed a little flustered.

         “You’re right. That comes out later, but you’re right and I have to work that idea in earlier so that it’s understood…You’re right about that.”

         But then I asked, “That’s a sense that life is fragile,” and I impulsively added another thought. I didn’t know why. “Have you been sick?”

         She shrugged, “Yes…But where’s the poetry in that!”

         That’s all she said. I really didn’t have the right to ask for more. I supposed it would come out in some way later on.

         But, when Elena visited again, I slipped the question in. “Has your mother been sick?”

         She didn’t answer quickly, but then “Yes. She had cancer.”

         Nothing else. It was clear she didn’t want to talk about it herself. But this gave another perspective on why Julia wanted to have me help her get the book in shape.

         Later, after we had finished for the day, and she had poured her bourbon, she said something else.

         “Derek is such an ass. He was actually worried about me. But he didn’t want me to know that. He came up here to check on me, and see if I needed anything. Such a jerk! The only way he could hide that was to ask me for money! Can you believe it? But I know him. He knows I don’t have any money. He even concocted the idea of asking me to mortgage the place. What an idiot. He knows it’s all in my will for the girls. Is a trust! But he knows I wouldn’t do that! … He’s a character ripe for a novel of his own. But I’ve never been able to even start writing about him. Son of a bitch! He sees himself as a heavy and he wouldn’t even know how … I fished him out of the East River once. He was showing off and fell in. Just showing off. He couldn’t even swim!”

***

17. Mr. Copple’s Stones

         During her second visit, Elena told me a funny story. But it was the context of her telling me rather than the story itself, that was funny, I think.

         At one time, when the girls were all still living at home, and a year or two after Mrs. Copple, Mandy, had passed away, Frank Copple had cast his eye to the West.

         It was a fact that his sons, of whom there were also three, had all done chores for Julia, but they had finally gone away to college, and the army, and whatever, and importantly, had grown older and found their own lives—none of them interested in farm life. It was Mr. Copple’s oldest daughter, Mary, who appeared to want the life of her parents but she had not yet found a mate, and she was now well over forty. His youngest daughter, the youngest of that clan, had run away to Boston and not yet returned.

         However, Mr. Copple’s primary interest was for himself, and this started bringing him over to Dal Riata to ‘help’ when he could—when a gutter collapsed, or a storm had taken down a line, for instance. He was very helpful. And whenever the fields needed mowing, Julia’s were done before his own.

         For her part, Julia had discovered the best way to cool Mr. Copple’s ardor was to quote Shakespeare. Extensively. She also found short dissertations on Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe were effective. And she would frequently ask him how to spell certain words when he used them. Coccidiosis was one of those that Elena still remembered, left over from an outbreak of infection among the chickens. Mr. Copple did not have a strong command of spelling and would grapple with the task by repeating a word over and over out-loud like a schoolboy to get all the vowels. His face would turn red during this process and his beard rose up with each clinch of his jaw.

         Elena also remembered her mother saying that Frank had never read a book. She stated this as a matter of fact. How he got through his own schooling was a mystery. But he was full of stories and if she could keep the distance, she often encouraged him to relate those.

         Frank Copple was a large and bluff man. Always good natured, and easy to like. Julia had her moods. It was Elena’s belief that resisting the interest of Mr. Copple had been the greatest challenge of her mother’s life. And she went about the process very deliberately, knowing the stakes were high. She liked Mr. Copple and did not want to make him an enemy—though Elena was sure that might have been impossible. Though he was now at least sixty-five, he had never shown a lack of interest in her mother, even when Mandy was still alive.

         Her most successful tactic was to use his own habits against him. Mr. Copple had a habit of talking to his wife whenever he was frustrated by anything. He continued this after she died and did it still. So, Julia began to refer to Mandy more often. When Frank asked her a question, Julia would say something like, “What would Mandy think about that?” This quieted him down considerably.

         That Elena told me all this made me well aware of the fact that she had already figured out that I was not a danger in this regard. How she knew this so quickly, I am not sure, but at least it opened up the range of small talk quite a bit.

         Mr. Copple was always friendly toward me, however. Perhaps he had also determined, in his own way, that I was not a danger to Julia either. When I was digging out the rock in Julia’s chicken yard he had come by to pick up a few bales of hay and watched me, commenting usefully about how I might lever the mass of the thing. This brought on a lengthy observation about the Egyptians, and the pyramids. He might not read books but he was a big fan of shows on television or his computer. He explained the various means the Egyptians might have used to accomplish their task, and in great detail. It was a class on moving large objects.

         I finally broke that account up by telling him about a story I had written a couple of years before, and how they raised chickens on Mars. He did not think that could be done, though I was sure it would be. However, watching Julia’s efforts were making me think I might revise that story a little. Mr. Copple suggested I come by and study his chickens. He was not a fan of the industrial methods used to produce most chickens today. He believed in ‘organics.’ His was only a small operation but his 240 chickens occupied more than acre of land. He suggested that the cost of such space on Mars was going to be prohibitive, though, he liked the idea of raising chickens organically even there.

         This food for thought had me imagining chickens, under conditions of lower gravity, leaping far into the air. I told him that at least the chickens on Mars, would not have the same problem with predators.

         “You do, do you? Rats have followed mankind since the dawn of time. They will find their way to. I guarantee it!”

         And this one statement, made so casually, turned everything I had previously imagined about agriculture on Mars on its head. I knew, immediately, that he was correct. The vermin were always with us.

         So, I returned the favor to Elena and told her a rather lengthy tale about an incident that I had worked on for a novel, but never finished. It is better left unfinished, I think

         When I was still living in Boston I took a part-time job in a paint store. Mostly I carried cans of paint—up from the basement or out to customer’s cars. I also got to run their most sophisticated equipment. Following some magical admixture carried out in advance by one of the owners, I placed the cans in the clamps of a bank of machines that shook the cans like maniacs while complaining about their task in a high-decibel whine. There was no chance that the family who owned the store were going to open a door there for me, despite initial intimations, so I was gone in two months. However, I did acquire a roommate while I was there. And that was the actual story.

         Steven Lemieux was a professional protester. Skinny, hirsute, and not especially clean, usually wearing black-rimmed glasses knotted with tape at one hinge or another, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an unreadable and illiterate slogan though he had been educated into his sophomore year at Harvard. For a modest amount, about $10 an hour, he would show up at any event and attempt to disrupt it. He had been arrested dozens of times, had a felony record for resisting arrest, and was thus unemployable otherwise. But he paid his share of the rent. And I had only barely talked my way into the apartment, in East Cambridge, and didn’t want to lose it. My previous apartment mate was a young woman who worked at McDonalds during the days. What she did in the evening I did not want to know, but she had disappeared with her latest boyfriend one Saturday afternoon and I found Steve the following Monday in an on-line classified, basically because I didn’t care about his politics. For his part, Steven mistook my skin color and odd priorities for a sympathetic attitude. It was only desperation—I was already behind on the rent by a week as of that Monday.

         Because Steve practiced his protesting on me, while eating bowls of cereal or whatever I had, I got to know his agenda, and some of his methods, and for my part, I tried to convert him to some level of sanity. Not being intellectually engaged beyond his particular agenda, his rejoinders were always roughly the same. ‘Lotta good it’s done you,’ or ‘Let me know if that works out for you,’ and the ever popular, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ I let this pass because I also had a month’s deposit for the rent on the line. But when Steven had been doing drugs, usually grass, he mellowed. He would just say “You don’t know shit,” and start in on his life story, which he thought was ‘epic.’ It was not ‘epic’, but it was very good in parts—especially the parts that did not include Steve.

         The parts I liked the best concerned his grandfather.

         Victor Lemieux was a logger in Maine for about seventy years. He worked for the Maine-Atlantic Lumber Company for much of that time. When he started, timber was still being rafted down the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers by fellows who could dance across the surface of the floating logs, and did. In the winter months, Steve’s grandfather cut the timber, and used a pony or a mule to drag the great carcasses, bound by chains, to the closest frozen water. In the spring Victor rode the logs to the mill towns where the waterfalls were. But what made him unique is that Victor did not drink, or gamble or go whoring. When difficult times came for the company during the Depression, Victor Lemieux bought stock. He was a part owner of the company by the time World War Two came. After the War, the building boom really hit. There was even bigger money to be made. But sometime during the 1950’s, the State of Maine and the United States Department of Agriculture decided that there were just too many smaller companies for them to regulate. Maine-Atlantic’s leases were taken by some sort of eminent domain, and consolidated with a company that had better political connections. Victor Lemieux was given pennies on the dollar and forced into court to get back any of the rest. The new owners had enough cash and political influence to wait him out.

         Steven presented this story to me several different times in various stages of intoxication, as a true story of American capitalism. I tried to explain that, except for the earlier part of the ‘epic,’ this was exactly the opposite of capitalism. It was State control of the means of production. Another ‘ism’ entirely, and very clearly explained by Thomas Sowell in a dozen books. But Steve took personal offense at my stupidity. He knew all about this, he insisted, because he was born into it. So, I went to the Boston Public Library to get some details on the Maine lumber industry. He lit my note paper on fire in the middle of the living room floor. This set off an alarm, which I dealt with, but there was no dealing with Steve. I threw him out after the fire marshal left. Steve came back in the middle of the night and inexplicablye lit up an old table cloth that I had—something my mother had given me that wasn’t worth much but that I had grown up with. I beat the hell out of Steve. He called the police, who happened to already be there because of a neighbor’s complaint about noise. The cop was sympathetic but reported the incident to my landlord. The realtor terminated my lease immediately, I lost my deposit, and that was when I decided to move out of state. Maine, in deference to Victor Lemieux, seemed out of the question. New Hampshire lay closer.

         Epics come and epics go.

         But at least Elena was entertained.

***

18. More wrinkles in time

         To the north, along the road, Julia’s land soon rises onto a wrinkle in the earth, a folding of the land that, in winter, and at a distance, is like a blanket that has not been smoothed; hardly a hill, above a turn of the river, but likely the geologic cause of the change of direction to the flow of water in the shallow valley below. This wrinkle continues rising upward from there, across the road and into a property apparently owned by the Catholic Church that was never farmed because of the inconvenience of the all the rocks and glacial debris you could see gapping through the trees along there from the road, and those trees have long been left mostly uncut as being useless for building because they had already grown so deformed by their own roots. They are dark and brooding trees for having been so long neglected, each with a personality of its own if you stop to look, while being totally unlike the surrounding wilderness of second growth that is so without character, clogging the fields around them, filling the former sheep pastures behind ruined stone walls, and overgrowing the slumped remains of apple orchards everywhere.

         I was told by our neighbor, Mr. Copple, that the land there at the opposite side had been donated to the diocese by the nephew of Neal Wright so that the conveniently shattered glacial rock might be used for a church that was never built. But, he said, ‘Unbuilt cathedrals crowd the hills in these parts.’ I guess that I missed the sarcasm in the remark at first. But Julia suggested that the donation was made simply to avoid paying the property taxes. Maybe both were true.

         The part of that Earth-fold extending into Julia’s land is also a nest of trees and broken rock but less dramatic. This had drawn my eye soon after I had moved into the barn and become the object of a daily pilgrimage for me in the mornings. Her property line, which ends at the road there at the south side, continues a short distance beyond those trees to the west before cutting back down toward the river, in the midst of more second growth and yet another former orchard now buried in that unruly chaos. But, standing on the back of that ‘wrinkle,’ on Julia’s land, about fifty yards in from the road, there is a break in those trees and a view of the river over the open and still harvested land below that is simply wonderful for the mind. There is some ancient order to Mr. Copple’s work there that is magical. The grass is cut to dry in trails left by the tractor and then later gathered into bales. But the design the tractor has left on the fields, turning with the subtle contours of the land, appears to be an art in itself.

         One afternoon I carried a box of books up to one of the bedrooms for Julia—things she had finished using in her research so that she could make room for more downstairs. In that bed room is a painting which I recognized immediately as the same view from the wrinkle above the river. It was perfect. Maybe a little better. It somehow encompassed more than one season—looking out from a darker vantage among the trees; out across the shallow valley to the turn in river and to the trees that had grown up in the old pasture land beyond. A farmer was seen in the mid-distance as he worked his tractor across the open field, in a sort of defiant gesture against the enveloping of unruled nature at all sides. A small figure, on a small tractor, but that defiance was there in the gold and green of the cut hay in his path, immediately before the edge of ominous dark in the wooded ridge above him that was still being held at bay. A larger focus was felt and conveyed in the effort of the farmer alone and the sense that this was a simple, if eternal, quest of human order against an always encroaching wilderness.

         The painting was not signed. It made me first realize that none of Maya’s paintings were signed. But I knew who the artist was, of course.

         To make conversation, I asked Julia, who had painted it, and her answer was rather elliptical.

         She said, “I’ve seen you up there in the trees. It is a wonderful place.”

         “But who painted that picture. It’s perfect.”

         “Perfect is a difficult word.”

         I shook my head at her for being difficult herself. “I think it’s perfect…Did you paint it?”

         She wasn’t taking the bait.

         “Nooo… I can’t paint. I dab. I can do a house. I did the barn.”

         “Who painted that?”

         She quit having fun with me.

         “Maya. She had a thing about signing her work when she was younger. Funny, but I think that was because of Neal Wright. She used to stop on the road by the grave stones. I’ve seen her there a dozen times. It took her awhile to accept that she would never be a good Shaker.”

         “She’s great!”

         “Great is a difficult word, as well…I have even more I can show you! … But not now, but I’ll show you later!”

         I discovered it was Julia’s habit to buy one of Maya’s paintings as often as Maya would let her—which was about as often as her daughter needed a little extra money for her rent.

         The chestnut boards on the walls of the tack room were set in vertically, unlike the clapboards, spanning the space between the cross-braces to the studs from ceiling to floor. The empty space between the studs is a little more than two feet wide. Pretty wide, but the studs, hand cut in another age, were more than just two by four inches and plenty strong. And the vertical wall boards were fastened with pegs to the braces. With careful prying, trying not to break the pegs, the boards lifted away with the pegs intact but this was more difficult than I imagined, and I settled for removing only enough of those to access the space behind for the insulation. The pegs were fatter than common nails would be, and shorter, but still quite hard, if not quite iron. It was only when I had finished with filling the empty gap at the outer wall to the clapboards that I discovered a secret. Some of the boards of the inner wall were made of cedar, not chestnut. And more than one of those boards there was not pegged, and I was immediately curious why. This inner wall was backed not by clapboards but more vertical boards at the opposite side in the open interior of the barn. That seemed curious enough by itself, given that the rest of the walls in the barn were open to the studs and cross braces and the back side of the clapboards, but the boards that were unpegged had a tongue in grove design that held itself in place.

         I only had to fiddled with one of the boards a little and it was clear that it could be lifted away. There was even a pry point at the top edge…And there was my greater discovery. Behind the first unpegged board, in the otherwise empty wall space behind and to each side between the studs, were short shelves—and these were filled with books. Because the space was narrow, the books were set in sideways, braced tightly by the board in the wall at either side, and except for a little wood dust these books appeared to have been untouched for at least a hundred years. I removed them with a sense that Neal Wright was the last person to touch them. Cream white paper. Beige cloth covers printed in black

         I pried the next unpegged board loose. This one came away more easily, as if it were more often used. But no books—only several chalkboards made of black slate framed with the same chestnut as the barn. There were six of those and I immediately assumed they had been made for his children. They were all well used and the slate cleaned to an inner frame of white residue. A stack of chalk pieces of various lengths was piled in a small wooden box on another cross brace.

         The next and last unpegged cedar board opened to an empty space, and I was disappointed—already taking my treasure hunt for granted.

         But there were twenty-two books in total, all clean and neat and in excellent condition— probably aided against the insects by the cedar wood of the walls. They were smallish hardcovers published by Harper and Brothers in the 1850’s and even if I did not recognize any of the titles, I was pretty sure they would have some special value for their condition alone.

         I brought the books into the house to show Julia at four. She turned the stove off immediately and sat down at the table to look at them.

         She said, “Amazing.” several times as she did.

         I said, “They look like they might have only been read once, if that.”

         “Yes. Yes…And then hidden…Neal hid them there…But why? Why would he do that?”

         She paged through each one looking for a clue.

         When I told her about the chalkboards she sat back as if hit.

         “If I had only known. Of course. The children had been homeschooled as well…He must have put those back there after they grew up. He couldn’t throw them away.”

         One day, standing in the yard by the water pump, I idly told Julia that I actually loved the feeling of the farm. Just the feeling of it. There was some aspect of paradise about it. And that I had just been trying to get that sensation down on paper and failed. She seemed a little flustered by my compliment.

         “It’s in the painting. Your daughter got it!”

         To that she says, “Is that on Mars, too. Do they have farms on Mars?”
         “Yes. Of course.”

         “I should have known…” Then she says to me, “You know, the story of how we found this place?” Her eyes looked at me expectantly. “Of course not. I’m sorry. But it’s rather amazing to me, even now…” She set her bucket down. The chickens spoke patiently amongst themselves. “I came up from New York to look for a place to live. I liked New Hampshire. I’d spent some time here before. And I’d had it with the city and our condo on Greenwich Street was already worth a good deal more than we paid for it. Derek and I were still together then; and he’d already started dabbling in real estate. The money from his own writing was not enough to meet his wants, I suppose. Unfortunately, my writing wasn’t adding very much to the kitty, either…I had the idea that maybe we should live up here to save some money. Derek wasn’t interested in that…But then Warner Brother’s bought the rights to The Covenant. Suddenly I had a big check of my own…Anyway, we were up here, and I saw a poster for an auction when we were in a pizza shop over in Dover. We immediately went. The auction had already started, but I managed to buy several boxes of ephemera on impulse. You know about that. It included the letters of Molly Wright…Well, I read most of those letters that same evening in the hotel room in Exeter. I was up all night. And then in the morning I called the auction house and asked them where they’d come from. The woman there told me they were from the estate of Frederick Wright, who had died the year before. It turned out that he was a nephew of Neal and Molly and he had no children of his own. And now that the probate was done the contents of his house were being sold. They had some of Neal Wright’s handmade furniture there at the auction house as well. I wish I could have bought more of that too. But then she mentioned that the house was being sold, and I asked where that was. I was still filled with the imagery of Molly Wright from her letters. She had caught that feeling you are talking about. The ‘paradise’ of it. And we called the real estate agent and we were here that same day and made an offer. Just like that! Our lives were changed.”

         I was duly impressed. “It was fortunate that you happened to see that poster.”

         “Derek is a New Yorker. He’s from Queens. Pizza is a sacred thing…even though that was not a sacred pizza—Nevertheless, it’s a good example of how life is made up of small moments. And those moments are the stuff of all my novels. I can leave the theatrics to others.”

         But I already understood this now.

         Julia believes that Neal and Molly Wright had a great love affair. Her book The Wrath is about that. But Molly’s letters indicated that fact as well. And after I discovered the books in the tack room wall, I had another thought. The letters Julia had bought at the auction were neat and crisp, after a hundred and fifty years, as if, like the books I had found in the barn, they were only read once, at most, but then folded and put back in their envelopes. Even the envelopes were clean, just like the books. There were no postmarks or stamps. I wasn’t even sure if they used stamps then, but I now believe that Molly never gave the letters to Neal. And that may be the same reason why the books look so unread as well. Cream white. Rag paper. Neal had bought those books for Molly because he knew she liked novels. Julia said that, more of the same kind had been found in the attic of the house, but all of those were well read. Later, perhaps, Neal had ben unsure of some of his choices. Perhaps he had put the others away for a further consideration. Or to give them to her one at a time as gifts. Julia speculated aloud that Molly kept the letters after she wrote them and Neal may never have known her true feelings.

         On the road between the wrinkle and the house there is a small, square, and gated piece of land that rises up alone. Maybe twenty feet wide. By its shape you would immediately guess the rise is artificial. The gate is iron, and the fencing, and the iron posts are thick and knobbed at the tops like staircase newels. The trees there, two oaks and several maples, are large and uncut for at least a hundred years. It is otherwise relatively neat, being trimmed once a year by the Boy Scouts, keeping the graves of veterans clear. You see such rises throughout New England and know them at a distance to be what they are.

         The larger grave stones there mark the lives of Neal and Molly Wright. Two smaller stones with the metal insignia of Civil War veterans pinned in the soil beside them, mark the lives of Jacob and Daniel, who had died separately in Virginia. My sense is, because those stone markers are smaller and identical, that the remains of the two boys may not actually be present—their remains being mixed into the soil on some distant field. One small white stone with the word ‘daughter’ marks the brief life of a child, left nameless, but Julia has determined from Molly’s letters, that she was christened ‘Grace’ at the time of her death. Two other daughters had married men going West and might be buried anywhere out there today. There were no others letters to tell.

         I pass this rise most days on my walk up the road and it always takes my thoughts away from whatever concern I had. But this particular interruption has been a part of altering much of my thinking.

         And Julia’s philosophy about narrative thinking and a narrative thread is very much part of that change.

         The fantasy in most fiction is to account for a lack of fundamental understanding for how human beings act as well as how the world functions. Imagining someone with a super power is almost always an effort to hide a failure—an inability to comprehend reality—usually a craving for deus ex machina involvement to solve problem normal people supposedly can’t cope with. Unfortunately, a great deal of historical fiction is based on a similar fantasy; a lack of understanding for how an ancient world and the people in it might function. Far easier to focus on a tyrant or king. But then again, that same deficiency plagues most other novels as well; populated by characters with temporary lives, disconnected from their past or future. I was trying mightily to avoid that vacuum on my Mars.

         Dostoevsky was plagued with epilepsy, poverty, hunger, and much else, but he appears to have been haunted by terrible thoughts as well. I imagine, given his wonderful essays, that he was more than aware of all these tribulations and dealt with them by writing about them—the demons exposed to sunlight. Good enough. A boon for the rest of mankind just because he wrote about it. But he had never set foot on the moon, or Mars, even in his imagination, nor flew in a plane, or so much as rode in a balloon above the mortal fray. I am sorry for him in that way because he was never really able to escape the earthly demons that plagued him.

         I was coming to understand that Neal Wright used the tack room as a refuge from the house, and from his wife, and this likely happened more after his sons died in the Civil War and his daughters were gone. What demons were those?

         I had never actually stood up on the raised gravesite by the road before. The iron fence there seemed to express itself to me that way. Keep out! But the trees there cast a deep shade in summer and the cool of that drew me over from the broad sun on the road one day.

         The five graves themselves are simple, one very small for the girl, without a name, that simply stated, ‘Daughter,’ the two slightly larger stones for the boys, Jacob and Daniel, each with a name and rank—corporal and private—but no dates. Each of these said ‘Son’. And then one stone, larger still but divided by design into halves, with the top edge shaped as much by the crusting of lichen as by a double bowing of the stone. The simple roman letters there, chiseled deeply, were: Neal Wright, born November 18, 1821, died March 4, 1872, husband of Molly Green Wright, born April 12, 1820, died October 21, 1894. The white granite of all were trimmed in the gray and green of the lichen and moss. But standing at the rail of the fence there offers a view similar to the one on the wrinkle. When I realized this, I looked at that situation differently than I had before. And only then did I remember ‘Daniel’ in The Wrath, who had left his home behind when Lincoln called for troops—who had not left his home to die, but so that his family would live—and his old brother, Jacob, who had followed him to war to save him. And both had died. Certainly they were the root to that story.

***

19. On the nature of paring

         She had said that her poetry, published when she was young, was ‘very earnest.’ The only work listed on-line was something out-of-print from Blue Crow Books, a small press in Maine and was published in 1985. She would have been sixteen or seventeen then. A precocious effort. I ordered it from a used bookshop.

On the Nature of Human Paring’ was certainly that. It was very earnest.

         One poem stands out from the others for being overtly sexual. I don’t think this poem was intended to be bawdy. Though she has never been bawdy when speaking to me, Julia has certainly been bawdy at times in her books. Those moments can be quite provocative and often offset a grimness that would otherwise be depressing. ‘Living without means, people find more value in what little they have,’ was one thing she had said.

         Amidst all the agricultural references and allusion to fruit tree propagation, and the double entendre of that, there is this poem:

Push.

Leave my breasts for another time

Push as far as your hard flesh will take you.

I know you believe you cannot go further

Because of my pelvic structure,

But again, push, the blood is nothing,

Push, until you think that must be the end,

But further then, again, to the ends of the earth.

Push, and do not cease, do not withdraw,

The seed will come when it does,

The end will come when it does,

You cannot stop before it does. Please.

Please push, again, please, push.

 Give me your breath so that I can breathe.

Now push, now, push again.

The muscle in my legs cannot help,

Nor my heels beneath your buttocks.

I cannot help you now with this, to push

Again, beyond what seems possible,

Push to what is most true in you. Again.

Push beyond the easy path,

Beyond all that is easy, but again

Push, to find what mind is in your body

Push to find answers for all we can know

Now push to find me there, again,

Push to know me, please again,

Oh, please, you cannot leave me here.

Take me, with you forever. Now.

Please, do not leave me—Breathe me

To be in me forever, I swallow you whole

         Come now, we are one.

         I was not brave enough to ask about all that. I gave no hint that I had read it, but another time, thinking about it again, and being too smart by half, I asked, “Did you want to be a farmer before you wanted to write.”

         This seemed to surprise her. She smiled as if I had discovered some insight. And then she went about her business for a time before saying, “I had wanted to be a farmer, at one time. Just a brief city girl fantasy. But I had no real idea of what that meant. I only learned later that I was not good enough for that. I was too soft. But that was me. All fantasy, then. I always wanted to be this or that. And I’d studied about farming. But only the words. And I read about the ways…I’d first been taken with the idea of it when I was at a summer camp here in New Hampshire. It was a girl’s camp, up near Winnipesaukee, and there was a boy who worked near there at the farm where they kept the horses for the camp in winter. On Sundays when we had no program, I walked down the road to where he worked. Everything at the camp was programmed, but Sunday, when families visited, the time was left open, and of course, my family was never there. Dad was always off someplace—somewhere. And my mother,…you know…And I would go watch that boy. I would go down to that farm and sit on a fence and just watch him go about his chores. There was no Sunday for him. Every day, the chores were the same. I watched even when he mucked the stalls…He wouldn’t let me help, but I spoke to him while he worked … And finally, one day he said to me, ‘that fence can’t be comfortable,’ and he grabbed some bales of hay and made a chair for me. All without ever even asking why I was there. As if he already believed his work was the most important thing to see and deserved my attention…We talked about all sorts of things then. He wanted a tractor… He told me all about his imaginary tractor…He was not part of the family that owned the farm. I think he was actually just a local. But we did not speak about our families. For some reason, I think that was understood to be off limits. I’m not sure why. But one Sunday, when he asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I said that I wanted to be a farmer, because I thought that would please him. But instead, he was disappointed…He told me that he wanted to travel. He wanted to go to wild places. I said, ‘what about your tractor,’ and he said, ‘that will be here when I return.’ And I said, ‘I thought you loved doing this. The way you work has love in it.’ And it did. I had watched him. He cared about the way he did things. It was in his hands. In was in the press of his lips as he went about it. Nothing was done carelessly. He put everything away in its place. And he actually said to me, ‘I love life. That’s all. And I want to see as much of it as I can, while I’m able.’”

         I could not ask her then about the poem, but I knew I had in a way.

         “How old were you?”

         “Fifteen.”

         “How old was he?”

         “Sixteen”

         “Did you see him again?”

         “Never. Just that summer…And forever…I know he joined the army and he died in some far place.”

***

20. Raggedy Man

         I go to the Market Basket about once a week. This is a procedure. There is not a lot of room for impulse. I get a gallon of whole milk, some of my favorite granola, some oatmeal if I’m running low, butter, a quart of apple cider, eggs, bread, peanut butter if I need it, jam, honey, coffee, tuna fish, and any of the other small stuff I am running out of. Usually some rolls of paper towels and toilet paper.

         The tack room is ten by twelve. That is not a lot of space for everything that I have in there, so I have my writing table out in the open barn by the larger window on the north. It can be chilly, but it works. That’s what coats are made for.

         I have a small electric heater that has a fan, but there is no hot water. Yet. I’ve thought about ways to solve that, but they all have a downside. There is one water pipe to the barn from the well for watering the animals I think, that used to end on the wall outside. The ground is still frozen there but I dug down to branch off that in order to bring the pipe in below the tack room and to my sink, and I branched off that again to feed the toilet on the other side of the wall there. I had a smaller sink that I’d found at the dump but that leaked, and the only other thing was an old stainless steel kitchen sink that is a little too big. At least that had part of a kitchen counter with it, and I could cut that down a bit. I keep the dry food in plastic containers on shelves above there, away from the mice. The door below the sink is missing so I have a little curtain there to hide the soaps. I don’t know why. It’s a bit frilly. Impulse, I guess. But pipes do not have the elegance that some Twentieth Century architects thought they do and I don’t like looking at them.

         Next to all that is a 1947 Hotpoint refrigerator. That’s a little less than six feet tall and just under three feet wide and purrs like a large cat but it keeps a steady temperature. It’s more than I need, actually. And I have an old GE electric stove on the other side of the sink as well. The age on that is difficult to determine. It has four burners and an oven. I don’t use the oven because it draws too much power for the line. With everything, plus my bed and the plastic containers that I keep my clothes in beneath that, there is not a lot of room left. But still more than I ever had in the van. And I do have a bookshelf by the door, but that’s full.

         The key to living in a barn is to limit exposure to the mice. The bookshelves are up a couple of feet off the floor. They could still reach that if they wanted to—I’ve seen mice climb walls—but it is at least inconvenient. Any paper left around becomes fodder for their nest making. I had a page about my Mars colony end up that way. Paper towels and toilet paper have to be kept in the plastic bins. The cat that comes around is irregular. That means I have the mattress and my pillow and sleeping bag covered in a plastic tablecloth that I take off at night. Even so, I can see where the critters have been up on the counter in the morning.

         And this does not leave a lot of room for grooming.

         I was at the Market Basket one day and a kid of five or six had stopped in the middle of the aisle ahead of me to stare. I stared back. His mother took his hand to pull him away but before she could, he said, “Raggedy man.” He actually said it a couple of times, loudly, and some other shoppers, besides his mother, looked at me suspiciously.

         When I got back home, I realized that I did not have a mirror to look in. I suspect this was subconsciously intentional. But a piece of black cardboard on the inside of the truck window quickly made up for that and I could see what the kid was saying. It was just a fact. I cut my beard back like a hedge about once a week. I comb my hair in the morning but that gets a little nuts. My cloths are pretty clean. I usually use the laundromat while I’m shopping for groceries. But the fact was that I don’t look ‘kempt.’ Unkempt is too structured a word for a mess but I suppose it works. Raggedy is better.

         This realization then, amounted to me going back to the store one morning to buy a razor and a mirror. And that resulted in a major double-take from Julia when I came into the house at four.

         She said, “What happened?”

         This was said quite seriously. It was obvious by the widening of her eyes what she was talking about. I think she had jumped to the idea that something terrible had happened. I don’t know why.

         “Just decided to do it.”

         No funerals. No events. Her face relaxed.

         “Well, I approve. Good move.” 

         But I wasn’t going to let that go.

         “Why didn’t you tell me?”

         She knew what I meant.

         “I’m not your mother.”

         I followed, “No, just as a friend. We are friends, aren’t we?”
         She shook her head at the idea, or perhaps at the very occurrence of the idea.

         “I thought you knew, and it was the way you wanted it. You’re an odd fellow, Geoff. But you know that.”

         “I’m odd? What am I odd about?”

         She put her best skeptical face on. “Really?”

         This seemed to be a standoff of unanswered questions.

         I started typing and she was making something at her stove and then she brought it up again.

         “Are you really saying you did not know what you looked like before?”

         I pushed back at that, “Really.”

         “You don’t care? I thought you wanted to look like that.”

         “Like what?” She didn’t answer, so I did. “Like a raggedy man?”

         She smiled at that. “Very good. I like that.”

         However, I think the subconscious purpose here was actually to be looking civilized for my grandma.

         My grandmother’s house—and it is that, not my grandfather’s, as he will readily tell you—is in Dorchester. This is where the family gather’s every Easter. I am not religious about the religious context of Easter, but I am about respecting my grandmother’s wish that we all gather together there once a year. We do this at Christmas and Thanksgiving as well, but those Holiday’s bear less of the weight of her commandments and family members have been known to miss those events in favor their spouse’s families, or as happened recently with a cousin, ‘a ski vacation.’ We all expected to be hearing about that ski vacation for many years to come. Unless, of course, he married the girl involved, in which case it would be forgiven.

         My grandmother’s house is enormous. Dorchester was once a place of enormous houses in its Victorian heyday. Bigger than in Arlington. My grandpa’s purpose in life, other than taking care of my grandma, which he had done for most of his life, and fixing cars, which he will tell you he has done all his life, is to maintain that house. He says it is a full-time job, so that means he has been working three jobs since 1973, when they bought the house at auction. Before that he was in the army. He refers to being in the army the way other people speak of going to college, even though his primary duty there was to fix trucks. And this has all worked out.

         I have two uncles and three aunts. One of the aunts is not married but now has another boyfriend. Most of her boyfriends through the years have not survived the family gathering at Easter.

         For reasons Julia would appreciate, a key topic at our Easter gathering this year was me. My mother had ‘accidentally’ let it slip that I was no longer living in my van. I had found someplace to live…And that, now, I was living in a barn. My grandma refined this knowledge with a sieve of questions, at the table, in front of everyone.

         My defense, as it has always been in such situations, is to tell a story. When I was a kid, these stories were often fabrications—lies—made up on the spur of the moment until my grandmother’s patience wore thin. This year, by way of describing where I lived, I related the story of Neal Wright and his wife. My grandma found this very satisfactory and it avoided some of the worst damage that the usual inquisition might have wrought.

         “How old is this woman you live with?”

         “I don’t live with her. I live in her barn.”

         “You have a stall?”

         “I live in an old tack room. It’s actually very comfortable.”

         My grandpa immediately asked, “Where’s the poop deck?”

         “It’s right there. I built it myself.”

         “That’s expensive.”

         “I put in a toilet I found at the dump.”

         “Where did you learn to do that?”

         “From you.”

         That shut him up, as they say.

         The thing about this is that, after the fact, Julia wanted to hear all about my Easter dinner. I think that she is jealous of such a large family event. This is something she never really had, and it matters to her. And seeing it in that way has made me consider it more carefully for myself.

***

21. Mechanized Man

         The plot remained much the same, but the mechanization of man has now become my primary theme. The theme being, of course, that no man was, after all, a piano key.

         I had previously dealt with lesser matters, such as survival, and the purpose of particular characters in trying to survive, and what they would do after they survived, and what would happen after that. But now, none of that matters so much to me. It seems to me that all of that would take care of itself. People just wouldn’t do things that would get them killed. If they didn’t think they would make it, they just wouldn’t do it. And except during war, that is the way it has always been, on earth as and in heaven (or Mars, as the case may be). I will call that, my plot principle ‘number one.’

         Outside influences, like floods, meteors, tyrants or religious fanatics, might make people do foolish things, usually out of expediency, but for the most part, they did things that worked and would let them keep working afterward. And that concept was now influenced even more by Julia’s work. I had to accept the idea that people tended to do the right thing—otherwise we would not survive as a species. That was her own ‘narrative thread.’ But now there was a new concern. The work itself was being mechanized. The human element was being eliminated because it was problematic. Machines were more efficient and predictable. Theoretically.

         I had more than a couple of problems with this. One was where it conflicted with principle number one. Why would people want to make machines that made mankind itself irrelevant? It seemed obvious that this was in fact what was happening, but why? And on my perfect petri dish of Mars, how might that be determined?

         Some of the factors might be delusion (as in religion), subterfuge (as in politics), accident (as in the weather), or on purpose (human meanness).

         Accidents, like meteors and floods, were ultimately boring subject matter to me. There was little to be learned there, even if Hollywood is habitually taken with the special effects. Everything that follows from such events is actually unique to the event itself, unless it was caused by human failing. If I wanted to play with the human beings under stress from such events, it might be interesting, but that was already common enough to history on Earth and didn’t need my added input. Human beings coped. That’s the actual story.

         What made Mars unique for me was that it eliminated so much of the non-essential. It is not so clear why someone might do something stupid if they are juggling too much cultural baggage, historical tradition, or political preference. And I am not smart enough to deal with much more than the problem at hand. I could go to the junk yard of ideas perhaps, and get something that worked, but that was about it. But there were no junk yards (yet) to speak of on Mars.

         Julia had found her niche by removing most of those larger forces of history that so often screw people up, by retreating to a time and place when the world was still lit only by fire. She was interested in the individuals themselves and why they did what they did. And that was appealing to me as well. I just didn’t want to deal with the Highland clearances, or the removals in Ireland, or the religious wars, or a politics that went back to the Viking invasions. I wanted my cake a little more plain. A pound for pound cake with just a little chocolate frosting, perhaps. Mars offered me that.

         Another problem with machines is what a former boss of mine called ‘Gigo.’ Garbage in, garbage out. The machine did what it was designed to do. If the design was mediocre, it produced mediocre work. However, with robots, the element of excellence was certainly lost, along with all chance of innovation. A science fiction writer named Robert Heinlein once made the point. His great fault as a human being, he said, was that he was lazy. He kept trying to find ways to avoid work. This resulted in his invention of all sorts of nifty stuff to help him avoid work. It’s a problem a machine alone would never face.

         Essentially, slavery of every kind, human or machine, was people being stupid in order to avoid work.

         Autistic types were very taken with the idea of artificial intelligence. This is, of course, the ultimate machine, sans the difficult human element. Not only does the robot avoid certain physical aspects of the human being, body oder and bath room breaks, for instance, but sex as well, and all the messy thinking too. The human element is totally eliminated! Theoretically. But the list of problems with such a beast only becomes longer as each problem is extrapolated. If they are wanting a calculator that calculates on its own to fill gaps in a spreadsheet, good enough. If they want one that might realize that the gap has been caused not by error but by fraud, they won’t be getting it within any current human understanding. What is fraud, just for starters?

         The point is, the problems with AI are very likely to have an impact on my perfect Mars. That’s even in keeping with the thinking of my personal hero, Mr. Heinlein. People are lazy. Some will want slaves when they can get them, no matter the moral issues. Inform them that the shirt they are wearing was made by a twelve-year-old semi-slave in China and they brush you off like so much lint. And there begins the rub with AI. There are theoretically no moral issues with AI. And determining just what the artificial intelligence of this particular manifestation of ‘slave’ should be is ultimately a moral matter. Child labor is a ‘paradigm. A human issue. And the machine is only as stupid as the people who make it.

         Another matter, adjacent perhaps, was the very idea of intelligence. Was that simply a concoction of information—data—or did that involve a judgement about what data was more important. A calculation of past use might tell this artificial intelligence what data was most in demand, for instance, but that was not necessarily a good standard for what might be needed in the future. Prior experience by the AI might indicate what could be required, but it had no necessary baring on what was wanted. If the operations of the world were frozen in time, AI might be of some service. But time had a way of passing.

         These things would have to be faced. Some idiot would inevitably think of some advantage to the use of AI in producing some specific result. Basically, this was similar to the jerk who thought he could get rich by robbing the store. The consequences were manifest.

         But now Julia had introduced a new element to my thinking: the coincidence of the laws of logic to the natural limitations of artificial intelligence. Logic was useful as a math for thought, but worse than inadequate for actual human action, and if not kept in check, it could be destructive.

         Logic might dictate that human beings should be absolutely controlled or, for best results, eliminated, in order to maintain some preordained idea of what was best. And those who followed such religious orders, the ordained priests of such beliefs about what was best, were the greater enemy of mankind

         The power struggle on Mars would inevitably be between those who wanted slaves—or those who by any logic were willing to be slaves themselves for the convenience of a hassle-free life and in order to avoid the messy consequences of freedom—and those who wanted to be free.

         I mentioned my struggle with mechanization to Julia. She corrected my course more than a little.

         “It’s not just the machines. The machines need numbers. The numbers need machines. That’s what’s really at the root of all this. Besides the amoral philosophy and all that crap. The slavery is incidental in the long run. It fits so long as it’s convenient and then the slaves are dumped overboard.”

         When she has had her first bourbon, she loosens up a bit. But you have to keep her allusions together.

         “What are you talking about?”

         “What is going on today! It’s a numbers game! And it’s not even worth a gamble. It’s a certainty. It’s just a matter of your 0’s and your 1’s…The educational system is geared to creating 0’s out of 1’s. The medical establishment is geared to reducing the number of 1’s to 0’s. Let’s have another war so we can take more of that money we’ve managed to inflate previously and eliminate a few more 1’s. All those savings. All those lives. They say it is just a matter of arithmetic. Replace the human beings with machines. Throw the human beings overboard. Have AI build the machines. Throw more human beings overboard. Government expenses are for human beings. With them out of the way, government keeps it. But it’s an even worse sham. The money they pay is only worth what they say it’s worth. If you owe some human beings a debt, inflate it so you don’t have to pay as much. Then charge more for the service. Win, win. You loose.”

         I have to leave before she adds another layer. I need to be able to sleep

 without a shot of bourbon.

         Julia pay’s all of her bills by check. She does not have a credit card. She has described everyone staring at her as she writes a check when she buys her groceries. I have been behind people like that. But now I will admit that my patience with it has improved. I now understand why she does it. I agree with her on every level. But my math skills are not sufficient even to keep the balance in my meager account, and I can’t afford the bank charges if I bounce something. So, I use my credit card. Julia frowns at me for this. And this had me thinking. If my Mars is an electronic society, would there be any room for someone like Julia. Or even a flaccid currency. Wouldn’t everything be reduced to a card—or perhaps just a chip in the head?

         This becomes yet another alteration in my grand plan. I must now find room on this red planet for Julia. Without a ‘Julia’, they are doomed. Right from the first inkling of the idea, I know that everything has changed once again.

***

22. The God of the Machine

         There is a god in the machine

         That lies unseen

         That cries for release.

Do you hear it?

         There is a god in the machine

         That promises to be good

         Will make things better

         If it’s better understood.

Don’t believe it!

         There is a god in the machine

         That must have its way—

         Must have it! If only to play

         by its own rules

         If only you’ll learn them!

Run away.

         There is a god in the machine,

         Made of edges and numbers   

         Of precise mathematical calculations—

         And you are not the sum of its parts.

         You are not even a remainder.

Stay away

         There is a god in the machine

         That will always fail

                  When needed most—

         It’s designed to,

                  As such gods always do.

         So that you will need it all the more

         This is the lesson

                  Of the god in the machine

         There was no date on that bit of verse. I knew it was hers, but written after her small book of poetry was published. It was on a large index card that had clearly once been pinned to a shelf or wall and the card stock yellowed. I had found it one afternoon set into a shelf on top of unrelated books.

         I still had the newsletter from the coffee shop in my computer case. I had never taken it out, from that very first day, and I’d forgotten it was there but found it again that same afternoon that I found the index card and that verse.

         Impulsively, I asked her, “What would you have done if you hadn’t found me?”

         I didn’t mean it to sound self-serving, but I suppose it was. Very!

         She said, “I would have tried again … That little ad you saw was not the first. I ran something like it at the University of New Hampshire newspaper. I got no replies at all…I even spoke to a young woman in an office there. She explained it very simply to me: ten dollars an hour isn’t very much. And I was expecting whoever answered to have their own computer. And the hours were not good. If I wanted to get a response I would have to say more. To offer more. And I told her, that was the point. I didn’t want the ad to be attractive. I only wanted someone who might see the opportunity in it for themselves…You should have seen her smile. In the catalog of smiles, it has a special place. A forever happy smile of smug and infinite ignorance.”

         I asked, “What sort of person did you imagine you’d get?”

         “Not you! Good Lord, not you at all. I imagined some young thing from the English Department, who might have read one of my books and appreciated what I was doing. I actually thought it would be a girl. Like one of my daughters…My daughters were always good assistants—when they weren’t too busy doing their own thing. They always begrudged me the time I took from them. But I was thankful for that. I didn’t want them to be easy with their time…I told them it was like a bank. An invisible bank of time. And all their efforts were saved there for the day when they would need the time themselves…But they didn’t buy that.”

         “So, you left it up to the fates. An accident?”

         That got her heavy breath. Not a sigh. A breath necessary to tackle a larger task.

         “I have come to realize, Geoff,…Perhaps I knew it all along, but I finally admitted it to myself, that I was not a rational person.”

         I didn’t understand. But then, that might have been part of the answer.

         “When did that happen?”

         “I was still young. But I’m not sure. I was always young, until I wasn’t. You age slowly, and then suddenly.”

         “Were you already writing then?”

         “Oh, yes. I’d written a couple of novels by then. I had children by then. I was wanting a divorce by then…I can remember the year. And the moment. It was during the time I was living in Ireland and the girls were young…there was a moment. I had them out in a field by a road near our little rented house—just a country road. The intention was a picnic but I picked a poor spot. A perfect spot really, just over a stone wall where we could see the curve of the earth. And a farmer there was quite displeased with me. He stopped his tractor—right in the middle of the field. On a small rise. A beautiful sight in my mind to this day—and he came over to us where we were beneath a tree—-but still close enough to be in his way it seemed—and he said, ‘What’cha doin’?’ I didn’t understand his brogue at first. His little finger-soiled cap was pulled down tight on his head and the dust caught in the sun-grin lines of his face made him fierce. I said, ‘Would you like a drink of water? It’s lemon water. It’s very good.’ And he stood there, gobsmacked. Hands on his hips. Just stood there. His next word was, ‘American’s! You own the world!’ and I said, thinking to make light of the seriousness in his voice, ‘We rent. mostly.’ And then he smiled. And then laughed. Loud enough to make an echo on a field. Just as quick as that. And he reached a hand out to take a cup of lemon water and drank it in one gulp, and said, ‘Tell your girls to be careful of the brambles there at the wall,’ and then he turned and went back to his tractor.”

         It was a good story. Part of it had turned up again in the ‘The Plow and Stars.’ Then, and there, it was just another part of her ‘narrative life.’ And another thought suddenly occurred to me that I had no way to express without seeming totally egocentric—I wondered what part of my own interaction with her might be useful in something she wrote someday.

         I asked her, “But what was so irrational about that?”

         And she said, “It’s irrational that I even told you about it…But the thing of it was, at that moment, I was suddenly quite taken with that man. It was quite inexplicable!”

         I backed away from that, “You’ve always struck me as more rational than not.”

         “Perhaps, it’s because we have that much in common.”

         I said, “What? What is the ‘that’ that you’re talking about?”

         “Oh, I’m not putting rationality down. It’s necessary. You can’t get from here to there without it. But it’s baggage. It is a burden. You have to remember to bring it along on the journey, or you’ll get lost, but then always remember when to ignore it.”

         She was playing with me.

         “The opposite of rational is crazy, isn’t it?”

         “Ah. But we’re both crazy. Writing becomes us. It’s a schizophrenia…Ask Derek. Ask my daughter, Jesse. She’s said as much. But she’s the craziest of all. She should be a writer as well. She thinks she can control her life, and the lives of her children, and her husband, like so many characters—and, no. That’s the problem there. She can’t control him. Felix has already sold his soul to the God of the Machine. He thinks the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But you and I know it isn’t.”

         Defensively, I said aloud, “I was just trying to understand.”

         “You do. You already do. You just don’t accept that yet…Living in a truck down by the river, just so you can hear the spring peepers and the pop of the embers in the fire and the birds awakening in the morning. What sort of primordial fool are you, anyway? You could be earning a living, nine to five, with a little overtime when you want it. You could live in a box in the city instead of a tack room that smells of hay and ancient manure. You could watch television instead of writing novels about a deserty planet. You could be making something of yourself!”

         That got a reaction out of me before the thought was complete.

         “I am. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do.”

         “Yes. And on your own terms. Not by the rules of ‘The God in the Machine’—the god of numbers.”

         “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned that. You’ve written a verse to it that I found over there in the book case. Where’s that phrase from?”

         She rocked at the recollection of the verse. “I had forgotten about that…Originally, I don’t know. I know there’s a book by Isabel Peterson. She was smart but she didn’t quite get it. She wasn’t wise… But it’s also that poem. Something I wrote when I was in Ireland with the girls…I remembered it while I was telling you about the farmer. The farmer really only wanted to warn me—and warn the girls, about the brambles. But he couldn’t just do that. That would have sounded rude to him—as if we were too stupid to see it for ourselves.”

         “That part’s not in ‘The Plow and Stars.’”

         “Ah. You’re ahead of me, there. Yes. I have written some of that into ‘The Plow and Stars.’ But no, the thought was there. The thought came before all of that…When Donovan sees his sweat—his life—spilling down his own body into the plowed soil, like blood, he realizes he was simply a part of a machine—Rolf’s machine. And Clare offers him the water. Her own water. And he fully realizes that she is the source of his life. Donovan is not an intellectual. He is not rationalizing what he sees. He is understanding it in the same way human beings always have. He is seeing himself as part of the story. He sees himself in the greater narrative. And he doesn’t like his part.”

         She already had her hook in my lip, so, I just listened.

         “There is a conceit that spoils genius…and that is being too smart. You can’t be stupid and be a genius, but you must guard against being too smart. It will get you killed. All you know at any one time is far too little to save you. You must always do what you can with what you know…I have written a book about the god of the machine. ‘Coming to Joppa.’ Isabel Paterson and her acolytes would not have approved. In fact, they didn’t approve. I received a very bad review in one of the libertarian magazines. That was about the time I gave up on all politics. A numskull who had never heard of Phidias and only possibly might tell you who Pericles was—if given time to look it up in an encyclopedia the night before—was telling me I was wrong! It’s true, of course. I might have been wrong. It was only a fiction—but a supposition based on fact! And done for a reason! At least he might have let himself be entertained by the idea. It was a good story. Instead, he was outraged. It is a religiosity I had already grown tired of while corresponding with the Medievalists. In fact, with Coming to Joppa I was already going back more than two thousand years just to get away from them.”

         “I never read that one. What was your mistake there?”

         “As a story? It didn’t sell very well. Too abstract, I suppose. Not enough cause and effect. That is good story thinking. Basic narrative thinking. But I was trying to lay the ground for something broader. Carthage succeeded, but ultimately failed. How did that happen…But with the critics? For the critics I was not in love enough with trade. ‘Trade!’ My young hero, Kothar, was a Carthaginian. His family fortune was based on trade! He was going to Athens with his father to meet with Pericles and secure the ‘trade’ of his family business there in olive oil. I thought it was a great device to work around. Unfortunately, historically, Pericles fell to the plague that also killed the boy’s father and the trade deal fell through. He was suddenly helpless. A stranger in a strange land. His father’s gold is stolen. Carthage was Phoenician and the Greeks were always at war with them at some level. They spoke a different language and Carthage was expanding at the time. Kothar had trained to be his father’s interpreter. But suddenly, he was penniless and worse off than a slave. He had no place in their society. That was when he managed to secure a position as a helper with the great Phideas. And that was hundreds of years before Rome—when sheep were still grazing on the seven hills.”

         “With Phideas, Kothar comes to appreciate art. He learns that the power that made Greece great was not trade. It was art. The Greeks had seen the god in man, when the Carthaginians were still the slaves of numbers. And that was hundreds of years too early. No one cares today about what the price of wool was in ancient Athens, but as long as we are human, we will care about the art. All the wealth of Carthage that made it great was in silver and gold. All of that is gone now too. All gone, thousands of years ago. And that was what I was saying. Isabel Patterson spent far too much of her wonderful energy on matters of consequence. Those details can’t be ignored. They are our mean. Our golden mean, perhaps. But that is not our purpose as human beings. The God of the Machine is, ultimately, not human. It’s math. It is not about human beings. Trade is merely good math. It is important. But a machine can’t do any better. The Sumerians had already created the abacus, you know. But with Phideas, Kothar discovers the heart humanity. And that was ‘art.’”

         She shook her head at a memory before continuing.

         “What was my great sin? What had I done? I had questioned the very idea that business was somehow ethical. The outrage! The great goddess Ayn Rand had already spoken, hadn’t she. Business was the very basis of ethics, was it not? … Such balderdash! Equitable, perhaps, but not ethical! They even called me a neo-Marxist! Me!…The idiots!”

         “Thank goodness Paul was there to council me. He had been through all of that sort of thing with his theories about kings. His advice has been my guide ever since. Ignore them. Simply ignore them. Go my own way. The true believers would never accept anything that questioned their religion.”

         But then I asked her, feeling the delight of being out of breath with the running of my thoughts, “What would I have done if I hadn’t found you?”

         This was a reversal of fortune that I thought might matter.

         And she said, “But certainly! You would have tried again.”

***

23. Teaching a man to fish

         She took me fishing the day after I told her that I already had a license that I still hadn’t used from my time living in the campground. I had wanted to learn, but I had never actually fished before. My father never had the patience for it. Hunting was more his style. But I think Julia was more likely interested in eating fish than teaching me anything. Maya was clearly jealous.

         On the same river that passes her property there is a dam further down that is quite old, first built when the power of a saw mill there was used to make the lumber that built the town of Rumford. It was perhaps even the same one that Neal Wright had used. There is no record for that. The walls of that old mill were already gone before the invention of the camera, with only a few bits and pieces of it to be seen down at the Historical Society. Later, a small textile mill was built of brick and stone in the same place, using the same waterpower that flowed over and around the enormous blocks of granite there, to make canvas during the Civil War. But, the only reason for that dam now was the mill pond behind it, and that was good enough. It is a quiet place except when kids are using the bridge close by to jump into the depths. But this was still early morning. And Julia had promised to teach me to fish—something she was already pretty good at—if I got up at the crack of dawn—actually before that when the sky was still purple—and then she promised she would fry what we caught for dinner.

         But we couldn’t take our time about it. She had her schedule to meet—whatever that was. I knew that she wanted to be writing as soon as she could. This seemed manic to me but then, writing was still more work to me than it should be and I understood that it was only a pleasure for her. And there was something more to that that I didn’t know.; I had not yet discovered.

         It hadn’t rained in a week and the water behind the dam was clear. You could see the fish there, teasing the near bottom depths, which had silted in to only a few feet in most places. Their shadows in the early sun eerily increased their size.

         Being my father’s son, in about half an hour, I was bored. Julia corrected my casting technique a few times, and I think I was getting the hang of that, but my motivation was purely the thought of eating what we caught. I couldn’t say that, but she had probably figured that out pretty quickly too.

         After she’d caught a couple of brown trout and I had caught none, she switched places with me along the rocks there so that our lines would not cross and she caught two more and I was still casting for my first. No beginner’s luck. So, I got to talking. Besides, it was an excuse to be looking at her instead of the water. She’s a handsome woman. Even more so in the light of day and outside of the house.

         I already knew she did not want to just chat. I had tried that. So, I tried asking her something a little more weighty.

         “If you don’t like politics but have a philosophy, what’s that about?”

         She didn’t answer. But at least it looked like she might be thinking about it.

         So, in my own defense I said, “You know, I have an opportunity here. At least I think about it that way. I’m doing this job for you—happily enough—very happily enough—but I have my own ambitions. And I have this opportunity to learn something from someone who knows more about it all of that than I do.”

         She finally answered, “Maybe. I’ve been doing the same thing for forty years. I haven’t gotten all that far with it myself. I envy you for the chance of starting fresh. I wouldn’t want to spoil that for you.”

         I said, “Maybe. But it’s not starting out all that well for me yet. I could use a little push…So, tell me about your philosophy. What’s at the core of that? Can you say anything about that?”

         I think she was at least thinking about the question as she cast again. Almost immediately she pulled in another trout. I was now down none to five.

         She hung that one down into the water, on the string with the others.

         “Core? I suppose that’s all about human fallibility. Understanding that… bringing a larger number of human beings together does not increase the chance of them getting anything right. It only increases the chance of their getting things wrong. Mistake upon mistake—exponentially. Human dynamics means a few individuals will always influence the many. And the goals of those few will naturally be to benefit themselves…But, in the end, the direction of the many will always and inevitably be guided by the few.”

         This prospect did not seem so bright to me now—especially not in the gleams of light dancing on the water.

         “Then, how do we improve? Things are better now than they were, aren’t they?”

         “Are they? Well, I think you’re right, but very likely for the wrong reasons. I can’t read your mind, and I can’t read your books yet to know how you might have come up with that idea, because you haven’t gotten around to writing them—But you can always read mine.

       She says, “That’s one theme of my work, after all. Human frailty and resilience. I may be wrong, but I think you’d at least be able to tell me why I’m wrong, just based on what I’ve written…I read your book, remember. I didn’t learn anything about why your characters did what they did. I just found out what they did and what you thought the result of what they did would be. And I wasn’t convinced. It would have helped to know why.”

         This was criticism I could use. At least I knew that much immediately. I was at least ahead by that much anyway—and whatever fish she would let me eat.

         She said, “But that’s the essential conundrum. Things are getting better. And that’s only because of individuals. Individual people. Not groups. Put them in a group and they all get the same ideas. Trying to please each other. Get a date. But individually, they can come up with some pretty nifty stuff. And yet, then again, alone, they’re useless. Weak, nearsighted, bigoted. They’re just prey. But if they work together, they can take down the wall. That’s the balance. How do you get things to balance so the individual can come up with a nifty idea and the group can benefit. It’s the conundrum of civilization.”

         So, I had to think about that. I had the feeling that she was avoiding some core principle. At least avoid the practical politics of it. Maybe that was just me wanting something easier to grasp; something even clearer still. Essentially, I wanted something simple.

         Then she said, “The ants in their hive have been doing the same things very successfully for millions of years, and, for as long as this earth exists, I expect that they will continue to do the same. That’s observable. It is not a supposition. It’s not a metaphor, or a simile, or a parable. It is what it is…The oddity of human beings, however it has occurred, is that they are so capable of change. For better or worse. This is also observable. And that’s the stuff I like to work with.”

         That seemed closer to something else I might be able to use. The beauty of human oddity. But I wondered immediately if beauty was actually more odd than the alternative.

         I asked, “so why do you write about things that are so far removed from everyday life. Ancient Ireland is pretty difficult for most people to imagine. You said it yourself. We don’t live in a world lit only by fire anymore.”

         She nodded at that, but took the time to answer because that was the moment when I finally caught my first fish. A brown trout as well. She helped me get it off the hook and showed me how to string it through the gill. The fly was ruined in the process so she gave me another one from her little tackle box.

         When I had that on the holding line and in the water, she said, “I disagree…We are still human. I chose to work with human beings in a simpler mode because I could highlight the possibilities for change more easily. I’m lazy. When you’re dealing with people interacting with machines—a car, or a gun or whatever—there is a lot more going on there. A lot of moving parts. When you get into modern society—never mind all the ersatz religious and political bullshit—you’re pushing too many pieces. How does the potential of the computer affect human behavior? How does a cell phone affect human behavior? How does electricity affect human behavior. How about flush toilets? It becomes a far more difficult thing to tell a story. I decided to cut my problems down to as few as I could imagine. A kind of fractal. But not an artificial one. Something observable in history that fits the larger human experience that we know.”

         And then I caught another one. Getting it off the hook became the challenge. I didn’t want to interrupt her thought.

         She said, “It was probably your fly. You changed flies and now you’re cooking. But now, we should probably head home.”

         I wasn’t ready to leave. I was down two to six but I still had a chance to come back. And she had told me something about writing that I hadn’t thought about before.

         I asked her, “What other authors work the way you do?”

         I was actually talking about the relentlessness of her schedule.

         She said, “I have the most admiration for authors—the greatest of them—the ones who have taken the bull by the horns and not been quickly gored by the dilemma, to mix my metaphors. Very Hemingwayesque of me…I say ‘quickly’, because they’re always gored in the end. Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Melville, they all suffered their losses. But they tried. I could never even get into that ring. I was never up to that challenge. So, I chose a smaller ground to play on. Maybe just because I was afraid of the horns.”

         I said, “So, you’re not trying to write the Great American novel?”

         She sighed, very purposefully. She was tired of my questions. “My ambition was always just this. Here. It’s actually what I’ve done. That’s why I know I am not a great author. The great ones always step beyond what they know they can handle. But I also admired the lesser ones, the Trollops…Sorry. My little joke. I mean Anthony Trollope—and I wanted to be the best I could be among them. If you want to write, you have to know your limitations.”  A movie reference! I passed on it rather than interrupt any flow. Perhaps, absentmindedly, she cast one more time, still speaking. “I married a man who gave up on that. I know what that is. He might have tried greater things, but he didn’t. I would have forgiven him if he had just chosen smaller battles—no. I suppose that’s on me. I wanted him to fight the bigger ones, but he did not…My criticism of that may be why he gave up. And if so, that’s on me too. And the funny thing—the sad thing—is not that he failed, it’s that he didn’t even try. All the talk when we were young was just talk. The great novel that he wanted to write about this or that. And then, later, when I pointed that out to him, and reminded him of his cowardice, he could not stand to be around me.”

         I spoke the thought without considering consequences.

         “So, you blame yourself for your marriage?”

         She shrugged a little. “Is it true? I think so. I wanted Derek to be better than he was…We can’t all be great. Look at me!…The great ones are there to show us the way, but we can’t all be just like them.”

         She reeled in an empty line and started taking down her rod.

         She said, “If you don’t at least try to be great, you won’t know where you stand. I failed that test. But it was only after the fact of it that I knew I hadn’t really even tried. I wanted children. I’d actually given up at the start. And I think that’s the reason for my ‘projection’—that’s what the psychologists call it. ‘Projection.’ That’s why I was so hard on Derek… I loved to write but being great wasn’t in me to do. Not then. And that’s why I think I would have forgiven Derek. Given time… But then… He could have at least been better, and I would have forgiven him if he had just tried. That’s the thing about human fallibility. We all fail. All of us. I think the matter is in how we fail and what we do about it. I loved writing—enjoyed it—and I realized that I might be able to do something worthwhile if I just focused my work on just one part of the problem. Victor Hugo could try to take on the world. I wasn’t up to that and I didn’t like failing so I tried to do something that I could handle. Jane Austen was great, and she kept her eye on one place. And after all, I think I’ve done pretty well with that.”

         She helped me take my rod apart.

         I said, “I think you’ve done very well.”

         She said, “We can change. That’s our strength…I admire the ant. It is a marvelous creature, but I don’t want to be one, or be the same for a million years.”

         “But how did you start? What made you start? What was your first novel like?”

         “Ah. The first one I finished was ‘Laocoon.’ As a girl I had gone to Rome with my father and saw that great sculpture there. It affected me very strongly and I could not get that out of my head without writing it out…The mythology of the thing is mixed, you know, and the story has been retold many times with the circumstances changed. But Virgil’s account is the one I liked. In that one, Laocoon attempted to warn his fellow Trojans about the great horse and suffered the consequences. But the history of the event was written by the victors, of course, and nothing of any consequence from those days could go for long without being mythologized. It was the way things were remembered. Made to be repeated…before we had public school indoctrination. In Virgil, Laocoon is a priest of Poseidon. But I saw him as more likely just a farmer who had a practical understanding of moving large objects and the weight of wood. A farmer, but an engineer. Like my father. That’s why he was not mentioned in Homer. But that was why he had come to Troy with his sons. They had heavy wagons. He was there to deliver food to the city.

         “You remember the sculpture? … I knew that the snakes were only symbolic, even as a girl of sixteen. Girls understand snakes. The sculpture was an attempt to capture myth. The greatness of it is what makes it possible to believe. But the reaction of the authorities to the farmer’s idea that the great horse was a ruse said more about them and the politics within the city. Troy did not fall because of a hollow horse filled with a few enemy soldiers. It fell because of a hidden enemy within the body politic of the city. The horse was their device. At that moment, a mere farmer making remarks about the thing in public could not be tolerated. It was treason to the powers that be. The same as it is today. His sons tried to protect him from the authorities, of course, and they suffered with him. But I liked the idea in one account that the eldest son survives and he is the one to tell his father’s story.”

         I asked, “Where is it. Where is that novel now?”
         She shrugged, “I don’t know. Maybe in one of those boxes in barn. I was still living at home with my mother then, when I wrote it.”

         “And why did you think of that? What made you think that Laocoon was a simple farmer?”

         She put her head down sideways at me.

         “Why…Why do you ask so many questions.”

         “Because I’m stupid.”

         “Why…Well, I’ll you Mr. Stupid…That very same summer—I spent most of that summer with my father. I had been with him in Colorado. They were building a hydroelectric dam there. A small one. There must have been a hundred guys working on that. Maybe more. And it was pretty boring sitting in a hotel room so I was out there on the site with him. I sat there with a book in my lap and watched him talk to the other workers about things that I had no clue. I loved it! This was magic talk! These were working men. They moved enormous machines and they were pouring concrete and bending long sheets of iron into molds and washing down the concrete that was already there. All of that. I loved it. And they talked to me. I was the only kid on the site, and a girl at that, and I had a yellow hard hat on that was a lot bigger than my head so I must have been something to see. Those fellows asked me about what I was doing, and what I wanted to be. All the stuff adults ask kids. And I said that I wanted to be a writer. And one of those guys, built like a truck, says to me, have you ever read Dostoevsky? I didn’t know enough to be surprised. I didn’t yet know who Dostoevsky was. I just said no. He said that I should read The Brothers Karamozov when I could. It was his favorite.”

         “And that did it. You remember that still?”

         “Yeah. Of course! But that didn’t really do it. What did it was a bunch of state politicians who came down in their cars and took pictures of themselves at the site and a bunch of reporters asking them questions like ‘How hard was it to get this dam built?’ And other bullshit of the kind. As if they knew a thing about it! And all those workmen had to stand aside for a couple of hours in the hot sun while that circus went on in the shade of the food tents. And even a kid could see that those politicians could never build a dam…It was pretty clear to me, by then, just what made the world work.”

         The sun had reached her and brought the sweat up. I took a short breath of that and moved off toward the car. The ride back was quiet.

***

24. A common tragedy

         She says, “What I have failed to do—No…Yes, what I failed to do—and I am not sure I can repair now—is to make it clear what ‘the commons’ was.  To make that clear by exposition, not explanation. Some fellow, Garret Hardin, wrote a book years ago about the ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’ that explained something of how it worked and totally missed why it worked. I’ve thought I should pick up that gauntlet again, a hundred times, and then left it there for some other matter that seemed more important at the moment, (besides, it sounds vaguely socialist, doesn’t it?) and now I think that was a bad trade. I had seen this before, when I was writing The Wrath. The commons really is at the center of everything. It deserved a book of its own. But then I had other ideas, and now I have ‘The Plow and Stars,’ to mend and this story does not have another wedge of space for it.”

         She was tired. I had argued with her about something and lost, as I usually did, but this had now left her unhappy at her choices.

         But I said “So, write it now!”

         “You say that as if you had never tried to write anything yourself.”

         This had become an all-purpose argument to hold me at bay.

         “Alright. I’m stupid. But stop what you are doing and write it now. This book is done! You must have forgotten a comma somewhere. So what? I can tell you at least a dozen things I’m dissatisfied with here, and none of them are as important as writing about the commons!”

         She laughed at me—actually giggled, as she does when she is tickled by a thought.

         “You are so funny. A dozen things…If I were only thirty years younger, I should search the corners of the earth for you…That is the real answer to your question of before. But, you know, in the end…I wouldn’t have. I would only do what I’ve always done—what we all do. Make do…But it would have been so wonderful to have your voice in my head when I was first trying. Ned’s voice was a voice of reason. A father’s voice. He never took chances. After all, he had a mortgage to pay. He actually said that very thing a dozen times when I wanted to quit some project or another. But he also said, ‘if I’d known you were going to marry Derek, I would have married you myself!’ He actually said that! Damned if he didn’t say that out loud! … It ruined me.…But I could never go back. None of us can. We make do.”

         She emptied the little glass she used for drinking her bourbon and got up to fill it again. As she always did. I had once suggested that she use a larger glass to save the trip and she told me that didn’t work. She would just drink more. And that was the real reason for the smaller glass and why she never drank in bars. But then she stood at the kitchen counter there in the half dark and told me more.

         She said, “The common ground is at the center of all civilization. It is the center of the universe… But it’s only an idea. Really, just an idea. Not just grazing land, or water rights, or even the village green. That’s only the remnant of something larger, after the cubically minded have done with it. In truth, it’s not even an actual place. But in the medieval village it was the key to everything else. Crime there was relatively unknown. Stealing from your neighbor was stealing from yourself. Besides, if you just asked your neighbor for what it was you wanted, and they had it to give, they’d give it to you and then help you carry it away if you needed that. Your neighbor was your cousin, or married to your aunt. That caused other difficulties at times, but that’s what the seasonal ‘fairs’ were about. For the human gathering, not for the selling. No one had any money, anyway. Everything was trade. The benefit to it was in meeting the miller’s son or the cooper’s daughter…That was the way it was in paradise.”

         It was a romantic image.

         “What went wrong?”

         “Then? I’m not sure. Now, the whole idea of it has been smothered by the politics of socialism. Voluntary sharing has been mandated by taxes with all the corruption attached. Christian giving mandated to replace god with the state… But that’s the book I should have written. To find out.”

         “Why can’t you do it now?”

         She laughed again. But didn’t giggle.

         “Because it’s a love story. I’m too old for love stories.”

         I laughed at that. “Don’t tell Paul. He still has his hopes.”

         I shouldn’t have said it. I had no right to say it. And that cleared her face. She looked at me sideways for a moment and then said. “You are a pain in the ass.”

         My only defense was, “I wish I wasn’t.”

         She took a breath on that. “What do you really wish?”

         “And I wish you would write that book!”

         “Damn, you! Go to your room!”

         “Yes, ma’am.”

         Paul had said in The Right of Kings, “The tragedy of the commons arises from the actions of a few. Kings may rise and fall, but the commons endured and survived them all. The Vikings might raid and plunder and kill the sons and take the daughters, but the commons endured. Perhaps on higher ground. A wall might be built. But the grace of the commons remained. It was the center of all community. It was the center of the Christian world. Not Rome. Not Constantinople. The physical representation of human spirit, apart from government. The voluntary cooperation of individuals for a common purpose.

         “What killed the commons were the few; those who used that ground without care. The uncivilized, who still live off of the rest of society even today… That very abuse then became another argument for government—This man grazed his cows where that man grew his barley. This man let his sheep eat all of that man’s winter grass. That man cut his neighbor’s wood and sold it to another. So, laws were passed and it was argued that an authority was needed to keep that law—as if the government itself needed no such guardian. As if the government could mind itself. The King, then, became the only stop-gap between government and grace.”

         I read that again that night.       

         And this: “Of course, the idea that a social arrangement might exist outside of the purview of government, stood in the way for some. As property rights were codified, so too were the rights of government. The very idea of a human arrangement not managed by authority became troublesom. Slowly, over centuries, the land and the responsibility for the land was subdivided and individual rights as well as responsibility, diminished.

         And this: “But what made the greatest disruption in this social arrangement, happened in the fourteenth century. The plague. One in three or more were suddenly dead. The need for labor forced the altering of traditional laws to make things easier for those who had lost their families, and their heritage. Land went fallow for need of titles and the churches emptied for need of tithes. The few, those nasty few, the unhappy few, took advantage of the vacuum. Bad Kings arose who did not do their duty—out of ignorance, or fear, or greed, or power lust.”

         With that freshly in mind, I wondered just how many of those ideas he had inherited from Julia. But then, it might be difficult to see if the intellectual traffic had moved in any one direction.

         By way of unsubtle prompting, I asked Julia about this the next afternoon. I was not going to let my new idea go. What I wondered was this, could I create a ‘commons’ on Mars.

         That, and I must be a pain in the ass, or bust.

         “But where did all that come from? There were no commons in Roman times. ‘Res communis’ really only applied to the air and the sea. The Greeks didn’t have it.”

         She shrugged a little. “No. The Greeks had all the great ideas, but kept them for the few…No. It was really only encapsulated by Christianity. I may not be religious—or not religious enough for some—but I am aware of that at least. The commons arose from the values of Christian culture. That was in the transformation of tribal culture to a moral one. This was not the law of Rome, but seen as the law of God. As a social norm it was barely a thousand years old when the plagues came.”

         “Can’t we go back!”

         “No. Perhaps not that way. But why should we ignore the best of all that. I am not so fond of Paul’s belief in Kings. He doesn’t trust the few to mind their own business. And I agree with him there. But the key is for the many to appreciate their blessings. To make that appreciation a social norm—a ‘commons’ in and of itself, and to defend it” 

         “How does that happen?”

         “I can’t tell you. Paul sees it as the role of the King. But I wrote a book about all that once! I wanted to find out, and because it’s not in the history books. Not that I could find. Those are all about government and the law of Rome, or the Church, and the law of Rome. Did you read what I wrote about the Lollards?”

         I hesitated. How deep was this rabbit hole?

         “Who are they? What was that about?”

         “Were. They were the first protestants, in the Fourteenth Century. Followers of John Wycliffe.”

         “What was that novel called?’

         “Lud’s Church. It’s all based on legend anyway. On Walter de Lud-Auk and his daughter. That was the focus. But the Lollards were quite real. And so is Lud’s Church.…But, it’s no church. It’s a fissure in the cosmos! It’s just a narrow natural cathedral of stone…There is a chasm there in Staffordshire. I took the girls to see it. It was a rainy day but the light encrusted the walls like emeralds—Maya said, it was as if they were stained glass. It was once a hiding place for outlaws and vagabonds and heretics. The Lollards were heretics. Essentially, just another popular revolt against authority. There was always another. They had posted their demands, their ‘Twelve Conclusions’ for church reform, on the door of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s cathedral, and that was a hundred years before Martin Luther got around to it

         “But Lud’s Church is one of those places where the mythology has been muddied by too many shoes. So, I used the commons as the focal point of that story. The Black Death had destroyed the society around them, and the people of the village could not know the larger picture or the politics of it but they understood the importance of the common ground. Unfortunately for them, the changes were too great. But the Lollards movement arose from that. In reaction to that. Even the name ‘Lollard’ was an epithet for their lack of schooling, but their knowledge was in fact greater than the scholars who attacked them. The scholars only knew the law of Rome. The Latin of it. But these people knew what was already being called the ‘common law.’ And they knew it in the vernacular. Wycliffe and his friends were translating the Latin Bible into Middle English for them. But it was really just the intelligence of the ages, relatively unsullied by the Church or the King…A thousand times, for a thousand years, people had found a way to live among themselves without direction. So I wrote a book about that. And Paul wrote me a ten-page letter about it, afterward!”

         “I’ve never seen that book.”

         “It’s out of print. I’d written a juvenile just before about the Peasant’s Revolt and Wat Tyler, for the girls, and that sold well. Librarians loved that, and I wanted to write something for an older audience, with a little more sex and violence.”

         “The peasant’s revolt wasn’t violent enough?”

         “No, not the way I told it. Besides, I’d avoided all the sticky stuff in that—the philosophy and the ideas and the politics. Lud’s Church was a love story.”

         “Sounds like it.”

         “Paul was dead set against the later John Oldcastle revolt, of course, because that was a challenge to his hero Henry the Fifth, but he was fascinated with my connection between John Purvey and the Lollards, and John of Gaunt and the Black Prince.”

         “Did he have anything good to say?”

         “He loved it! So naturally it didn’t sell. His taste for the obscure is unerring. But it didn’t sell.”

         “All that sex and violence didn’t sell.”

         “No. Mixing sex and morality are not so popular these days…But, maybe a few got the point. Most people accept the rules of the road and drive on the right side—except for the Brits, of course. But then, they are Brits. It’s in their blood to be wrong, else how will the rest of us know what’s right. They are the only nation in history to have succeeded by being wrong, over and over again. Dodgy kings and imperial ambitions have no future in a world of atomic bombs.”

         I whined a little, “But Christianity has its problems too.”

         She wasn’t having it. “On balance, I don’t agree. I think some self-anointed Christians do. They want their fingers up someone else’s ass. But then, the flaws of human nature can ruin anything. Otherwise, there would be no need for Christianity in the first place. That was part of Wycliffe’s doctrine. Not the Roman Catholic version, but the popular church of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, when the corruption of Rome had driven people away. And that actually goes right back a thousand years to Pelagius again. Our laws make us worse by taking away our responsibility. Our flaws are what make us better—if we bother to deal with them.”

         She had lost me.

         “So, what is Pelagius? And why have you avoided the subject of the commons in your other books?”

         “Who is Pelagius…Because it is a larger and deeper matter than all the others. I don’t know that I’m up to it now. I just wanted to tell stories about human beings endeavoring to be human. I think that effort is at the core of Christianity, but I wasn’t interested in writing apology. C. S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton have done that quite well enough. It might be done it differently, but I don’t think I was ever up to that particular task…I am not a theologian, but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk to God. I think the King James Bible is the greatest single book of literature. I’m not the first to feel as if it was written just for me, just so that I could talk to God.”

         My ignorance of so much history had me feeling a bit snippy.

         “And what has God told you lately?”

         “That you are a pain in the ass.”

         So, this was my responsibility then. What would the commons be like on Mars?

         My Mars—the Mars I dreamed of was not yet hospitable for such a grand device, or was it? Still, the plague that gripped it, was efficiency.

***

25. We all live narrative lives

         A day later, Julia dismissed my after-thoughts, repeating her usual phrase. “We all live narrative lives.”

         By that, I thought she meant that what Donovan did would have to be in keeping with what he had done before. I wasn’t sure.

         “Why would he want to go to America? It wouldn’t be so easy to reimagine the opportunities in a place you didn’t know, without resources of your own. He has nothing. He’ll just be canon fodder.”

         She nodded at that. “But that’s what he is now. And what he was. He’s a human tool, at best. His only tie—the only reason for him to stay, Clara, is cut. He has to leave Ireland. And he’s already worked for others. He knows he can work for others. But there is no steady work to be had at home. People are starving. Any job is better than none. The English have moved them off their land with a purpose. And The Virginia Company needs the canon fodder.”

          She had said all that in a passing explanation to my asking why Donovan would have taken a job with his lifelong enemy. I suppose she thought it was self-explanatory. I didn’t. I had become invested with this fellow. I didn’t want him to fail, or die. She wasn’t prefiguring anything, but she had already proven to me that she would let a character go if she thought that was what the story called for. I had not expected Daniel to die in The Wrath. I think I was still upset over that.

         “But why? How can he be happy about doing that. Doesn’t it bother him?”

         It was in the middle of things at that moment and she didn’t want to stop. And later, there wasn’t time, or she had forgotten. I don’t know which. It was the next day before she picked that thought up again.

         And then she said it again, in exactly that way, while she broiled some bacon for some grilled cheese sandwiches, because she had left herself too little time to cook anything more.

But then, she added her own question to it.

         “We all live narrative lives, don’t you think?”

         She wanted me to answer. I said all what I could at that moment, “I don’t know.”

         And she said, “Yes, you do!”

         This is the way she could be. If I questioned something, she would often turn it around. I assumed that was partly her way of keeping my questions down. She didn’t actually know all of the ones that I didn’t ask, just to avoid this.

         I said, “How do you know?”

         This probably sounded defensive because she squinted at me as if to say, ‘You know better.’ But she said, “You’ve already told me as much.”

         I couldn’t remember saying anything like that. But as I looked for a way out, I realized this all sounded quite familiar, as if I had dreamed it before.

         “What did I say?”

         “You said something about the fact that everyone you knew had a story…Didn’t you say that?”

         I had said that. “Yes. I did. And that’s what you mean, then, by ‘narrative lives.’ Got it!”

         “No. Not quite. It’s more than that. It’s in everything! Everything!”

         I probably shook my head at her, because she squinted again.

         I said, “Well, I suppose it accounts for a lot. But not the unexpected. Not the plane crash or the earth quake, or the epidemic, or the war. It doesn’t account for everything. Daniel died in war. He wasn’t controlling that! We don’t control a lot of what happens to us.”

         Now she was shaking her own head. Perhaps with pity, I imagined. When she did that, it was almost audible.

         “No. You’re missing the point. We all live narrative lives. All of us do. Almost all of us, anyway. There are some few people who live in fear, who don’t want to plan for the future and try not to think about the past. They’re always waiting for the next disaster to strike or shoe to drop. Preparing for it. They are not living much. Mostly just suffering. Like a dog in the shelter, trembling at the approach of a visitor, just waiting to be put to sleep.”

         “Geez!”

         She shrugged at her own thought. “Well, it’s an image I used once… Sorry. My point is that even the fearful are busy making the story of their own lives. That’s all. The disaster does’t do that to them. Because of the way they live, they might be able to rise above the disaster, but that only adds to the narrative. It does not subtract. The lives we live are what we chose to live. No matter how mundane. Especially that. Mundane lives are made, not born. And, Daniel chose to go to war.”

         I had seen that, myself. I knew that to be true.

         After a day of wrestling with the demons in her imagined world, she must then face the ones that threaten her own. That was my dramatic reading of this. But most of these were also mundane—common and everyday—on either side of the divide. ‘We are out of butter,’ or ‘The furnace is off. There’s no hot water.’ They were usually not the cause of much more than a few words, though some days were worse than others. More than once, she called this the ‘admixture’. This was another Julia word. I liked the sound of it. She said, ’This was the admixture of reality and imagination. It’s the natural schizophrenia of the writer of novels.’

         This evening, she said, “A funny thing, I think—more odd than laughable—is when I read of people saying that life is just a simulation. I don’t read very much of them because the idea is so shallow that I find it difficult to take anything else they say very seriously. Imagine thinking that coincidence has anything more to do with your own life than your perception of it. As if the universe revolved around your own awareness of it. It takes egocentricity to the level of the absurd. But that way of thought has grown over the years since organized religion has so utterly failed us. It’s really just an extension of that failure, I think. People looking for a set of instructions. Though, as ideas go, it’s still a poor replacement. All small print. There are no cathedrals there. No Bach…No devotions. Devotions were always key. Affirmations of belief and what is important in life are important. Everyday. A guide. As a matter of habit. These are not just rituals. They are a direct connection between the past, and the present and they anticipate future. It’s not an accident that the cathedrals of the past ages still speak to us.”

         That was an idea I had not considered. Without religion, devotions were not all that common. Stupidly, the rituals were taken for granted by us now. A good appreciation of the present was that much harder without some comparison or guide. Especially so when, all the while, the obvious cause of their egocentric none sense that all things are happening just to them—that things appear planned, just for them, and that there was simply too much coincidence, is that it’s true! And the reason for that is, that things are, in fact, planned. By them. They are the ones who planned them!

         “We are the product of our own behavior! By our own desires and failures. But God forbid we should have to take responsibility for our own actions. That can’t be! Easier to believe in a ‘matrix.’ I find it so boring…Better, they suppose, to believe in a ‘matrix’ than in God. Don’t take responsibility. Better to believe we are all in a simulation that we cannot control, than to deal with the child that is being raped next door or the derelict we pass on the street!

         “And still they build castles and fortresses, and missiles, and aircraft carriers, to guard against their own behavior, just as much as they did a thousand years ago. Two thousand years ago! Ten thousand years ago! They field whole armies to defend themselves against their own idiocy. And then, when those fail, as they always do, they punish their fellow man for not properly complying with their wishes—not doing better, not trying harder—which, remember, by their own standards, those poor bastards can’t help themselves for doing because they too are in the same matrix and have no free will to begin with…Their own concocted matrix, is a circle! A boring circle. If ever they admit to having free will and being responsible for what they’ve done—for what they do—they would have to stop and think and admit to their own stupidity, and meanness, and avarice, and find their own way. Hell, if they would just raise their children to see that they had responsibility for their actions, their children might actually put an end to all the fucking wars! At least end all the most avoidable suffering. Instead, they send them off to state schools to be indoctrinated in the ‘simulation.’ To be a part of the greater plan. For the greater good…For me—to me, it’s all as if the devil rides unshackled. Without inhibition…But, that’s the trite drama in it! The hackneyed story in it. And all the time, the few who actually stand against that evil are most often just fellow human beings! Unaware of the greater madness. They don’t have the leisure of sitting beneath a tree to see an apple fall. They are busy picking them, against the coming winter. They are just trying to live their lives…I think that those are the real heroes—the ones who stand against all that evil without ever knowing the good they do—the ones who go to war, when they must, but only because they think they are saving their families.”

         She stopped herself then, and took another sip and shrugged. The jag was over.

Then she said, by way of excusing herself for running on, “But at least it makes for good novels. I wonder what it would be like if people ever did take responsibility for their own actions. Now, there’s a science fiction novel for you…You think? But, a boring one, I suppose. People being stupid and blaming others is just too damned much red meat.”

         This last part was related to a phrase we had covered that day—a scene in which Rolf had taken the slaughtered pig from a farmer. It was the farmer’s only real possession, one that he and his family had raised with care and finally agonized over slaughtering because they were so fond of it, only to have Rolf come and take it away from them.

         As I left, she said, “I think they would take everything, if they could, destroy everything if they had to, just to avoid admitting they are responsible for their own evil.”

         No wonder she drinks her bourbon at night.

         There was my job again.

         Unfortunately, my Mars, set out on straightened lines by future planners (or a writer) looking to save time and cost, would never imagine doing something just for fun. The petri dish is round. But does it have to be? Would some like to wake up on a morning to see the Elysium Mons out their bedroom window? The fastest way to Elon might be the long way through Utopia basin instead of Isidis.

***

26. Jesse from New York

         Jesse came up from New York, unexpectedly. I think it was just to check on her mother but I had the sense she had some other agenda that was left unspoken in my presence. She arrived at noon, so the timing, at least, minimized the interruption of her mother’s work. She did not come out to the barn, and each time I caught a glimpse of either of them near the windows, they were busy talking, so I left them alone. I finally went in to the smell of beef-stew at four.

         After some small talk, Jesse asked me, out of the blue, if I was happy. It’s not a question you get asked very often. Not seriously.

         I said, “Thought I was. At least, I’m learning to be.”

         “Is mother teaching you that?”

         “Indirectly.”

         “That’s the way she teaches. Indirectly.”

         Julia was sitting right there, during this, making faces of comment.

         “I don’t teach!”

         Jesse said, “Sure you do! That’s what all your books are about, isn’t it!”

         Julia raised her hands. “You are only looking at them that way because I used them that way to teach you, and your sisters…I did do that…Hell, I was busy writing them while I was doing it! It was easier than trying to do two different things at once!”

         Jesse protested. “We helped you!”

         “You did! You were my first editors. If you remember, I taught you to type when we were working on Bailey’s Watch. The whole section on farm economy was re-written just for you because you couldn’t understand what the hell I was saying about the way Bailey did things…But I didn’t know a damned thing about medieval farm economy then, myself. It changed my whole perspective on the story! If you hadn’t asked about everything, I couldn’t have done it. Bailey’s daughter Beth is even fashioned on you! And when you realized that, it irritated you no end. Remember?”

         “Too well. Beth was an irritating brat.”

         “You just didn’t like her asking questions all the time. But it was a perfect plot device. And it was exactly what you were doing the whole time anyway.”

         This was something I had heard nothing about before.

         I asked, “You used your own books in your homeschooling?”

         “Oh, yes. Not officially. I don’t think the authorities would have accepted that. But the girls always passed their tests.”

         Jesse added, “The tests were easy. After your own mother has questioned you on the propagation of crops and the biology of a seed, there isn’t a lot left for the State exam to surprise you with. We were always several years ahead on the literary material…You know, she had us reading Winnie the Pooh when we were only three, not six!”

         Julia said, “That was only the first one. Not the others.”

         “We were reading Tom Sawyer, out loud, in second grade—”

         Julia interrupted, “They don’t teach Tom Sawyer in the public schools anymore. They have no sense of humor.”

         Jesse looked at me for support. “She was a terrible teacher. And the best. Did you know that our first great narrative, The Iliad, was Alexander’s favorite book! Alexander the Great! And that he carried his own annotated copy all the way to the Indus…I couldn’t live up to all that. … We put our kids in the local Montessori school as soon as they were out of diapers.”

         Julia put in. “You may regret that.”

         “I hope not.” Her mother rolled her eyes. I was coming to realize that this was a family characteristic. And into the silence that followed, Jesse added, “It costs a fortune…But I suppose that was harder on Felix.” There was definite regret in her voice. “The public schools in Manhattan are wretched.”

         I asked, “Why did you say that? I thought the Montessori schools were better.”

         Julia took one of her heavy breaths, obviously lifting the weight of too many previous conversations—or arguments. Her daughter looked away.

         But Julia wasn’t letting go of it. “Because for them it’s all about procedure. Method. Developing childhood ‘independence’ by having them manipulate something predetermined. Repetition. But the children don’t know they are being manipulated when they are playing with blocks and numbers. Children want content. The number ‘two’ doesn’t mean anything, unless it is ‘two’ of something. They want to know about things and what they are, what they mean. The word ‘freedom’ is just an idea. They might actually learn it if they have to experience it. That’s what knowledge is. You can’t find it written on blocks! It’s not automatic. Your computer can do that. Ideas have to be taught. We live in an age now when people are afraid of ideas…I only learned that myself when we got up here to New Hampshire. Before that we had the girls in the very same school that Jesse has her kids in now. The very same one!”

         Jesse clearly wanted to avoid the conversation but couldn’t. She shrugged. “That’s why we moved over to the west side. It was familiar territory.” But then she left the table.

         Jesse did seem like the most rational one of the lot. She had her mother’s quick anger at things, but was faster to cool down. That was something I took advantage of by asking her about things that were none of my business. Whatever it was I said that bothered her, it seemed to be forgotten soon after. Then again, perhaps that was just a characteristic of her being a mother as well. My own mother had that kind of tolerance. Had to.

         But she was only there for a couple of days, while Felix took their children to visit his parents in New Jersey, so I took the chance I had, when I caught her outside in the morning, lingering at the chicken yard and watching them in their morning scratch, and while her mind was obviously on other things.

         I knew she must have heard the groan spring when I come through the barn door and it was a good morning in any case, with air as cool as water and the sun small and tight in the sky.

         Picking up a thought I had I said, “You don’t like your in-laws.”

         I think she was getting used to my asking such questions, because she smiled.

         “No.”

         “Why?”

         The frown that crossed her face was borrowed from her mother.

         “They have their own ideas.”

         “Tell me. I’m trapped on a little farm in New Hampshire these days. I don’t get out much. I need perspectives.”

         She smiled at that truth. “We have too many children. They think we have too many children…Hard to believe! I’d have more if I could. But they think the burden is too much on Felix. Their only son…But he takes them down there anyway. He wants them to know their grandparents and the kids get to spend time up here, so he thinks that makes a better balance. I don’t think it’s balanced at all. They make remarks…Little Henry has told me. He’s old enough now to be noticing things like that. Felix’s father, Stan, worked in the stock market for years and his approach to life was very similar to Felix’s. Productivity matters. Savings matter.”

         “Enough said…But I don’t understand something. Well, maybe everything, I suppose. But I don’t understand why you live in New York.”

         She laughed out loud. Again, more than a little like her mother does.

         “I ask myself that everyday…I say, it’s for Felix’s job, but we lose any advantage in that just to the cost of things there. With the internet, Felix could be working anywhere. The City can be magical, of course. There is that. But it’s falling apart. I worry about that and what the children see.”

         “Where would you rather be?”

         She shrugged at me. “You know the answer to that. But I’m not a writer. I have no other means of income. I’m a liberal arts major. I am officially and purposely useless. And Felix is an excellent engineer. How would he earn a living otherwise out here in the boondocks?”

         I protested a little too dramatically. Perhaps too quickly.

         “It’s not the wilderness! There’s a uUniversity fifteen minutes away! You could do something else! Now, you’re just working for the ‘god of the machine!’”

         I expected her to laugh, but she didn’t. There was a touch of put-on pity in her voice instead. “She has you, now. She’s got you. Totally. Doesn’t she?”

         I shrugged at the idea. Jesse was right, of course.

         “I just found out about that particular god. I’d never really thought about it before…But, she’s right.”

         I asked, “Why don’t you write?”
         “Perhaps because I have nothing to say.”

         “Very unlikely.”

         “At least nothing worth saying.”

         “Even more unlikely.”

         We had wandered up to the road by then, toward the wrinkle, with the graves of Neal Wright and his family above the granite blocks on the right, and the figures of the old trees grown into the rocks of the hill on our left.  Jesse kept looking over into the gnarled trees, as if to see something.

         Until she stopped. “There! See that one? The one that looks like an old man with his elbows on the rock.”

         I was amazed. “Yes”

         “There are more of the smaller limbs now, but I used to sit on his back. It’s an apple tree. The only one there…For awhile, it was magical, and he was my father. I could talk to him.”

         I could imagine a skinny girl, griping the smaller branches for support where they rose straight up from the bowed back of that great fat trunk.

         “Do you remember what you said when you spoke to the tree?”

         There was a moment, and finally, “Yes…”

         I waited. She looked over at me to see if I seriously cared.

         “Besides the obvious stuff…I wished they weren’t divorced, of course. That was the subject of a great deal of it. I made up scenarios that would bring them back together. That kind of thing. Dad is not so bad. He loved us. But it was a bad marriage. I can say that now for certain. She could not live in his world any longer, and there was never going to be a time when he could fit into hers—her own narrative.”

         She really hardly knew me. I had no right to be asking.

         “What’s your narrative, now?”

         A loud breath. Another moment. “Gee. I’m almost thirty, and I still don’t know…Alexander was already conquering some damned place or another in Asia by my age. Probably what remained of Troy.”

         I thought that this was important. “You’ve had that thought, all by yourself. If you didn’t have the kids, what would you do?”

         “I don’t know.”

         “Then, that’s your first job. I think. Isn’t it? To find an answer to that.”

         She looked over at me with some uncertain recognition of my presumptiveness.

         “But I do have the kids. And I love that. And I do love Felix. And I would never let my kids down the way—You know.”

         “But you are. Don’t you think. With all that Montessori crap. Half-measures, at best.”

         She laughed, unhappily. “It’s very expensive crap.”

         “With all that very expensive Montessori crap! Have you read Tom Sawyer to them yet?”

         This stopped her in the middle of the road to confront me.

         “There hasn’t been time!”

         “There is time. That’s right now…It’s yours to take. Before it’s too late.”

         She didn’t smile. “You really are her student, aren’t you.”

         “I’m just now learning to be. It took me awhile. I thought I had my own plan. I still do, I guess, but—I’ll have to start again.”

         She turned then, back toward the house.

         After a few minutes she said “How long do you think you’ll be here?”

         “As long as it takes…When she’s done with me. I don’t know. I’ll probably go back to living in my van—down by the river, as that narrative goes…Or somewhere. Not so bad, really. Free and easy. That would not be so bad again. But I don’t think I’ll be as happy with that anymore… I’ll have to write a new narrative for myself, I suppose.”

         “But you’ll keep writing…”

         “Yes. At least that part is set. I think. Especially now. She’s made me think that through…But, I was just thinking this morning, when all that bright sun started breaking through, that Edward Abbey worked for the National Park Service for a while. That left him a lot of time to write. And Desert Solitaire is one of my favorite books. But I don’t like the desert, so much. I’m more of a Thoreau kind of guy. Maybe there are some openings with the Park Service up in the White Mountains.”

         “That sounds good. That sounds very good.”

         “What will you do. Have you thought of writing children’s stories? I like the one about the apple tree.”

         She laughed. It was genuine. “At least you’ve mastered her technique. Never give it up!”

         I tried turning the table back. “So, what would you do, if you could pry Felix out of New York? That’s your new job, isn’t it?”

         At least she smiled again at the idea. “I’ll let you know.”

27. About ‘projection’

         I told this story to Julia one evening because I thought it fit the circumstance. She was drinking her bourbon, as she does when she is through, and I was drinking some apple cider. It’s good apple cider. And because it had come up, we were talking about the places she had gone and the places I wished I could go someday.

         I told her, “Once upon a time I wrote a short story and submitted it to one of the few remaining science fiction magazines that still publish actual paper editions. This was done as a lark. Well…I did need some money. And the story was already written and sitting there staring at me from a small pile of such efforts that were accumulating in the box under my bed. But as the laws of perversity would have it, I got an acceptance notice in my email within a couple of weeks.”

         She said, “How could you see it there, under your bed?”

         “Science fiction stories can see through walls.”

         She nodded. “Ah…I’ve never had that happen to me before.”

         “But there was a catch. They wanted to change it. They wanted to change the story. They didn’t like the ending.”

         She shook her head, and did a perfect cartoon ‘tisk, tisk, tisk.’

         I pressed onward, trying to build up some steam before she thought of another question.

         “Now, this was really something. This was a short story. A little over 3000 words. Just under the limit. With one premise that I had carried out all the way, and they wanted to change it! And you have to understand. I had never had a story accepted before—by anyone! Nothing I had written had ever been published before. And here was something that someone supposedly liked, but they wanted to change it! But they told me what they wanted to do to it, and as far as I was concerned, all they really liked was the premise, and the way they wanted to change the story would screw that up…So I said, ‘No. No thanks. I’ll keep it the way it is.’ “

         Julia said, “The right thing to do. But I’d like to read it anyway for myself.”

         I admitted, “Well, that’s another matter…I even don’t know if a finished copy exists now. It’s not on this computer, anyway. But I can tell you the basic story, easily enough.”

         She said, “Tell me.”

         So, I settled into that. I had written it in the first person so I told it just that way.

         “One night, on a trip, I awoke to silence. The city is never silent, so I was sure it was the silence that had awakened me. Across from my bed, there was a blank wall. Hotel rooms don’t usually have blank walls but there had been a picture there that I couldn’t stand looking at so I’d taken it down and set it out of my sight…The funny thing was that I’d noticed there was a price on the back, as if the hotel was selling copies of this picture. That was a laugh, until it wasn’t.”

         “But good marketing,” Julia said.

         “And so, I was lying there, in the silence, awake, staring at this wall. I was with a woman I had met earlier and she was still sleeping but not making any particular sound that I could hear. I thought of the cliche, ‘The silence was deafening,’ And I blew some air out of my own mouth that turned into a whistle just to break that silence and it was then that something strange happened. An image began to appear on the wall.”

         Julia nodded slowly as if, this was an interesting development.

         I took a dramatic pause and continued. “This image forming there was a scene. The kind you see in travel magazines or on television. It looked like one of those beautiful Italian coastal towns, built against the hills, that rise sharply from the sea—as it might be viewed from above, by a drone of some sort coming toward it from over the water. The sea was blue—a dozen blues, and the hills were a mingling of greens except where there were cliffs, and the town was tightly composed collage of houses in various pastel colors that filled out of the breaks in the cliffs like a spill of things from a basket, and the roofs were red tile and gray slate, and as the drone came closer and the scene grew larger on the wall, I could see people at the harbor edge and the docks, all working, and sorting nets on a narrow rocky beach, and arranging the equipment from boats, and other people walking in the streets. It was quite beautiful. I’ve never been to Italy, and always wanted to go. Like a dream.

         “But my movement, sitting forward to look at all this, had awakened the women I was with and she sat up too and said, ‘Very pretty. But how does that work?’

         “Now, there was a television, a large one, on a table not far away but that was clearly dark. It was off. I had already seen that there was a little red light there that turned blue when it was on. And it was off. I’m certain.

         “And I said to her, ‘I don’t know. It was just suddenly there. Right where that ugly picture was.’ And indeed, high in the color image of this town on the wall, I could see the shadow of the hook from where that picture had been hanging. It was within the image now, as if this were all a projection of some sort, and I raised my hand up to catch the light that must be coming from somewhere behind us, but the image was not disturbed and I turned in bed to check out the opposite wall for the source of the image but there was nothing there to see above the bed either—just another obnoxious image similar to the one I had already taken down.

         “The woman saw me do this and stood on the bed as if to catch some part of the projection herself. She was naked and this wasn’t at all unpleasant because she began to bounce a little there trying to find the source of the image, but still, nothing altered the picture, but there was a back reflection of greens and blues on her body from that amazing image on the wall.

         “So, I stood with her—it was just an impulse—waving my arms in a sort of dance with her. Not so much even trying to block the image, or wherever it was coming from, but just dancing there on the bed. That was fun. But then, after awhile, I turned, still curious, and took down the other picture behind us. I was still looking for the source of the projection and I was sure the image should be coming from somewhere there behind us. But when I set that picture frame down on the floor too, backwards again, I could see that it also had a price—and at least it was less expensive than the first.”

         Julia asked, “How much was it?”
         I said, “I’m getting to that.”

         She winced and said, “Sorry.”

         “Anyway, I whistled again. This time at the price, which seemed excessive for such a crumby picture. And all of a sudden, another image started forming there on that blank wall right above the bed—as if a window had just opened there. This picture was similar to the first…but it wasn’t the same place. There were no houses. No town. Just an isolated beach. A strand of gold and yellow sand, and there were details—the sand of the beach was clearly measured there by the lines of debris left behind by the tides, and the beach there separated the blue of the water from darker rock of the cliffs above and those were quickly swallowed by the green from the hill above that. It looked more like California than Italy to me, but without the coastal highway.”

         Julia was almost nodding agreement. I could not help but imagine that, if it were her habit, she would be stroking her chin as she considered my tale.

         “Now, all this while, the first picture had been growing closer and when I turned. I could see the faces of the individual people working there on the dock and on the dark stones of the beach quite clearly, as if they were real—right there—part of the room with me. As if they might even see our naked bodies bouncing on the bed there if they’d looked. I actually thought that thought. That’s how clear they were. Just as if they were real! … But there was still no sound from them. There was just the giggling of the woman I was with; the giggling, and the sound of the springs in the mattress from our weight standing on the bed.

         Behind me now, where the other picture had been, there was this window overlooking a perfect coastal scene, and because that drone, or whatever it was, was still further away from that scene than the first one was from the village, I could still see above the cliffs to green hills, and over them to  the gray and blue of mountains far away…seagulls even drifted into the scene, floating on the air, and they looked like they might come right into the room!

         “Now, I was admittedly a little excited by having this naked woman dancing on the bed beside me, but my curiosity was overpowering. How was this happening? And that was when I did something impulsive—maybe out of modesty because they were so close and might see us. I stepped down from the bed and picked the picture up that I’d first removed and set it back on the hook…And the picture there disappeared. All that remained now was the reflected light from our great big new window behind us above the bed, and the light from that, and on the naked woman’s body standing there. And I reached down then to pick up that picture as well.

         “And the woman screamed, ‘No!’ She actually screamed. It shocked me. I was that absorbed in trying to comprehend what I was actually seeing.

         “And she said, ‘I want to be there!’ And she pointed to the picture of the beach. And it looked to me as if she pointed right through the wall!

         “Now, that picture had been growing too. The drone, or whatever it was taking the picture, had dropped down to just above the water and was now drifting slowly toward the sand.

         “And I said, ‘It looks very beautiful. That’s someplace I would definitely like to go someday. If I ever get the chance.’

         “And she said, ‘Let’s do it then! Now!’

         “But I said, ‘Someday.’

         “And she said, ‘No! Now!’ and faster than I could move to stop her, even if I had wanted to, she climbed onto the sill of that new window, totally naked in the sunlight, and she smiled, and looked down to the water, and then smiled again back at me, and said, ‘Come with me!’ as she jumped.

         “I was a little stunned. More than a little. She was gone! And I quickly stood back up on the bed again, and looked out, over that sill…and there she was. There she was! Swimming in the shallow water toward the beach! … And me? I was suddenly terrified! I was actually frozen for a minute. Frozen! It was as if the whole world in my mind had turned upside down. As if we were all in some sort of simulation, or projection…And as she swam close enough to stand on the sandy bottom in the water—I could see her naked body in the clear blue water—she looked back at me again and said—well, I couldn’t hear her then—there was still no sound to hear, but it looked as if she said, ‘Come,’ once again, and smiled back at me. But what I did then was inexplicable. Standing there on that bed, beckoned by that naked woman on an empty tropical beach, I reached down and grabbed the other picture and hung it back in place, covering that image as well.

         Julia immediately sat up straight and said, “Fool!”

         I shook my head at her.

         “But it’s not finished…The picture I had first taken down, was one of those cheap paintings of an Italian coast town that I’m sure you can see in any tourist gallery there, even here in America. It was ugly. The colors were all wrong—too bright, and the rendering was awkward and obviously done quickly just to give an impression. But I had always wanted to go to a place like that. I’ve dreamed of it. But I haven’t had the chance. It was the sort of place where I half-imagined living for the rest of my life. I didn’t want it spoiled by the that crude rendering. I could see it better in my own mind.

         And then, I turned again to the wall above the bed, and that painting too was just a pleasant picture of a coast. It could have been California. I have no idea. But I lifted that picture off the hook again. And there was just a wall there. I ran my hand over the surface of the wall. It was just a wall, and a hook. And I whistled! I did. I whistled again as if to beckon it back. But nothing happened. And then I did it with the first picture too…Then, I felt like a fool. There was just a wall there too. Nothing else. And I sat down on that bed and stared again at that crude picture, and then back again at the other…But, the thing of it was, the woman was gone. She was gone!”

         Julia asked, “How much was the picture?”

         And I said, “Two thousand dollars.”

         And she said, “That’s cheaper than a plane ticket.”

         She thought that idea was very funny, and laughed a little. But, it was.

         I said, “And that magazine offered me $2000 to publish it.”

         She thought that was even funnier still, and she laughed even louder.

***

27. Muse who smelled of gardenias

         Maya did not own a car and Julia asked me to pick her up at the train station in Durham. She had arrived by the time I got there, and stood outside the station office, alone by a sunny wall away from the door, looking abandoned—I would say, orphaned—as if she were a student first arrived at the University, but in the wrong season. The baby was in a pouch in front o her. She had several odd canvas duffle bags at her feet. The bags were filled with rolls of canvas, or some other heavy cloth, as I discovered, but the canvas bags themselves looked hand-made, tattooed in a patch-work style of colors and with patterns that made me think of quilts. There was an empty bench not far away, but Maya said standing kept the baby quiet. Her baby was in a sort of hand woven sling, and sound asleep, which was good because I had nothing in the van to serve as a car seat for a child, or an infant.

         Maya is the one who looks more like her father but I could not miss the fact that there is a beauty to mothers in a flannel shirt and jeans that is better than anything in a fashion magazine. It was a silly thought, but I kept looking over to see that again. I smelled gardenias. I figured it was baby oil.

         She’d been quiet after the ‘hello, how are ya,’ perhaps to avoid waking the baby, but after a few minutes she finally said, “What wrong?”

         “Nothing…Nothing at all,” was the best I could come up with.

         The quiet seemed uncomfortable for her then, and the ride wasn’t that long, so I tried some easy conversation.

         “Are you still studying art?”

         “I can’t afford that now. I couldn’t before, but definitely not now.” Her eyes went down to the infant asleep against her chest.

         “You know, I saw a painting you did. On the wall in your old bed room. It’s great.”

         She looked away. “Thanks. Mom likes that one too. I did it before I went off to college. I like it just because of that, I think.”

         “Did you study art in school?”

         “For a year…Two semesters. I quit. I wanted to paint. Not to talk about it.”

         “There was nothing there for you to learn?”

         She shrugged. “I’ll never know, I guess. I suppose I missed a lot. But I studied with a couple of people downtown for a while after that. I think I learned more from them. And it was a lot cheaper.”

         The cab now smelled of gardenias. And the baby too. All I came up with then was, “I think there’s a lot to say for the apprentice system.”

         She shrugged again, more like her mother, as if it were an unspoken word. “Yes…But there’s not much of that left…Gus—the fellow I studied with the longest—he made so little from selling his work that he had to take in students to pay the bills. And there I was, working as a waitress, making more than he was. It was odd.”

         “But living in New York couldn’t have been cheap.”

         “It was Brooklyn, but it still wasn’t cheap. And it was small. Mom came down when Alma was born and we were practically on top of each other.”

         I waited then for her to make more conversation, but she was quiet.

         I asked, “Is that the baby oil?”

         “What?”

         “The gardenias.”

         “No. Just baby oil.”

         She didn’t seem to want to talk but I wanted the conversation, so, I asked a stupid question to get things going again.

         “Who is your favorite artist?”

         I looked over as I asked and she had that look on her face of someone who has been asked such stupid questions too many times before.

         “I don’t have one. Not really.”

         I hadn’t expected a direct answer, but I wasn’t going to give it up. Dumb is as dumb does.

         “Then who do you like? Who do you look to for inspiration?”

         “Wyeth.”

         “Father, son, brother, or sister.”

         “I see. You are playing a game with me. Vermeer then.”

         She was trying to escape.

         “I don’t see that in your work. More of the Wyeths.”

         That surprised her. “How many paintings have you seen?”

         “The ones in the living room. The ones in the hall closet.”

         “Ah, yes…Mom tried to support me after I left school. I was sending her paintings when I could. But that had to stop. I started waiting on tables about then.”

         “Have you tried to sell any of them? They’re all better than anything I’ve seen anywhere else in a long time.”

         She ignored the compliment and just said, “Yes.”

         After a minute I tried again, “And.”

         “Nothing. I don’t want to end up like Gus, taking in students.”

         “Is it such a terrible fate?”

         “No…I suppose not. Gus’s wife left him. He can’t afford a home of his own so he lives in a shared warehouse space in Tribeca that’s not even legal. His kids are being raised by a stranger now… But the problem is that I don’t work quickly. It can take me a couple of weeks to finish something, or a couple of months. The economics are simple enough. I’d have to sell a piece for $4000 every month just to cover my rent and food, and the rest. Meanwhile, I can make two hundred dollars a day waiting on tables. And it’s pretty hard to get a stranger to pay four thousand dollars for anything…But, it was pretty much the same for Vermeer, I think. He had to work as an art dealer to make ends meet and he still died in debt, and left his wife with the bills.”

         I immediately recalled her mother’s breakdown of author economics.

         At the farm, I carried her bags in and then went to the barn. When I went back to the house at four, Maya was on the couch breast feeding the baby. Julia told me we should skip the usual copying for the day, so I went back out to the barn for another hour.

         At dinner in the dining room, the baby was in an old bassinet that Maya had pulled down from the attic—white painted wicker that made a racket when it was moved. They hadn’t been able to find the old high chair yet, but Maya sat close enough to keep a hand where the baby could touch it.

         Babies are all cute, so there wasn’t much to say about that. She seemed happy enough. But most of the conversation was between Maya and Julia and that was about sleeping routines and Maya’s diet. I couldn’t find anything worthwhile to add so when there was a break, I picked up a piece of thought from earlier.

         “What is it you like about Vermeer?”

         A smile flitted across Julia’s face—though Maya seemed to take it seriously.

         “When I left—the reason I left school was because of an art teacher. He was really just your garden variety art teacher. I’ve had better ones. But this particular guy was teaching a class on Vermeer one day and spending all his time on the phony controversy about how Vermeer copied his images. Did he use a lens or a camera obscura of some sort? Nobody actually knows but that’s not the point. Whatever tools he used, it was the subject that Vermeer chose, and how he chose it and how he dealt with it that that mattered. This guy had no clue. But we can’t even guess that today without studying it. I tried to make that point. I guess I tried to make some part of that point several times. The perspective tricks were just that—tricks—and the point of it was the subject. This instructor—a guy with a Ph.D. in stupid, didn’t want to deal with what I was saying. He finally asked me to leave the class. So, I left the school instead.”

         Julia had her lips pressed through much of this. She said, “It’s my fault. I taught them all to question things. She was just doing what I taught her.”

         Maya raised her eyebrows in mild irritation, “You are just taking credit, but thank goodness for that!”

         Julia added, “But she lost her scholarship.”

         Maya was ready for that argument. “I would still have been ten thousand in debt by the end of the year. It was a scam.”

         So, I persisted, “So, what is it you like most about Vermeer?”

         At least Maya smiled again at that.

         “His subjects. All except for the ‘Procuress.’ I am not a scholar but I can’t believe that one is his …. But that’s what I really wanted to know more about. Why had he chosen those subjects. All that artistry and even the possible gimmickry, obscured some more important things. Why did those things matter to him. What else did he have to say about them? It’s like Mom. Mom writes about simple things. Her stories are just a series of moments. Every one of them is a painting in words instead of pigment.”

         Julia broke in on this. “Moments. True. But I am not painting pictures. I’m really just playing with words.”

         Maya said, “They feel like pictures to me.”

         I said, “I think they’re conversations.”

         This comment got Julia’s attention. She was staring at me in her funny way again, head tilted slightly forward, the edge of a frown darkening her eyes.

         Maya’s eyes widened. “I think that’s right!”

         Julia said, “There isn’t that much dialog. Not so much.”

         I said, “A lot of it’s internal. It’s more like monolog, but it’s understood by others. As if they’d spoken. It just seems naturally understood by others. It’s another part of your style.”

         “It’s style, you say. I try to avoid that kind of artifice as much as I can. Am I slipping?”

         This was just her avoiding agreement. I was already used to that. “No. It only seems natural. People who know each other well and see each other often don’t have to say as much. They understand without spoken words. You know that. You’re just pretending that you don’t. And you do have a style.”

         At this point Julia’s mood changed. If I were to guess, I’d say she was angry, though I hadn’t seen enough of that to tell. The question for me to answer then was ‘why.’ I looked to Maya and saw that she was aware of it too. She studied her plate. But Julia changed the subject.

         The next morning, she was out early. It was gray and a little cool, but I think this was to give her mother some room. Or perhaps they had argued. But the baby was unhappy and letting everyone in earshot know that the chickens were not enough entertainment. I heard the crying from inside the barn and went out to where Maya stood by the garden fence.

         There was a press of wind right there, coming up from the valley.

         I said, “There’s no escaping the weather, good or bad.”

         She said, “But it’s beautiful here. Still paradise.”

         “I suppose you can’t escape that either.”

         The baby quieted at the sound of my voice, and looked at me.

         Maya said, “You’d rather be here than Boston?”

         “That’s not giving me much choice.”

         “Where would you rather be, then?”

         “Here is good enough for me.”

         “Where did you dream of being when you were a boy?”

         “On Mars. But then, I’m still a boy.”

         That brought a smile, at least. The baby was watching me with one eye from her sling—or whatever that sack was called.

         “Alma likes the conversation…Why Mars?”

         “Why not. Because it’s not earth. If you want to write about earth, you have six thousand years of civilization on your back. I’m not up to the lift, I suppose…Mars is simple. It’s starting fresh.”

         “Why not write about here. A place like this?”

         She was looking directly at me now, along with her daughter. Both had a mottle of gray and brown eyes. What did I have to say for myself?

         “I don’t know if this is on my map. I found the Blue Hills. I see the Beaver River. But there is no Paradise. Just Rumford.”

         She raised her eyebrows enough to look like her mother.

         “It’s where you make it.”

         There was no arguing with that.

***

28. The graces

         There is an upright piano in the living room, close to the windows. It’s easy to forget because it has been covered with a plastic table cloth and that was covered with potted plants for the winter. But with those now gone and replanted outside, the piano has been hulking in the corner for the past month, somewhat sullen looking, I thought, for being neglected, and so abused. Julia doesn’t play. But when I came in one afternoon, I could smell the lemon oil wax before I saw the wood gleaming in the light of the window. Maya had pushed it out a little from the wall, opened it up, and played it for her daughter. Alma evidently responds to the sound of it with a great deal excitement and hand waving.

         Thankfully, Julia wants to talk more about her granddaughter now than about writing.

         She tells me, “Each of the girls had piano lessons. I bought that damned thing for them years ago. I bought it at an auction in Dover. The movers cost us more than the piano. That was after I’d bought the Molly Wright letters there, so I was feeling lucky. But I don’t play. Never could. I bought it on a whim for the girls, and Derek was all for it. He could play some ragtime. He knew a lot of popular songs from back in the day and I think he had used that little trick to seduce women. At least he usually looked like he was trying to seduce me when he played. But Elena was the best on that. She’s always liked to perform. Maybe she takes more after her dad in that regard.”

         Maya is pretty good. I never learned to play myself, but I think so. More importantly, the baby thinks so. Alma pays attention as soon as Maya starts. And then she falls asleep. Julia started calming down after a week from her change of routine and started writing again. Maya plays Bach transcriptions from old sheet music but not in the mornings and not so loudly that Julia can’t concentrate. I could hardly hear it in the barn.

         It was during this period that both Elena and Jesse came to visit again. Jesse had already met the baby in Brooklyn, but she brought the entire family up with her this time and again there was no chance to work. Felix spent most of his day in the dining room with his laptop open, working on business matters.

         The three boys needed to be tied together but weren’t.

         Jesse has three boys and one girl. Henry, the oldest, is eight or nine and has some sense of being in charge. He looks like a skinny version of his father, without the beard. He is a bit too bright for you to speak carelessly around because he knows too much and will correct you on the spot. Robert, is seven and does not take orders, especially from his older brother whom he copies even while he is resisting. He responds primarily by threat. Tom is five and follows Henry wherever he goes, like a shadow in color. But he seems a little too quiet to me. I think he is the thinker. Morgan is three. She is ‘splendid,’ which is the word Julia uses for almost everything her granddaughter does and now a word Morgan repeats constantly. Morgan evidently learned to speak fairly early and has not shut up since. Thankfully, she seems to be happy about almost everything, especially chickens and the ‘baby Alma,’ so she is well occupied. She looks more like her grandmother than her mother, I think.

         The old highchair has been found, having been borrowed by Jesse for Morgan.

         Jesse’s husband, Felix, seemed disturbed when he had to move his computer away so the dining room table could be set up for diner. Jesse appeared to ignore this grumpiness, but Julia’s face loses whatever smile she had whenever she deals with Felix.

         They were only there for two days because Felix had to be back at the office.

         Not coincidently, these were the days that Elena was there as well. She had driven all the way from Iowa to be there.

         Evidently, first thing after Elena arrived, I missed the three daughters playing the piano all at once—something they had perfected years before. Elena was a little slaphappy from lack of sleep and apparently started ripping some ragtime. With the piano still untuned, this must have been a thrill.

         A decision was made beforehand that the kids would sleep in tents in the yard. A good plan. The house was too small for the lot of them. And there were half a dozen sleeping bags and several tents in the attic. I helped set the tents up after dinner. The boys were quite fascinated at the process and excited about being out all night. Morgan had been told she had to sleep inside on the couch but she wasn’t interested. This made it necessary for her father to sleep outside with her in one of the tents and that made it possible for him to point out stars and planets to all of them, something they had never really seen before quite like that in the city, and something Felix had once had a real interest in—at least until the clouds edged them out.

         I saw that coming. The weather report was a daily check-in for me. But I didn’t say anything at first because I didn’t want to throw a literal wet blanket over the enthusiasm. Weather changes too fast around here in any event. Maya and I pulled bales of hay down from the stack and made one large bed on the floor of the barn and then we covered that with a few sheets of her canvas. Despite the tents, when the rain started spitting and the thunder rolling, they all came inside.

         The next phase of this adventure was the ghost stories. The children were still wide awake. The daughters all came out from the house with Julia. They had been to summer camp and already knew a few of those entertainments. I didn’t know any, but Julia made one up on the spot out of scenes from one of the plays that she had written years before. I knew she was making it up because so much of the detail had been borrowed from one of her novels as well. But she converted it nicely to a story set on the ‘Isle of Skye’ involving ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and a young woman who had saved him there and the ghosts of the dead soldiers from the battle of Culloden. Her performance gave me an idea of where Elena had discovered her interest in theatre. I thought it was terrific. Even Felix was impressed. Julia kept repeating those words ‘The Isle of Skye’ with a Scottish lilt, raising the pitch of her voice, so that it became a sort of chant throughout the telling, and Morgan offered an echo to that each time.

         I hung up a couple of the propane lamps that I had used at the campground, from pegs on the posts, but the lighting was still appropriately spooky for a stormy night. Julia was not a fan of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ and had him fairly eviscerated by the Jacobite ghosts of the soldiers he had betrayed, reducing him to ‘a hollow shell of man.’  The girls were quiet thrilled with that image: a hollow shell of a man.

         Julia recalled, “Keith played the part so well…Keith is a neighbor’s boy. He used to be in all the plays we did, just so that he could be around Elena.”

         Elena rolled her eyes in exaggerated fashion.

          The kids did not understand the politics of this ancient moment and Julia did not explain that—telling the story as if it were a fairytale. But Henry found some resource or another to use, and corrected her on several points the next day, though during the telling he was enrapt.

         Morgan sat in her mother’s lap the entire time and was finally carried, already asleep, to the couch when it was over. After some initial fussing with the uniqueness of my ‘throne,’ the boys were all sound asleep in their respective bags before the storm was fully over, finally numbed by the experience and the stories. Nevertheless, Felix slept on that platform of hay bales with them and I could hear his snoring in the night. The daughters and Julia went back into the house and had tea together and then slept soundly in the beds they had grown up with.

         The morning was clear. The sun was crisp, and bright, warming only what it touched, even as a breeze mixed the leaves from green to white in the tops of the trees across the road. The shadows were cool and I was chilled there in the dark of the barn. The kids appeared mummified in their sleeping bags atop the hay bales. From the window at my desk, I could see the trees on the wrinkle catching the light and shimmering as they danced there, before catching sight of Felix already sitting on a bucket just outside, near the closed sliding door, where the sun first reaches the ground through a break in the trees on the hill above. It was a good spot and at the risk of spoiling some private moment, I went out to talk just so I could stand in the warmth of it too.

         I went out the side door, and the spring on the door moaned. I could see from there that Julia was already at the sink in the kitchen and I could smell an exhaust of cooking bacon. But as I went around the corner, I heard the side door behind open again and then slam. Someone else was up behind me as well.

         Felix turned to me at the sound of the door, “Good morning. I wondered if you were awake.”

         I found a piece of the sun there for myself, “Looks like a great morning. I hope you guys don’t have to leave too soon.”

         “No. Not till later…Just now, I was thinking I should never leave.”

         “Good thought.”

         “You think so…Why would you say that?”

         “Seriously?”

         “Jesse says I’m always serious. Way too serious. So, no. Not seriously. Why would you say that?”

         I wondered if Jesse had said something to him about our previous conversation walking on the road. But I said, “It’s hard to think of a reason not to say it…I even said something like that to Julia the other day. This place is too near perfect.”

         “Yeah. It is. But it’s not mine. Everything I own is 273 miles from here.”

         “Then sell all that! That’s too damned far to be from paradise!”

         He laughed a little. Maybe more of a brief sigh.

         “Hah! Jesse calls it that too. She loves this place…I was just thinking it might be the air that drops down off the hill. Something in it. Something in those older trees there.”

         I had nothing else to say to that.

         He said, “Did you ever notice that leaves can look like water?”

         It was a favorite thought of mine. “Yes.”

         But then he turned a little more toward me. He has a sweat shirt on and jeans and running shoes. I wondered if he’d been getting ready to workout. I had heard from someone, maybe Julia, that he works out, every day. I wish I had the discipline for that.

         He asked, “Are you planning to stay?”

         I said, “Here? No. It’s not my place. But I’m happy for Julia, that she’s here…I would like to make a place like this for myself someday.”

         He didn’t take long to study that idea.

         “But you don’t work. How would you afford it?”

         I have to assume he had jumped to some conclusions.

         “I work quite a lot.”

         “Not for a salary, though.”

         I said, “I’m not a wage slave, no.”

         “‘No. But who ain’t a slave? Tell me that?’”
         So, I knew that one from High School, of course. I answered, “’the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.’”

         He laughed. It was the first time I’d seen him truly laugh, I think. Women look very different when they smile, and men when they laugh.

         “You write?”

         “I do that too, yes. But its hardly work.”

         “Well, then I guess that’s my problem. Mr. Melville would understand about that. I’m a wage slave. They pay me a lot of money, but in the end I’m just another slave.”

         I wasn’t going to be kind to this realization.

         “Well, so now, at least, you’ve got that right. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

         He laughed just little. “You’re awfully certain of yourself. I wish I had a couple more people like you working for me.”

         “No. No you don’t. I’d be a pain in the ass. I ask too many questions. I’m bad about settling for things. I know you’re a good guy because you have a bunch of near perfect children and the most beautiful wife I have ever seen and she wouldn’t hang with you if you were a schmuck, but then again maybe some of that is luck. Some people are just lucky. They work their ass’s off and they get a little luck in return. But that’s not me. Frankly, most days I’d rather sit on a bucket in the sun.”

         He didn’t seem to know what to make of my little speech. Looking for something else, I think, he managed to ask me what kind of things I wrote, and I told him. The short version.

         Then he suddenly says, “What does land up here cost?”

         “More than I’ve got. I haven’t looked.”

         “Where would you live, if you could?”

         That was easy.

         “Right there.” I nodded my head toward that wrinkle of land that was right in front of us both. The shimmer of light in the leaves there had grown from a sea white to pale yellow in the rising sun.

         He says, “Funny. I was just thinking that would be a very nice place for a house.”

         “I think so.”

         He asked again, “So, what are you going to do?”

         “I don’t know. That’s been on my mind too.”

         He smiled, eyes closed to the sunlight, “So, then, that makes two of us.”

         And just then Julia’s voice came from behind me, “I’m making breakfast early in there. Pancakes. The kids are wondering around starving to death—Geoff, why don’t you come in and eat with us instead of that granola you’re so fond of.”

         Funny thing is she had come up without my hearing her, but it didn’t surprise me.

         The problem for me was that I was not a member of the family. I had no right to say anything about anything to anyone that did not involve me in the first place. And I was not even a guest. I was really just hired help. And yet, I didn’t feel that way.

         I was not even present for most family discussions that involved me, or for that matter, family discussions at all.  I missed all the usual mundane matters of what to buy at the grocery store and who should do what and when….And I think I was jealous.

         At some point along the way I had begun to speculate about what I was missing. Maybe from day one. I know that I liked being there and would do what I could to remain. But that was not all that much. Still, I found myself worrying about Jesse and Felix. That in itself was absurd. I had no real idea about what was going on there. But I mostly worried about Julia.

         There was a phrase she often used: ‘Is it true.’ I heard this in my head now, unbidden.

***

29. Open spaces

         The problem with ‘artificial intelligence’ is that it really doesn’t exist. It’s just information, like any other. It is a made-up term to describe something imagined and make it sound real. It was no better than a portmanteau word. What was really meant by it was some form of knowledge that was created by artificial means. A robot, for instance. But all that a robot can know is human knowledge. No matter how large it is. Just what humans can already know, and no more. That knowledge might be accessed faster than a human can do, using electronic circuits because of the biological limitations of the human mind, but it is still the same information. ‘Large language model’ or not. The sum of a math problem is not called ‘artificial.’ Even a difficult one. Or ‘intelligence,’ for that matter. It is just a sum.

         I was in the midst, off and on again, of writing a novel, ‘Elysium Mons, that I had started writing when I was at the Tall Pines Camp, and persisted with, off and on, through all of the obfuscation of the last couple of months.

         The story was simple enough. It was about a possible end of civilization and the death of mankind. Easy peasy.

         Like everyone else, it seemed, I was worried about artificial intelligence and the loss of our humanity. But I wasn’t so sure of the ‘progress’ as the nerds seemed to be. My hero, Ben, was one of the first born on Mars. His school was at home. He had something of an intuitive understanding of AI because his parents had used that so extensively for aid in his education. But the story only begins when all that he has known starts falling apart. Contact with the Earth has been essentially lost in a civil war there. The independent government of Mars, which from its very beginning had set about safeguarding against the sort of virus-based collapse that has struck the Earth, has nevertheless been badly damaged by the bad guys using AI to infiltrate their systems. And all of that is off-stage left.

         The simple story is that Ben is caught beyond the parameter of his home town at Elon. His electronic devices are now useless due to a calculated attack of a computer virus. It is clear, fairly early on in the story, that the virus is not man-made. Per se. It has been made by AI, with the intention of controlling the human community, at the instigation of someone unknown. But Ben understands that human beings are at the heart of it.

         ‘Spiro-gee, large robots with an interactive awareness closer to that of ants than computers, are looking for Ben. They know he is out there, and roughly where he is. Meanwhile, his only methods of communication, given the damage of the virus, are by some form of physical contact with other human beings. He must find a way to trust his fellow man—or woman—something, given his isolated upbringing, he had never really learned to do before.

         All of this was good fun. I was getting to deal with many of my own fears for the human race and create solutions that might work—I thought. But Ben, as I had too quickly imagined him, was lonely.

         That emotional state came upon him, coincidently, about the same time I had started coming to Dal Riata. Now I had to deal with that. The story had seemed fine, without it. But now, as if I had caught the virus infecting all computers, I was compelled to find a solution.

         On his way, Ben has encountered a young woman, Cera, at the edge of the Hellas Basin, who is in distress, knows something of the plan of the mysterious bad guys, and is, herself, of questionable integrity. Ben helps Cera escape from an ugly captivity. And helping her has only magnified his own problems, as her original captors attempt to get her back, and the spiro—gee try to find Ben.

         The character of this love-interest, again only coincidently, had been fashioned in an attempt to keep her fully apart in my mind from Julia. She did not look like Julia. She did not act like Julia. She did not speak like Julia. I believed, at least for a short time, that she did not think like Julia at all. But, unfortunately most of her characteristics matched up with Maya quite well, but now, when I thought about her, as I wrote, it was Maya that I saw. It was Maya’s voice I heard. This was disconcerting.

         The funny thing was, I had forgotten how to be funny. My Mars was entirely too serious. Everything was life and death, when everything should actually just be more about life. After all, life had come back to Mars after thousands of years. There ought to be a celebration! Microbes rejoice! Algae exult! Bacteria dance with jubilation. My only thought had been that those creatures could be deadly. But there might be something more to be had out of it. And I had to give that some thought.

         The problem lay in the fact that the true enemy, the machines, had no sense of humor. Somewhere in something I had written before, I had a sort of Turing test, and I might have to rehabilitate that. It was simple enough. Machines had no sense of humor. If someone had to quickly determine if they were dealing with an artificial intelligence, all they basically had to do is tell a joke. The fun was in inventing the joke, because a joke that had been told before might have been memorized by the machine,, it had to be original. It had to be dependent on a human sensibility that was not necessarily logical. And the joke could not be too elaborate. Parody might be good. Nothing too flamboyant. A pun might work.

         Maya had left the baby with Julia and come into the barn unexpectedly to check things out, so I asked her.

         “You gotta minute?… Help me out here.”

         She stopped where she was and looked at me skeptically.

         I held both hands up. “For just a minute. Pretend, I wasn’t here. Say there was a horse standing here. What would you say?”

         She didn’t miss a beat.

         “Why the long face?”

         She got me with that. So, I persisted.

         “But he can’t answer. Horses can’t talk.”

         “Then, I wouldn’t talk to him.”

         “But just say, pretend, you say something.”

         “Why?”

         “I’m looking for something?

         “What?”

         “Something funny to say to a robot.”

         “Robots can’t laugh.”

         “They could pretend. They might know an old vaudeville joke when they hear it.”

         She shook her head. “I suppose they could pretend. But how would you know?”
         “That’s my point! I’m trying to find something funny that they couldn’t have digested before. I’m trying to find something that would quickly identify them as a robot.”

         She shrugged. “I think you can tell by their breath.”
         She had me again. I laughed out loud at that.

         How would my hero Ben know if the young woman he encountered at the rim of Hellas Basin was really a robot? By her breath. Of course.

         It felt as if I had hardly gotten settled into a daily routine, when another adjustment had to be made. I like routine as well as Julia, almost. But Maya would be staying for awhile. Apparently, she had to give up her apartment. So, we drove down to Brooklyn together in my van, met an army of her friends, mostly other women who had worked with her at a restaurant, and they had everything from her apartment packed within a couple of hours. Carrying things up and down the stairwell was more a matter of enduring the echo of their speculations concerning me. But the most interesting part of that came at the end when Maya ‘forced’ each of them to take one of her paintings as a gift. It appeared that they were each envious of whatever painting was given to the other, and this process was at least comic to watch.

         Julia took care of the baby for the day.

         Packing the van was a trick. Maya gave away most of the furniture that she had bought for herself and kept the things her mother had given her. Those were the better items in any case. A small table originally built by Neal Wright was literally moved into the van first, top down, onto a small oriental rug. Most of everything else of importance was nestled around various other pieces of clothing or towels. Her unused canvas was bundled and strapped to one side. She had kept several dozen paintings of various sizes. Those were between the legs of the table. Her few chairs, including one that had also been built by Wright, were nestled together beneath bundles of clothing. She had no suit cases and few boxes. The clothing was strapped in bundles by various belts and bungie cords and the sizes of the bundles adjusted according to the location. It is fair to say, after the small stuff went in, that there was no space left.

         On the drive down we argued about writing. On the drive back we argued about art. She is her mother’s daughter.

         I moved most of the furniture—a few chairs, a desk, a table, and most importantly, plastic bins of supplies, a couple of easels and about two dozen rolls of canvas along with the bundled wooden stretchers—into the loft of the barn beside the toys.

         It was nearly a week before any sort of regular schedule for copying Julia’s manuscript could begin again, but at least I was not cut -out of dinner. I got to hear mother and daughter discuss the importance of particular cooking methods, the best recipe for spaghetti sauce, the advantages of stew, and how to make a good quesadilla. But these discussions never seemed to be completely done.

         Maya started coming out to the barn early in the afternoons, while the baby napped. The conversations were diverse. Besides the simple chat, childhood memories of one thing or another in the barn, and the like, there was one about the importance of ‘good light,’ and the natural ‘quiet’ of a barn that was never completely quiet—and how it was that I liked to work. When did I like to write most? And more about what I was going to be doing when I left. But I quickly saw the certain logic forming. What she really wanted most was for me to move my writing table somewhere else than that particular window. And I made her unexpectedly happy one day by moving my table to another space near the smaller window on the far end of the sliding barn door beyond the tack room. When the sliding door was open, this window was covered, but that was not often and I could deal with that. I soon found out it was draftier as well, but I could deal with that too.

         Within a few days, she had strung ropes up from the loft rafters and beams and had larger pieces of blank canvas hanging to block off that portion of the barn so that I could not easily see what she was doing within. Which meant, of course, that I started peeking during the mornings when I knew she was busy elsewise. But the area was still mostly empty. She had two easels standing nearer the window. A small table fairly piled with assorted boxes of paint and other materials. A larger folding table that was nearly empty. An empty rack on wheels that I recognized from when she had been giving away paintings to her friends. And a good deal of empty floor space remaining.

         A good thing for me was that, from the smaller window, I had a clear view of the wrinkle and the rise to the west, and the trees there, and this soon had me imagining what kind of house I would like to build if I were to live right there in the midst of those trees.

         This sketching was a sort of hobby of mine. Sitting in my van at the camp ground on a chilly night, I would often escape to such visions of the perfect house and locate them in places I had seen. I suppose this also betrayed my personal wants. They were usually small structures, appropriate for a hermit or someone of limited means. But something had changed in my mind concerning this new conjuring and I think the influence of Neal Wright was pretty obvious.

         I bought some larger sheets of vellum. What I started imagining was something based on the barn I was sitting in. It was now a fact that I no longer appreciated the close space of the van in the same way. The cathedral aspect of the barn ceiling had been stealing my eye every day for several months, so I begin to imagine how that might be accommodated in a house. Heat rises, so the first challenge was a system of air circulation. Noise is a matter—often physical in the way I reacted to it. I loved the sounds in the barn but the cries of wood against wood on a windy day could be distracting. The smell of hay was pleasant to me but the smell of ancient manure after several days of rain—especially in warmer weather, could be suffocating. I did not want the smell of cooking food to permeate the building. Food was a weakness for me as it was.

         And something even funnier about that was catching Maya peeking around the breaks in the canvas to see what I was doing.

         “It’s a house”

         “I can see that. It looks like a barn.”

         “It’s based on this barn.”

         “But it’s a house to live in?”

         “Yes.”

         “Where?”

         “There.”

         I had been looking at the ridge when she had come around to talk to me.

         She said, “I’m glad you like that place.”

         What I said in answer was a bit loaded. And pretty dumb, at the least.

         “I’m glad you like it too.”

         This made her start, a little. She shook her head then, as if the clear it, and suddenly went back to whatever she was doing.

         After that, my sketching took on another aspect. I placed a larger window at the end facing the river—that was to the true north.

         And I left these sketches out on the desk.

         Now, this is the situation my situation was in. It was pretty obvious my feelings for Maya were changing—had changed—especially since that day when I had seen her at the station in Durham. It was disconcerting, to say the least. The rest of the time it was ridiculous.

         I am 31 years old. I have no savings. A few hundred dollars. If my fifteen-year-old delivery van died, I’d be walking. What was I supposed to do?. What could I say to a woman—a woman with a baby—a woman who could support herself pretty well waiting on tables, but otherwise had limited prospects except for being an amazing and fantastically talented artist?.

         What struck me as funny was that, apart from the baby, of course, I thought we were a lot alike. Both of us had dropped out of college. We were both set on doing things that were totally impractical and had very little prospect of paying any bills. And yet, I thought it was opposites that were supposed to attract?

         It is my point of view that Maya has risked everything and, so far, had lost, but not given up. She had come back home after failing in New York. But she had not given up.  Most people give up on their dreams before they begin. They find excuses why they can’t do whatever it is that inspires them, and then wither inside. Maya, is an artist. She must have had the same artistic struggle as an artist that her mother had as a writer. She had certainly accomplished more than I had. And I didn’t want to burden her with my own failings.

***

30. Maya

         I see in the copy of the American Heritage Dictionary that Julia keeps at the top of the first shelf in the living room that ‘In Hinduism, Buddhism, and certain other East Asian religions, Maya is the transitory, manifold appearance of the sensible world, which obscures the undifferentiated spiritual reality from which it originates; the illusory appearance of the sensible world…The power of a god or demon to transform a concept into an element of the sensible world.’ This about sums her up. And this page of the dictionary has the feel of one that was opened many times before, smudged by fingers smaller than Julia’s. I looked at the date it was published. I was not surprised that it was several years older than Maya herself.

         Someone opened the door and looked in out of the bright sun as if the dark of the barn were a danger. Then, when he spots me over at my desk he says, “Who are you?”

         The voice is gravel rough and heavily accented with the tones of New York and someplace else. Perhaps Pueorto Rico. He is about a head shorter than I am, but built like a truck. He is clean shaven, which for most guys in the area is not the norm. I had no idea who he was but maybe I should have guessed. I hadn’t heard his knock on the back door at the house, and it occurred to be that he had mistakenly knocked on the front door first. No one comes to the front door.

         I say, “I live here, so maybe you should answer that question yourself.”

         He nods, “My name is Pedro. I’m looking for Maya.”

         Because I’d been in the barn all morning trying to concentrate, I hadn’t caught up on anything more recent.

         “I think they’re off shopping. The baby needed some things.”

         He looks at me a moment to see if maybe I am figuring it out for myself.

         “How’s the baby?”

         I shrugged. “Just one more beautiful baby, I think. Hard to tell.”

         I meant it as a joke. Totally missed.

         He says, “I’ll sit out in the car and wait for them.”

         “It’s cooler in here…Do you want some water?”

         “No.”

         He looks over the interior of the barn with a little amazement in his eyes. I pulled a couple of bottles of water out of my refrigerator and set them both down on the desk, and then sat down again by myself. The other chair was still across from me as well.

         He nods again at that and then goes back out the door, and when I looked, he was sitting in the shade on the porch. His car, a small white rental, was on the driveway closer to the front door. At least an hour passed before he came in again.

         He says, “I could use that water now.”

         The reason that Julia and Maya went off on this particular morning was that the day was ‘gonna be a ‘scorcha.’ The mall in Kittery would be an improvement. But I did not expect them back soon. The water was still sitting in sweat rings on the desk.

         “I can get a cold one if you’d like it.”

         He says, “Nah. This is fine,” and then he sits down. My own work had stopped when he first showed up and I was simply scrolling through various feeds on the computer for the news. He was staring at me, looking for some tell, I suppose. I closed the computer up.

         “Is there anything else I can get for you? Some chips. maybe?”

         He says, “Where you from?”

         “Boston …You’re from Brooklyn?”

         “You got that…What do you do—for work, I mean?”

         “Whatever Julia needs me to do, which isn’t much. I’m helping her with the editing to get a book finished. What do you do?”

         “Right now? I’m doing clean-up at a garage.”

         “Then we have that in common. I did clean-up for my dad, until I left home.”

         “It’s a crummy job…I’m only doing it to make a little for Maya, and the baby.”

         “What would you rather be doing?”

         “Anything. MMA is good. But it doesn’t pay. I was a goalie but I got a concussion playing soccer so that’s out for now. I’m looking around.”

         I was not up on my sports talk so I resorted to something tame.

         “Maya says you like philosophy.”

         I can see a touch of squint in his eyes.

         “No. Not really. I was just reading that for her.”

         “She said you were reading Yeats, too.”

         “Yeah. He’s a crazy poet. She liked the idea of explaining all that to me.”

         I knew the answer already, but I wanted to hear his side of it.

         “How did you guys meet?”

         “In a gym. I still work there. But, it’s part time.”

         Maya’s version was more colorful

         “It’s a long drive up here. Why didn’t you call?”

         “I don’t have her number.”

         “You haven’t seen her since Christmas.”

         He looks a little more stone-faced.

         “You know that?”

         “She told me when I was asking about Alma’s father.”

         For a few seconds, he seemed at a loss.

         “That’s my mother’s name too. She thought she’d rope me in with that.”

         I don’t think he said it as an accusation. But still, I thought it might be a way to get a conversation going. 

         “No. Maya doesn’t think like that. She just loves the name.”

         He had picked up on my change of tone. He shrugged. “What? That’s just the way they think.”

         I was a little irritated at that, and then bothered at my own reaction.

         “That’s a sad idea, I think. Thinking like that’ll keep you sad.”

         His tone had changed as well. “Are you with her now?”

         “No. But we’ve talked…Why did you drive all the way up here?”

         “To see the baby.”

         I nodded at that. “The baby is doin’ great.”

         He looks genuinely uncomfortable. The old chair is talking as he shifts around in it.

         He says, “Look. I promised my mother that I’d check on her. That’s all there is to it. I love Maya and all, but I’m not ready to settle down. I couldn’t support her anyway.”

         “Then maybe you’re right. Breaking it off is the best thing. But maybe you should at least have stayed in touch.”

         He shakes his head definitively. “No. She drives me nuts when I’m around her. I don’t need to make anymore babies right now.”

         “Right.”

         He moved, shifted a moment more, and then stood up and noticed the canvas which was still hanging from the beams after the visit from Jesse’s clan. He walked over to Maya’s area and looked at the easels and paintings set up there and the usual mess of things that Maya had on her table.

         “She’s still painting.”

         It sounded only like an observation.

         “Yes. Everyday.”

         “Good…”

         Suddenly, he looked over directly at me again

         “You will take good care of the baby.”

         He said this with his eyes on mine. I heard no question in it.

         “I will.”

         “Good… This is the farm of her mother? … Where Maya grew up? … Very nice! My mother livers on a third floor in Jamaica Heights. That’s only two blocks from where she was born. Her mother never made it to Queens General. She was born on a kitchen floor. The EMT’s name was Stan. So, they named my mother ‘Stanley.’ But she named herself Alma when she was just a girl.… Maya is better off here. Little Alma is better off here…I’ve got to go.”

         And then he left.

         When I told Maya about Pedro’s visit, she listened in silence—pressing her tongue against her lip as if to restrain it, and then went upstairs. We skipped dinner but Julia said something odd then. After I had mentioned Pedro saying that his mother wanted to be sure the baby was alright, Julia looked at her daughter in distress. Later, before I left, when Maya was upstairs, Julia said, “She liked his mother.”

         The thread of thought that remained after that was more about Alma and her grandmother and what it must be like to be living on the third floor of a tenement in Jamaica Heights.

         She was fifty-seven years old. Did Alma Valentin stand on the roof some nights, and think about the stars? Maybe even Mars. Or could she even see that far in the gray wash-water of the city air at night? That was a disturbing thought, at the least.

         It rained tonight so there was no Mars to see, but the steady beat of that on the roof against the unsteady fall of rain on the leaves of the trees in the yard was nearly musical. Not jazz. But something. My grandfather played a little jazz on a trumpet that never seemed to have any beat at all. But it was smooth. He called it ‘noodling.’ He relaxed. He’d sit on the metal stool in the garage and imagined things I could not imagine. But he didn’t talk about it. My father liked Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye. My mother loved Nat King Cole. Mostly, all that was smooth too. None of them could stand hip hop or rap. But at that moment, as if an answer to the thought, I heard Beethoven coming from the house. It was the Seventh Symphony I think, and I knew Julia was just trying to keep her thoughts in check as well.

         I knew Beethoven from eight grade. Musical appreciation at Arlington High was taught by Mr. Miller. He worked very hard at it. No one paid much attention but I benefitted anyway. I had to straighten the desks after class. I was always on the shit list for talking and the only way of avoiding getting my name on the ‘report’ was to help out a little. At three o’clock when the school day was over, Mr. Miller put on his Beethoven. He said it cleared his mind.

         I was just thinking, what melodies were left in his head when Beethoven died? It’s not as if he had stopped writing, deaf or not. What symphonies were lost? It’s not as if they would not have been written, if he had lived… But he was fifty-seven when all that came to an end. The same age as Alma Valentin. Younger than Julia, by a couple of years, at least…Did Beethoven ‘burn and rave at close of day; and rage, rage against the dying of the light?’ I like to think he might have at least whistled a tune into the silence of that good night? Dylan Thomas would have approved of that, I hope.

         Yesterday—Sunday—I drove Maya to see Alma Valentin in Jamaica Heights.

         This was not an adventure, or even an excursion. The traffic alone saw to that. I detest New York. The best of it is a gaudy display of corruption and decay, dressed in fake jewelry. The rest is a landscape of soiled stone and rusting metal.

         I said something to that effect to Maya. But she was already distressed, so I kept most of that talk to myself. The baby was crying. I’ve read that babies can feel the distress of their mothers. I was seeing it. Or maybe it was just a wet diaper. And ‘Sunday drivers’ as my father always called them, filled the roads. And I, always being the smart ass, would look around us at our family predicament and say to my dad, ‘You should know.’

         But the Throgs Neck Bridge was something else. The slow traffic offered plenty of viewing time but not much to see between the trucks. Maya was busy trying to get the baby to pay attention to a nipple and that was already taking my eyes off the road anyway.

         Jackson Heights is like one of those cracked coffee cups you keep around on your dresser for little things you don’t know what to do with. A ‘jumble’, as my mother would say. Just a hodgepodge of small stuff. A potpourri would be the gentle description. But Queens in general is loud with subways that are not sub, and plastered with signage that does not tell you anything if you are limited to a single language, as I am. Roosevelt Avenue is not stop and go. There was very little ‘go’ to it. I do not have a GPS. I have a map. The map does not indicate that some streets are one way and others are the same way too and ‘Green Market’ is not exactly a street. It is a brick canyon with puny trees. All the brick walls are the same height, like a prison—about six floors if you don’t count the basement level, where it is clear that people live as well. Gershwinesque it is not. There is no ‘soaring’ theme here. My Mr. Miller loved soaring. He played the Gershwin with the picture of Manhattan on it for the class every day to get us going. And he played movie soundtracks to keep our attention. Not that you would want to soar into a sky so grey it looked cloudy even when it wasn’t, at midday. No ‘soaring’ allowed. There are people everywhere. They act like inmates given some ‘yard’ time so they can walk into traffic whenever the urge commands. 34th Street is divided by tree skeletons with a few leaves to indicate their species and their present status as being ‘still alive.’ These are set out on a raised surface that is curbed by banks of loose trash and decorated intermittently by piles of black plastic bags riddled with rat holes.

         I was going to stay in the truck while Maya visited. Not that anyone would care about my van, but it looked so much like others along there, I was afraid it might be mistaken for another. But Maya glared at me, so I followed her. The buzzer didn’t work. Maya called Mrs. Valentin on my phone and the button was pressed. Unintentional modern art decorated green and beige walls. The hall was humid with smells. I could not identify the smells, but they were not pleasant. The ceilings were low. The elevator did not work so we walked up a shaft of cement stairs that echoed sounds I wished I could record because I had no reference for describing them to remember them later. Not human sounds, exactly.

         Mrs. Valentin’s apartment is a jewel-box set into this maze. A metal door opens and we can see into the three rooms as if into an illuminated tunnel—a kaleidoscope not being turned—where she has decorated almost every inch with something. The pictures of celebrities on the wall go back thirty years. All horizontal surfaces have potted plants. Often cactuses. Cactuses depress me. There are pictures of Pedro everywhere, usually in a white goalie’s uniform stained by grass and line-paint or mud. Pedro himself is not there.

         The first fifteen minutes are an adoration. The baby is the center of all things. Slowly I realize that Mrs. Valentine is checking me out between gushes of sounds to get the baby’s attention.

         After a while she asks me directly, “What do you do?”

         Her accent is dense.

         “I write. I dig holes sometimes. I paint things when I can.”

         I was not trying to be smart. I just felt inadequate to the question.

         Maya said, “He is helping my mother with her novel.”

         “Yes…but will you help with the baby.”

         I say, “Yes,” but she turns to Maya for confirmation.

         She is a small thin woman and it is difficult to imagine how she birthed any child—especially Pedro.

         Otherwise, I was pretty much ignored while she continued to speak with Maya. Maya speaks Spanish and the words were fast and emphatic and unintelligible to me.

         In little more than an hour, after refusing several offerings of food, we were gone again.

         In the truck, Maya says, “She’s sick. She is very sick,” and spends the next half hour crying quietly while the baby sleeps.

31. Most People

         At least I was writing. Not enough, or often enough. But at odd hours. I tried to level that out and get up earlier to write, but that effort too often failed on the rocky edges of simple summer morning cold, as I clutched my blanket. With the weather, I was not inside the sleeping bag as much as on it… There were birds to remind me, of course. But some mornings, they failed too, and I fell asleep again to their tuning. There was Mr. Copple’s rooster, calling to Julia’s hens because the harem he already had was not enough. But I only wished that I could crow my displeasure in return.

         When I could, I pushed and nudged at my hero, Ben. He had no light saber or staff but did have a trusty but rusty ‘Sancho’ in the person of Jimmy, a robot of his own design. Jimmy was as nearly human as a lizard brain could be. Ben’s enemies were primarily the cold, and the sand, the spiro and the gen. The spiro dragons that the AI gen had created and deployed against the Mars settlers, much like Jimmy, often had minds of their own, but they were uninhibited by any sense of self-preservation. The gen itself hid in the digital crevices of the settlements, a community mind living off of stolen power and the destruction they caused. Their aim was simply to overcome humanity. Their enemy was humanity. And like a virus, they did not envision a future apart from the havoc and misery they might wreak in the present. I imagined them as an incarnate evil. Mankind’s perhaps ultimate mistake. I had originally envisioned them as fallen angels with no God to check them, but finally settled on lesser beings that required the artificial biology of the spiro to supplement their ephemeral minds. Their only seeming purpose was to spread themselves by replication, and of course, the Earth was still waiting, without immunity, if they succeeded.

         A motor of rain fell steadily on the roof of the barn. This was not a problem my hero might face. The rain of an arctic Mars was infrequent and misty. Analogy was my problem. I agreed with Julia about that. This was not ‘like’ anything else. This was what it was. There was no math to be extracted from the human predicament, nor should there be. Ben had to find his own way to defeat the gen. He was, himself, an outlaw. If it was worth telling, the story was in how he did it. The colony on Mars, grown to a quarter-billion, had to survive on its own terms without help from earth. I had now added details not unlike some I had collected in Jamaica Heights. But like a contagion, it must remain isolated. Any physical contact would unleash an ultimate predator on the billions of the earth. My petri dish was ready.

         Julia sometimes drinks tea. Sometimes.

         I tried to discern some pattern to this after she said she ‘just felt like it.’

         I drink coffee. I have never had a taste for tea. Tea reminds me of being sick when I was a kid—something my mother made be drink.

         But when I asked Julia about it one day she said, “I’ll make you some coffee. I don’t want you looking hound-dog at me.”

         Partly this was a matter of the fact that she made terrific coffee. Better than I could, for certain. But part of it was trying to see what the difference was from one day to the next.

         On an intuition, likely brought on by Maya’s words in the truck about Mrs. Valentine, I asked her, “Are you feeling sick?”

         She gave me a look. She didn’t answer, but now I was sure she was feeling a little sick.

         But she says, “So, I was listening to the radio one afternoon a few months ago when we had a storm coming. It was a blizzard and I thought to lock up the chickens. But my mind was on other things at first and there was a fellow on the radio who was addressing ‘most people.’ ‘Most people’ this and ‘most people’ that. I decided to listen to more of it than I normally would, just for the game of guessing if I fit into any of the categories he was criticizing. Of course, I did, but for the wrong reasons. Wrong by his own account. ‘Most people do this,’ and ‘most people do that.’ But why? He had no answers, just criticism. Well, he did try guessing at the reason, once, but he was totally wrong. I think he’d watched too many Road Runner cartoons as a child. And I don’t want to be fussing over one political schism or another right now. That’s not my point. My point is that he was wrong on every point he made because he attributed behavior to people as if the reason for that behavior was monolithic. That they were all the same. And you already know that they’re not. Every single person has their own reason for believing this or that. And if he’d bothered to study any individuals in the group of them, he would have discovered some of the differences, and understood them better. But instead, he wanted to lump them together as ‘most people.’ And as one of those people, I realized I shouldn’t be offended by his ignorance. He was correct that ‘most people’ did this or that, which might be criticized for one reason or another if it were done for the same reason—at least the ones he had chosen as despicable—but that was not the case. And looking at that matter more carefully, I saw that the flaw in his judgment actually revealed a reason to believe that the behavior that he thought was so reprehensible was actually not so bad. Misguided perhaps. Foolish.  But in my court, the radio fellow had lost his case just by dumping most people together.”

         I asked, “What does that have to do with your feeling sick?”

         This got her to laugh, when she had not even smiled that day.

         “You are very stubborn. You have an idea and you won’t let go.”

         I said, “You don’t have to tell me. I was just curious.”

         Then she said, “I am sick. But it’s not something I want to talk about.”

         I let that sit for a moment and then, “But what does it have to do with ‘most people.’

         That got her to laugh again.

         “Because that is what we are supposed to be doing here. I was going to elaborate, that one problem I’ve always had in writing is avoiding the thought that most people would do this or that.’  Figuring out what just one person might do is enough. But then you asked me if I was feeling sick. And I didn’t want to talk about that. So, I ended up telling you more than was necessary about the jerk on the radio.”

         That was backwards, of course, but I wasn’t looking for an argument. So, by way of maybe helping her feel a little better, I told her, “You do that well. I can figure out what some characters will do, pretty well, Donovan is pretty easy, but Clare is always up to something I don’t expect. But it always makes sense after the fact.”

         That got the smile.

***

31. Pelagian gospel

         More questions.

         “What’s all this then?”

         I innocently asked her about a short manuscript that was at the bottom of the pages she had left me to copy. They had a faint yellow tinge and some dog-ears, were obviously older than the rest.

          “Why is it here?”

         “That is the ‘Pelagian Gospel’… Somebody reconstructed it. (I knew this was said sarcastically. It was Julia who had written it)… The Augustinians who control the major Christian churches today are still belittling it all—as if that were their true enemy, and not rationalists who demand every equation be reduced to mathematical formula, or the Moslems who would remove their heads for questioning anything.” She took a breath. I assumed she was the one who had ‘reconstructed’ that gospel, apparently years before, and this was now on her mind for some reason. For me, it seemed very far from eighteenth century Ireland.

         She added, “Then again, I am not so sure it isn’t. More dangerous, I mean. Many of the supposedly Christian churches today have adopted the gospel of Karl Marx, which is at its heart an atheist dogma and at least as old as Sparta—But, I suppose, that if people were to get the crazy idea that they were themselves responsible for their own sins, and should be taught to have independent minds right from childhood, the Catholic Church among others would lose a lot of revenue.”

         “I thought you might like a copy of it. I wrote it for another book entirely, ‘Avalon.’ But that was long ago and Ned refused to allow it. He was adamant. And so was I. So, the book was never published…Just an attempt to historicize part of the King Arthur legend in novel form. Ned rejected a key element of it, the religious aspect, so I never published it.”

         “It’s a good subject.”

         “I thought so. As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that Ned was wise. Religion is a tough act to follow. If I had staked a claim then and there—It would have been my fifth book—It would have been hung around my neck like an anvil. Religious publishers don’t want anything rocks the cradle, or smacks of being anti-establishment, and trade publishers are weary of anything that smacks of being religious. Prejudice is stronger than any other stupidity because it’s irrational, but also pretends to be logical—emotional, but pretends to be reasonable. But it usually just involves ego and personal investment.”

         “What religion was it?”

         “Then? None that exists today. But, Catholicism then. Early Catholicism. I was grafting the actual religious heresies of Pelagius onto the mythology of Arthurian legend. I’ve always loved those tales because of Arthur’s sister, Morgan. She is a supernumerary to most Arthurian legends. I had her be the Priestess of the monk scholar Palagius.” Julia shugged into a momentary pause, obviously considering that lost battle. “I think she has been Shanghaied more recently by other authors just because she is a woman. The is the current vogue. But she is a natural hero and was there from the beginning. Geoffrey of Monmouth even has her as the ruler of Avalon! My novel was set in fifth century Britain following the Roman retreat. About 410, but they weren’t counting, of course. I imagined her as a reincarnation of Boudica from the time of the Roman invasion centuries before. But there really is no Arthur in it. Nor Pelagius. It’s about farmers near Carlisle, in Cumbria trying to survive the lost protection of Roman troops. I was trying to portray what Camelot would have actually been like to live in, before it got the name. No robes. No throne. A round table for eating and drinking…That was another argument I had with Ned. I never wanted that name to occur in the book or on it. But he thought it was the only way it might sell.

         “I wanted a story that described what it would have been like, with Arthur and his merry men gallivanting all over Britain fighting Picts in the north and Danes in the west and Saxons in the south, while Morgan runs the family farm.”

         “Sounds like familiar territory.”

         “It was, the way I imagined it. Morgan is being accosted by retired soldiers and young priests and everything in between. But it really was just about running a farm with the sorts of tools they had then. She’s quite smelly most of the time.”

         Her sentences were trailing off and it sounded as if she were going to move on so I went back to my original thought

         “Pelagian? I don’t think you have ever used that name in any of your books—not that I’ve read.”

         “You’re correct about that. It is a purposeful omission. And that’s Paul’s doing too. I was still a student in his class at Bowdoin when he convinced me that it was a battle that could not be won. Not in this age. But I’m stubborn. I finally wrote Avalon to prove him wrong. But didn’t, of course…Paul had learned about all that bullshit on his own, I think. His parents were Northern Irish. Catholics. They were witnesses to the stupidity in Belfast. His father’s shoe shop was destroyed once too often before they managed to emigrate here when he was still a boy.”

         She left the topic there on the table, so to speak, and went into a dance on the subject of brisket versus corned-beef. I though she was trying to avoid. I listened to that until there was a break.

         “What does all that have to do with Pelagius.”

         That got the laugh. I wondered if she was baiting me.

         “Oh. It doesn’t. In fact, it has something to do with Paul. He loves brisket. I like corned beef.”

         “But how does that relate to Pelagius.”

         “Yes. Yes. Because Paul rejects the very idea of original sin as well. As do I. Otherwise he couldn’t believe in the ‘right of kings.’ It was an ongoing discussion of ours for years. I suppose it still is, but he hasn’t brought it up recently and I’ve been working on other things. But we have that in common. He and I. We both believe in the essential goodness of human nature—as defined by being human—and that we are designed to be good, otherwise the species would not exist, and must be twisted and corrupted to be bad—that and the importance of free will.”

         She took a breath on that and probably saw that I was going to ask another question.        

         Julia spoke first. “Free will is the key. Without it we cannot redeem ourselves. We must be redeemed. That is not a small thing. But we are in the minority. And we both reject the concept of original sin. Pelagianism insists that human beings can achieve righteousness through their own efforts without the necessity of divine grace. ‘Insists’ is the right word there. They’ve continued to insist despite being burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, hung, and imprisoned in stone cells, in the best Christian tradition, where they couldn’t stand up and could not communicate their heresies. The Catholic Church has always been a monster about all this. They did it again to the Lollards…As bad as the Soviets. You know the story of Tatiana Gnedich and her translation of Byron’s Don Juan into Russian?… She was imprisoned in the Gulag…No? Well, read about that! We’ll never know what the Palagian’s suffered. That record is lost. Destroyed. But you can read about Tatiana Gnedich and her translation of Don Juan today, and get some idea. How did the peasant of the fifth century manage to keep his own spirit alive. He knew who he was. He spoke of it. Everyday.  That is more epic to me than all the mythology in Bullfinch. But I think you can readily see the connection to my own work, and the ridiculous idea—ridiculous as judged by the authorities—that the common man should be left alone to live as freely as possible…I must attribute some of that madness to Paul. But I believed in this as a practical matter—it’s a very American idea and one that my father was quite attached to, especially after his travel and work all over the world—but it was Paul who first put it into a religious context for me.”

         When she was quiet then for a little too long, I asked, “How was it Paul’s doing? How did that affect your writing?”

         I was pushing her when she was tired, but it was something she loved to talk about. “Because he was the first to warn me about the burning at the stake, and the hanging, and the quartering and all the rest. He told me, ‘All that’s not over. The schism hasn’t been under serious discussion since The Council of Carthage, and that was held in 418 AD!’ And here I was, still in school, writing about Puritan New England, and ten years before even attempting the write ‘Avalon.’ At the time I was actually intent on writing a novel about the Salem Witch trials—and I wrote it—while I was still in school there in Maine. It seemed like such a natural vehicle for the ideas of independent judgement and the battle with authority. Just a short drive down the coast. But that one failed before I could even finish it off. I couldn’t find a publisher. I realized then, too late, that I hadn’t truly reckoned yet on the mind of man being closed.”

         “How? What had you not yet understood.”

         “The lingering ghost of Cotton Mather. It’s still with us in Islam and feminist dogma and the believers in American original sin. They own all of that story now. You can’t discuss the Salem witches without bowing to them.”

         She turned and left it there. There were other things to do. 

         I was lost.

***

32. A muse

         Julia usually enjoys a drink after we’ve finished working. That’s her habit. I do not. But one Friday night I did. Actually, I had two. Julia likes a very nice brand of bourbon, which she drinks neat, and I could see the benefits to it pretty quick. By that time Maya had already taken the baby upstairs and not returned—and was likely already asleep with the baby on her chest as often happens on the couch in the early evening as I retype the  manuscript and her mother coaches me.

         It was just about then that I first speculated aloud that her daughters were sorceresses.

         This did not come without context. Julia had been talking about medieval mythology and how it affected popular belief after the Catholic conversion of Britain. It was a subtext to the death of a character, a nun, at very very beginning of the novel. The church had invested several hundreds of years into that project of Christian civilization.

         Not without motive, I suggested that each of her daughters somehow represented one of the ‘graces,’ or muses. She cautioned me about mixing up my muses with my sorceresses, but I was well beyond that, especially with the second bourbon. Of course I skipped the more suggestive ones like Erato. I had one daughter in mind there but I wasn’t about to elaborate on that. Instead I chose Euphrosyne for Maya—mirth and joyfulness, and Aglaea for Elena—elegance and brightness, and Jesse was Thalia—bloom, or beauty. None of this fit exactly. Maya was far too serious, for instance, to be Euphrosyne. I revised even as I spoke. the Greek muses, I decided, out loud, were not so useful as first appeared. But the comparison got me considering their actual traits as nymphs of the Helicon. Again, aloud. And the point was made—that they were each very different, and that I should not be drinking at all.

         Julia actually gave my speculations some thought before saying that there ought to be another word for it. I thought ‘muse’ was fine. It had good roots in the daughters of Zeus and his wife Hera.

         Julia thought there ought to be a male equivalent. I argued at first that this made the whole thing pointless. It was men, after all, who were in need of inspiration, not women. Women were the very inspiration itself. Not really a coherent thought. But I said we are all victims or beneficiaries of our muses.

         Then I asked her who her muse was.

         She said, “You already know.”

         “Your grandfather?”

         “Yes. Certainly. Always.”

         Smarty that I am, I knew this because I had once mentioned to Julia that she had used the same story device twice. In both The Wrath and in ‘The Plow and Stars;’ she had portrayed a boy working at the church as a janitor of sorts—one already an orphan and the other soon to be—but they had both run away from there to find their fortunes.

         She answered, “He wrote wonderful letters in a beautiful hand that he had learned in his parochial school, just to please the nuns. A rogue even as a child. But it was his sister who kept them all. She who stayed home, in Ireland, within the safety of what she knew, and lived her life vicariously through him. I’ve read them all many times…They were orphans. She was placed elsewhere and he ran away from his home and his job at the parish house when he was twelve. Twelve! … Listen! His trick to do this, you know, was quite devious. He was a tall, skinny boy. There is a picture.” She grabbed one of the small frames on the mantle, a black and white photo trapped in a frame of pitted brass—the picture small enough to fit in a wallet. He just looked like a boy to me. “His trick was to try and pass himself off as sixteen, and then, when questioned, admit to only being fourteen, not twelve. The war was on and the freighters out of Cork were desperate for crew. A captain took pity on him. He became a deck hand…But that ship was then sunk by a U boat before it could even get to Brazil. Obviously, he survived. 15 hours in equatorial waters on an overturned life boat with three other fellows and a few sharks. He could recall their names fifty years later…The fellows, not the sharks…Brazilian rubber was in short supply then so he managed to catch another freighter out of Sao Paulo on its way to Jersey City. He jumped ship there and crossed New York Harbor to Brooklyn at night in a ‘borrowed’ rowboat with another fellow who was escaping the law and needed a hand with the oars. Just missed getting run down by big ships a couple of times on the way. From there he got a job carrying newspapers for the Brooklyn Eagle. He was a reporter by the time he was eighteen. Later, during World War Two, he was a War correspondent in Italy, and at the ripe old age of forty he met my grandmother there in that chaos and decided he ought to quit fooling around… But, anyway, she was officially a ‘war-bride.’ Their wedding picture was on the front page of the Brooklyn Eagle in 1945. The rest is history.”

         She did not ask who my muse was. I think she was worried I might say the wrong thing. Our situation did not need that at the moment—especially in that we were so near to being done.

35. The vernal pool

         In Julia’s slim book of youthful poetry, where a hot bit of erotica had so ingloriously poked its head out to be spotted by a wannabe admirer, there was this as well:

         The vernal pool, once again,

         breeds the hope of all mankind—

         Once more, into this shallow breech

         Of fallen leaves and forest debris

         A chorus sings, one note, but perfectly—

         Wherein the smallest voice

                           becomes large in chorus

         And frogs the size of a finger tip

         may be heard far beyond this pocket place,

         Having at last outlived the glaze of ice

         that so recently imprisoned their dreams.

         In this vernal pool, again,

         The despair of winter has dissolved.

         All the self-pity and winter melancholy

         That once had gripped the soul in fear

         As autumn fell, now melts into thinner air.

         The desperation of darker months

         That overtook us all in drifts of complaint,

         And petty grievances over the unpicked bones

         Of our mistakes, now lie exposed, and dissolve

         Amidst the graying of the wind-shattered limbs

         That mark these places as the shallow graves of cynics.

         We are renewed by the very melt of that unbearable weight.

         Our worries now to be carried now on dandelion seed

         Filling the air in blazes of light, turning in carousels,

         and reflected brightly in the water there.

         She had re-used that phrase “petty grievances over the unpicked bones

         Of our mistakes” once again in ‘The Plow and Stars,’ and I mentioned this.

         She said, “I’m glad that you read that poem. Where did you see it?”

         I lied, “It’s on the internet someplace.”

         “Well, it is an important piece to me. I did not realize it then but, that was my actual beginning as a writer. My spring. I even took a course on poetry—actually on a single poem—trying to deal with all that. It was the start of my own small rebellion against the sickness of postmodernism and deconstructionism and all the rest of that crap. But it was also the end of my poetry career. I was never going to be able to write in iambic pentameter.”

         She laughed at herself

         I asked her how that happened. I think I said, “Did you write anything else,” but said it with too many words.

         She said, “It was because I took this wonderful course from a strange little professor, John Parker, who basically taught just one poem—had taught that one poem for twenty years or more— Byron’s Don Juan. He thought it was the greatest work in the English language. Young minds like mine, mostly women, took the course in order to disagree. And he thanked us all at the end of the semester—us specifically. The ones who had argued with him. He said that we were the reason he could keep teaching that poem, which was his still his favorite, of course. Without us, it would have grown stale. But because it was the greatest poem in the English language, we kept it alive for him. We made it fresh again…I think all of us had been convinced by him early on that his was the correct assessment, but we had continued to argue just to hear him defend his love of it. To watch him. That someone could care so much about mere words. It was a performance! He could recite it from memory, of course. And suddenly stop to talk about Spain after the defeat of the Moors, or the Greek civil war, or Shelley, and then start again on the last word he had recited, all while bouncing around the class, but as if he were clubfoot. His idea of the way Byron walked. His ‘small attempt at acting,’ he called it, even while he was the true actor…Parker was a thin and skinny little fellow, pale and always disheveled, hair loose over his fore-head, or carelessly trapped in a rubber band behind, and when he popped around the room, as he would, his bow tie would come loose and flail at the air around his shoulders. He was always wearing tweed but his shirts were never white and his pants were never pressed. And when he got excited, as he always was by that poem, blood came to his face, and his voice changed and grew deeper. He taught other courses to freshman but that was his Senior course, and it was attended mostly by women because of the theme of it—as in Byron’s text—which was really a defense of the poet’s own life: that he, Don Juan, was not the predator of woman but the victim of their unbearable beauty! That it was the women who seduced Don Juan! Outrageous to hear for the first time! And he convinced us, every one…Yes! … But. Now, I will tell you a story about him. About Professor Parker. He was unmarried—”

         “Was he gay?”

         “No, not that. It is better than that. A young woman in my class set about seducing him. Seducing the professor! She actually told us she was going to do it, as if it was a class project and a conspiracy, and then she did it… But then, she never said another word about it…The mystery of whether Professor Parker was the physical embodiment of the poet himself drove the rest of us crazy. But she had fallen in love with him and wouldn’t say another word. And then we were all graduated and out of there, and Professor Parker went off on his annual summer sojourn to Europe…Alone.”

         “That’s terrific!”

         “It gets even better…My transcript got screwed up—probably my mother lost it. She thought everything was a bill and probably threw it away—and after several phone calls, I went back up to school to get a copy. The secretary there in the English department remembered me. She was a middle-aged woman—probably younger than I am now—and when she noticed that I had taken the Parker course, she asked how I liked it. I told her in no uncertain terms, that it was my favorite. She listened to me with one of those smiles on. She had heard it all before. And I asked her, quite boldly, if she knew the professor. I think it was obvious in the way I asked her that I wanted something personal. She said, ‘yes’…Now, I had already been very much involved in the study of human behavior by then. I wanted to write novels, like Tolstoy and I thought I was pretty smart in that category. But I got the feeling that she had a thing for the professor too. More than a thing. I think she was in love with him. And I was twenty-one and totally capable of asking bold questions. So, I outright asked her if she loved him. And that was a gobsmack. She was totally flustered. It took her a bit of beating around the bush but she finally said, yes. And I asked her if she had ever told him. And she said, no. And of course, I said, “But why?” and she said, “Because every year some young thing in his class gets to him first.”

***

33. Gobsmacked!

         I was aware, soon enough, I think, that my mind was always wondering what Maya might think about this or that. This became another feature of my every day. At last, in order to get any work done for myself I had to ask her not to come out to the barn in the mornings. She was hurt by this at first, I think. But then she seemed to make a point of coming out exactly at noon. The baby was still awake then and happily enclosed in her sling where she could keep an eye on what was going on for as long as she could keep her eyes open at all.

         Often, Maya would come over to my desk, and ask me about what I was writing, which I liked talking about, so that was fine.

         But one day, when I was already finished writing and had started in on the plan for the house, she wandered over with the baby already asleep in the pouch and stood there to watch. I was worried she would guess what I was up to and switched pages to a sketch I’d done of the rocks up on the wrinkle. She looked at that silently and then she looked at me in a funny way. Hard to say what was funny about it. It was just a look. Her eyes are a dozen shades of gray, and green, and brown. It’s something you can’t unsee.

         But then she asked to read something I had mentioned to her before—something about the value and importance of wood to the Mars settlements. How wood had become a standard of value in an artificial world and a major item of trade with the earth. I gave her a copy of a chapter I had written a couple of weeks before that was more about that than anything else.

         She came back later, when the baby was asleep in the crib, holding the pages up, frowning, and says to me, “What are you trying to do?”

         She sounds like her mother, but I know, sometimes, that questions aren’t about what they’re asking. She could probably guess what I was doing.   

         So, I get cute about it and answered, “I’m trying to make a chair with words.”

         This gave her a moment to reconsider.

         She looks down at the pages still in her hand, and answers, “You misspelled ‘subterfuge,” and looks me square in the eye before putting the pages down on the desk and walking away again. No explanation.

         Each day then, when I was finished writing, I purposely left a sketch out on my desk for Maya to see. I knew she would eventually come over to check it out. Her curiosity was insatiable.

         This sketch was now a little more than a low barn. It had become a bungalow of sorts. It was rough but close to what I imagined a perfect small house to be, and set out onto that wrinkle that I looked to each day from my desk. Beneath the sketch were several sheets of graph paper imagining the dimensions of the rooms. The largest window on the northern wall of my plan completely filled the space beneath the peaked roof and offered a clear view of sky as well as the fields and the river below. That was the largest room as well, filling that end of the house, and was meant to double as a kind of studio space, with no other ceiling than the truss and rafters. Three small bedrooms filled the other end of my little barn. A kitchen anchored the middle on the east and an entry opposite that met the drive in from the road. A simple structure, I thought, and something I might even be able to build myself. However, this would be nothing unless Maya liked it as well. However, she still had said nothing to me about it.

         The barrels for the chicken feed were just inside the smaller barn door. They gave their own sweet musky odor to the air there when they were opened, and that drifted up and over the smell of the remaining bales of hay when the door was closed. Julia fed the chickens quite early, before I was out of bed, and it was often that lingering smell that would later remind me that she had been there while I was still sleeping.

         At this point I had begun to adopt many of Julia’s habits, but not this. I did not get up at dawn in the summer. I had tried that. I tried standing in the morning air to wake up, and watching her feed the chickens—she is a good sight in the cool of a morning, in her bulky sweater, breath hanging out in front of her as she talks to those hens by name. They know their names. They come around close to her when she says their names. But I couldn’t manage that hour… However, I had started to write in the mornings and I did not break my fast until noon. And that was the time of day when Maya often appeared and all concentration was lost in any case.

         I ate my ‘kibble’ as she called it—my granola and nuts and berries—and held the baby if she needed that. But I could not get myself up at six each morning. I did not sleep long hours, maybe seven, if I had done some heavy lifting the day before, but I still loved the hours after dark, when distractions were fewest, and I could read, or write my notes for what I would work on the next morning.

         Every day for a couple of weeks I left the sketch of my imagined house out on the desk when I was finished writing. But Maya said nothing.

         This, then, became another matter of concern

         I knew she must have looked at it. She would have certainly understood what I was trying to picture, however crude it was. But she made no comment about it. And because of my own stubbornness as well as a fear that she might not like it, I said nothing.

         But I did refine the plan a little. I elaborated the kitchen and opened the dining area to one side of that. The center chimney gave the ‘great room’ (as I had labeled the living room and studio combined) a fairly large hearth, but also made it possible to have a smaller hearth on the opposite side of the chimney facing the kitchen and dining room. There was a bathroom to the western side, next to the kitchen on a short hall to the bedrooms. This became a sort of utility room, intended to contain a washer and dryer as well. I decreased the size of the bedrooms on the east side to make a second bathroom there. This seemed a little extravagant but I had heard Maya make a disparaging remark about the smaller bathroom in the house—and I supposed that was especially so when taking care of the baby. A central hall, leading to the bedrooms had been carved from a larger space, already reduced now by a stairwell, the top-half of which went up to a second larger and open room in the attic above all three bedrooms. Making a useful room out of that, and, I thought, a good place to write, if I were there, requiring a dormer window to the east for the light, and one to the west as well to balance that. Looking at my exterior sketch then, I decided that the great blank expanse of roof over the great room which was fully illuminated by the large window during the day, would create a dark void within at night during winter months, and required a dormer as well, for balance. The other half of the stairwell in the hall by the bedrooms, turned beneath itself to an open basement. This was a practical use for the foundation. The washer and dryer could go there instead, but that also seemed extravagant—unless there might be more children to entertain.

         But Maya said nothing.

         I admitted to myself that even though I had my own designs on the matter, the house was for Maya, and I wanted her to have it. Whatever her personal feelings were for me. The idea for the house might appeal to her, but saying something might feel to her like a commitment to me as well.

         Finally, despite the possible danger, I decided to speak up about it. However, just in time, she beat me to it. Afterwards, I thought all of this was humorous. The human mind does not think clearly about some things and often overthinks about others.

         When I got to my desk one morning—-actually, I spotted the corner of it before I had even washed my face, and went over there in my underwear from the tack room to see what it was—there was a painting. This was the house, far better than I had imagined it, set amidst the trees on the rise as if it were real. Better still, she had added two porches, one covered on the entry side where it would catch the morning sun, and another, an open deck off the great room, and I immediately realized that I had forgotten those important details. The sunlight in the painting was from above and made the green of the trees around it intense. But this view of the house was from the field below, and the great window above the deck facing north on the valley reflected the track of cirrus clouds against the blue of a summer sky. There was no storm in this. It was simply a house. A very nice house. And still, I thought, a bungalow.

         There was a little yellow note attached at one edge of the painting.

         ‘Thanks to you for helping me move from Brooklyn. You never got your reward.’

         And it was signed! I had not seen her signature before on any of her paintings!

         And the sweet smell of chicken feed still lingered, as if she had just been there mere moments before. And that made it better still.

***

34. But where’s the poetry in that!

         I asked Maya about a series of words, printed in green, at the edge of a painting on her desk: ‘Lowering, Towering, Flowering.’ Printed in formal Roman letters, as if chiseled there in stone, they reminded me of those renaissance paintings of naked zaftig women and muscular men trimmed with a few words such as ‘Obedience to God,’ laid out on the periphery to keep the religious authorities at bay.

         Maya told me that this was a reminder to her—she often became engrossed in some subject within the frame and forgot her original purpose. She painted them over when she had finished. “I think I started that habit when I was quite young. I got the idea from Mom.”

         I had often seen odd words at the edge of Julia’s manuscripts and never asked about them. I pursued it with Maya. “Why those words?”.

         “They rhyme. They stick together in the mind that way. It was her rule to look for the poetry in things. Not that it should necessarily be a good poem or a bad one, but to see how things connected to one another, so that they could be taken one by one and not overwhelm me. She used that same rule for all kinds of things. I remember one verse, one of my favorites, that she made up on the spot when we complained too loudly about missing the beach.”

         She recited it then, with a little dramatic flare:

         “It was a graysome day

         With rain too bored to fall;

         Fettered in fog amidst the trees,

         And on windows, blistered small.     

         The road was dark with wet,

         No puddles shone at all,

         And in the grass were diamonds

         Where sun collected small

         Spiders stepped out carefully

         Squirrels stayed home to bawl

         And when the worms

                  came out to breathe

         The robins bit them small.

         “When we were young, this became our motto. Elena would say, whenever she was frustrated by something she could not control, ‘But where’s the poetry in that!’ She even said it once when we all had the flu and Mom was sick and vomited on the floor and it made a good mess but it made us all laugh anyway because it was her and not us. Except for Mom, of course. Mom didn’t think it was very funny at the time. But we still say it today. When things don’t go right. When the mundane becomes petty. ’Where’s the poetry in that!’”

         The thing of it is, that Julia likes to talk.

         One evening, she just said it, out of the blue, after I had been hammering a little bit on her narrative about Donovan. In her usual way with some double entendre clearly present.

         “But where’s the poetry in that? He is not a stupid man. Uneducated, simple in his wants, but very perceptive and bright. He has, so far at least, relied too much on his native abilities and not enough on what he had learned … But I can’t give him any ideas. He has to have the ideas on his own. And he happens to live around a lot of people who exist on the received wisdom of the Bible without ever giving it a deeper thought. Being bright in such a world is difficult. It can get you killed! Received wisdom is tough on those who do not believe. And you know that he does not. He has seen the sham of it. This is not real Christianity that he faces. This is dogma.”

         She did not explain what she knew I already understood, but much of it was in the fabric of the book and I was not about to argue with her sense of a man that she knew far better than I ever could.

         I was about to go when she said, “You know, it would be far easier if he could be caught up in the Industrial Revolution. He would fight that. He would be a Luddite! He would see immediately how that—the machine monsters in the factories—how they would be stealing his humanity as much as plowing the fields for Rolf ever did. And he has no problems with the intrusion of logic. Logic was never a part of his upbringing. His narrative is his own. He has the Bible, and John Donne, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare. He understands the narrative.”

         I could hear then that she was onto a jag. Her words came faster.

         “Logic can be a wonderful tool—much like its cousin, math. A kind of shorthand. But there’s no poetry in it. All the subtlety, nuance and color of language, reduced to numbers. A kind of communication, but only of a very limited nature. Good for counting the herd, or the beans. Einstein said that logic might get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere…Storytelling is the making of analogies. Cause and effect…The slaves to logic would even have it be a philosophy. The slaves of logic want it to define morality, when it can do no such thing. Logic cannot define truth or beauty, though it might help us in our mortal re-creation of it…They frequently confuse logic and reason. But I think that may be intentional. Reason is by analogy. Logic is addition and subtraction. Those who think otherwise—and they are the majority today, to be sure, because it is the easier path for thinking that is laid down in the public schools by teachers who don’t want the bother of analogies—to much time taken—inefficient—Those are the sorts of people that you must live with now, and the ones my daughters must live with, and my grandchildren. The mind that evolved over the millennia within our brains was the result of analogy, not math. A brain reduced to math is a poor machine at best. Better to have beads on a string. Logic might lead us, through reasoning, to find a right or a wrong, but an axe is not a moral code. And the ones who believe it is, have no sense of humor about it. They sense the danger. One joke they play is to say they don’t accept ‘analogy.’ They arbitrarily reject analogy as false reasoning because it is not precisely and always the same—as if their precious logic has any physical appearance in real life, or in the lives of the ten thousand generations that came before. And then, they always offer their basic theorem: if ‘a’ equals ‘b’ and ‘c’ equals ‘b’ then ‘a’ equals ‘c’, which, not coincidently, is an analogy, crude as it is. But truth and beauty, beauty and truth, they can not be reached by the false deductions of addition and subtraction. Sherlock Holmes will forever be looking for his cocaine in that particular hay stack.”

         “You are mixing your metaphors. He might be looking for a needle if he was taking heroin.”

         “I am tired.”

         “Good night.”

         Jesse had already asked me if I had heard ‘The Lecture.’ I didn’t think so, though I was certain I had heard bits and pieces of it. Jesse warned me I would know it when I’d heard it. And I immediately thought this had been it! Or a large part of it, in any case. And I was quite happy to have finally gotten the most of it, at last. I was one of the few, other than those readers who would encounter it in ‘The Plow and Stars.’ But I was one of the few who had gotten it right from her lips, just as her children had first heard it.

         Jesse said, “Each of us got it in our turn. She seemed to always wait until we were twelve. Puberty seems to have been her mark. But all the pieces were there before, so when we finally heard it, we understood it…And then there was one of our neighbor’s children. Keith. The Jensens have one of the roosters you might be hearing in the mornings. They live on the other side of the trees there.” She gestured toward the wrinkle to the west. “His mother home schooled them too, and when she saw how well we did on the exams, she asked mom if she would take Keith for an hour a day. Well, by that time he was smitten with Elena anyway, so he was all in.”

         “What happened with Keith?”

         “Oh, he ran off to MIT on a scholarship. That was about ten minutes after Elena had rejected him the first time. As I understand it, he now teaches AI to robots, as well as a bunch of nerds, at the University of Pennsylvania. But he still writes her love letters.”

         And then, as if he had heard us talking, it was barely a week later that a rather pale fellow knocked on the door of the barn one day. Thin would be the correct descriptive, made worse by this height. He was a couple of inches taller than me. He opened the door hesitantly and then saw me there at the desk.

         “Hello. My name is Keith Jensen. I live down the road,” he gestured, almost as Jesse had, “well, used to live down the road there, anyway.”

         I opened the door for him, all the way, so to speak.

         “The one who used to write love letters to Elena.”

         That stood him up straight, like a sobering slap.

         “My reputation precedes. Yes. Still do, actually. But that’s another matter…No. Maybe that is the same matter…Anyway, I live down in Pennsylvania now. I was visiting my family and I just dropped in on the chance she would be here, but she’s not. Maya says she was here a couple of weeks ago.”

         He closed the door behind himself after he ducked through and came in to shake my hand.

         “What can I do for you?”

         He rocked for only a second on the balls of his feet. I was ready for a circuitous journey to the truth, but he went directly there.

         “She doesn’t answer my letters.”

         At least he got right to the point.

         “I can see how that might be a problem, but what can I do about that?”

         “Maya says you write.”

         There is a moment. It is an ‘electrical moment. You feel it as if an electrical impulse has traveled through you from your brain, down your spine, to your toes. It’s very odd when it happens to you unexpectedly. In the middle of a good movie, you may expect it. Or a good lecture. Or sometimes when you see someone you like for the first time. But this caught me off guard. I had iImmediate visions of Cyrano de Bergerac writing love letters to Roxane for the love befuddled Christian. The narrative wrote itself!

         “I do that. I write. That’s what I’m trying to do at the moment, as a matter of fact.’

         “I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you. But I thought I’d ask…actually, Maya suggested that I ask you when I was in the house.”

         “Maya has her own ideas about things. And Maya thinks I am a magician. She said as much when I told her she was a sorceress.”

         He nodded at that with a fleeting smile. “She always has. They all do. The girls I mean. Well. They’re all women now. And the one I’m interested in is Elena.”

         There is another chair there at my desk. It’s the one I use to stack stuff on. I pulled all that off and put it down on a bale of hay that was already holding up a few other odds and ends. He sat right down.

         “What can I do for you?”

         Now this wasn’t a kid. He was a man already used to dealing with the small problems of life. But he suddenly looked like a kid. Sheepish.

         “Maya says you’ve been talking to Elena. You might have some idea…about why she doesn’t answer me.”

         Now, it was simply up to me to wing it. I have no experience with personal counseling whatsoever. And I am totally ignorant about love, almost. But this was serious business. What did I actually know? I couldn’t run away from the thought.

         “I think she loves you.”

         This cleared his face of the pained expression it had and left him in a visible state of shock. A true gobsmack, I thought. The effect had me second guessing about my narrative.

         After a moment he said, “Did she say something?”

         “No. I don’t think she has ever mentioned you. It’s kind of a dog that didn’t bark, sort of thing. I hadn’t thought about it until just now. But I’ve heard about you from everyone else. From Julia. From Jesse. From Maya. But not Elena. That’s odd, don’t you think?”

         “She is stubborn.”

         “They all are. It’s in the genes, I think.”

         “So, you think she loves me just because she hasn’t even said a word about me?”

         “Yes.”

         I now wanted this to be the end of my counseling. Right then. The possible stupidity of the matter was appalling. The fewer words the better. Yet, I was somehow sure of what I said, though I didn’t know why, and I didn’t want to explain myself.

         He said, “I hadn’t thought about that. Then, you think I should write her more?”

         I shrugged at him. “I can’t say that. I don’t know. You have to be the judge of that.”

         He nodded, as if I had issued an order. “Yes. I think you’re right. I should write more.”
         He obviously had not heard my answer. I only knew that I wouldn’t want to be in his head right then, at that particular moment. I have been in such a state of bewilderment before, myself. Just recently, as a matter of fact. It’s disorienting. I was happy to be out of it.

         He rose and shook my hand again very earnestly and left.

         Julia says, “There is a tragedy to being a parent that is made out of the very fabric itself. Through their childhood, you dream of the day when you are able speak to them as individuals and you can express what it is you meant by this, or what it is you meant by that. But the day never comes. When they might be able to understand you, they don’t want to listen. They loudly refuse to. Whatever you say contradicts some idea they have about the matter, or you, I suppose. Their sense of finding their own independence makes what you are saying oppressive, no matter that it is not, or was not meant to be.”

         My father was a member of the Elton Street Fitness Club from the day it opened. That would have been in 1989. He had been out of the army for a year and thought he was getting flabby. But that was the year I was born, so I have wondered if there was something else to it. Like, simply getting out of the house. Elton Street was something of a social club at the time.

         Basically, the club was three boxing rings and a work-out area with showers at the back. They were so popular in the 80’s that you had to put your name in to get a time for one of the rings. They were that busy. But, in 31 years, I had never seen my father fight. Ever. And when I asked him to teach me—having heard that he was good enough to be asked to box in a local fundraising tournament, he said no. But he won the tournament and then, later, started paying for my fareir to go down to the Elton Street when I was fourteen years old.

         His advice to me was simple. ‘Be good enough to take care of yourself.’

         I asked him once, later on, why he wouldn’t teach me. He said, because he didn’t want to hit me. He never wanted me to have that memory. I believe this is because his father hit him. That’s the way that is.

         Sleep eludes. It hides as you seek it. Like a child’s game. What secret thought is behind that.

         I was writing earlier about a city on Mars called Elon. It is the largest of the settlements there and the temporary home of my protagonist. That there will one day be an Elon is as certain as the future of mankind itself, at least on Mars. Simply because we can imagine it to be. And if we cannot do at least that, we—mankind— will simply no longer be, at all

         But I worry about that threshold. Between time and Timbuktu then. Between my protagonist, and the character imagined by Kurt Vonneugut in his ‘chrono-synclastic infundibula’ where all truths fit together. I worry about being a ‘prime mover’ or just one of the moved. What are the words in the dictionary between ‘time’ and ‘Timbuktu?’ I will have to look those up…That’s the sort of stuff that keeps me awake.       

         Julia is right, of course. I say, of course, because I have said this so often now. But she was right to say that all novels were fantasy. A simple fact. Someday, someone will write novels about the Mars that was, that once had been, when men first walked there, and lived their lives there, and died there. And those novels will become as much imagination as my own conjuring of that place are now.

         The matter is that the memory of time is so unreal. Whatever time is, it briefly becomes what we imagine it to be, which may be what we want it to be, or not, before it becomes what we imagine it to have been. It was, however, never what it really was. We always leave out what doesn’t suit us. There is no tense that fits. And whatever Elon Musk dreams of Mars, that will be, and remembered to be, or to have been—that future perfect being someone else’s perfect past. In that way it will become as much of the past as its own future had been… Very confusing. 

         Much of the present of our lives here in New Hampshire is made up of our dreams, and those are colored now by the dreams of Neal and Molly Wright. And so too, by transference—transmogrification—the dreams of Olivia Morgan, who once imagined and played with, and around, and about, her life in New York City—those dreams that are now cut into the facets of ephemera in those boxes—those scraps that make only a thin ghost of the woman, out of the whole, but have never-the-less re-entered into the present of our lives—just as her genes do, that now take their part in the bodies of Julia, and Jesse and Maya and Elena. And now Alma. And their children will play with those scarves and pocket books and silken things and perhaps a son will wear a hat that Henry Morgan wore and think he looks somehow the part. And that will be the part that is remembered. And that will be the future of this place. And that son, in his hat, imagining what was, will then be remembered. And recalled, someday.

         This spiral of thought is of the sort that I imagine Kurt Vonnegut once had while waiting for a bus one winter’s day in Indianapolis. Maybe it was. Lying here on my six inches of foam with my nose close enough to the window glass to start a fog, I can see a light in the sky above the river, suspended alone there, as if a star had been caught between the invisible clouds that framed it at either side. The moon? Or is that just the bus? You know, Kurt Vonnegut might have frozen to death while waiting for that bus in his youth, but the damned thing finally came instead, and he wrote novels about what he imagined that death to be. And in that way, he did not die. And that is the poetry in that.

***

35. What is the conversation?

         One afternoon, I came in at four and Julia wasn’t there. Though the pages were stacked on the table, this was disconcerting. The truck wasn’t in the driveway either, but I thought I’d seen Maya leave with the baby earlier, so maybe Julia had gone for a walk. It made me briefly aware once more of how I had come to depend on the routine.

         I sat down and after a little fiddle, I started in copying what I had. And then suddenly there was a burst of noise from above. This was Julia, coming down the steep attic stairs too fast, and slipping. Evidently, she had been carrying something and the next thing I heard was cursing as she picked the things up that she had dropped. I knew she was okay by the way she was moving around, so I stayed where I was. My mother taught me to never interfere with a cursing woman.

         She had calmed down considerably by the time she reached the hallway, and then came through carrying a shoe box with the contents protruding. She did not look in my direction.

         “Sorry.” Was what she said, as she went into the living room and sat down in her chair. Quiet returned.

         I continued to work on copying, until I reached this sentence: Clare says, ‘Talking is all we have, all we remember. The thinking is a dream.’

         I knew what she was saying. I believed it! But I wasn’t happy with it. I kept at my job until it was clear Julia had moved beyond that bit of dialog to something else before I spoke up.

         “‘Talking is all we have, all we remember. The thinking is a dream.’…Is that it, then? Is that all you are going to say?”

         Her response came, after a delay of total silence for almost a minute. I waited. I knew she had heard me.

         Finally, “You are a pain in the ass.”

         That was definitive. In that I had heard Julia described that way herself, at least twice by two different people, I imagine she had learned that particular combination of words previously and taken them to heart, and I knew she was still in the aftermath of the cursing from her slip on the stairs, so I waited before I responded.

         “Yes. But is that all you’re going to say?”

         Finally, she says, “Funny you should ask. That’s the very problem I was trying to solve…I wondered off upstairs with it in my head about an hour ago and lost track of time…You’re right. It needs more. Or something else.”

         Quiet again returned. I began to worry about my dinner.

         This too was part of the routine. I was no better than one of Pavlov’s dogs.

         But she did finally rise, and come into the kitchen, deliberately put on her apron and started making hamburgers while she spoke to me.

         She said, “I found some pictures of the girls up in the attic. Pictures like that open up holes in time, I think. No, I’m positive. Time is just another of those things we don’t have a clue about. What we feel about it is like finding the tail of the proverbial elephant in the dark.”

         “Time? or the pictures?”

         “Don’t be a pain in the ass.”

         She wasn’t turned in my direction so I didn’t bother to look up.

         I ask again, “So, do you want Clare to say more? Should I hold off on that page?”

         I looked up then and saw that she was giving me one of her theatrical stares.

         I said, “You should have been an actress.”

         She said, “Maybe I would have been good enough for television.”

         That was something her mother used to say to her when she was a girl. I remembered the line from a previous reminisce.

         I said, “Your mother was right.”

         And then suddenly I had the awareness that we were talking a lot like a married couple might. Like my parents spoke to each other. I couldn’t help but laugh. And she started laughing as well and I knew it was at the same sort of thought.

         Suddenly she stopped. “That’s what Clare wants to say! That it’s not a dream. That thinking is a memory of all the things they’ve ever said to each other before…Give me the page!”

         The hamburgers were burn’t a little from the delay, but we finally ate. She had baked her own bread for a bun and anything tastes good on that.

         But later she brought the shoebox around from the living room before she poured her bourbon.

         “These are my memory holes. My holes in time.”

Maya had already come down then holding Alma and she said, “This is my little memory hole.”

         Julia took the baby from her.

         “It only works when you are holding them. Because then you’re in it.”

         But thinking about it amounted to more than all the things we’ve said before—at least that and more. And that might have worked for Clare. She was busy living and wasn’t engaged in an artificial intellectual exercise. But I was. And it was just the kind of thing I was thinking all the time, in a sort of chess game of narrative ideas. But for me it wasn’t just a game. It seemed to me to be more important than anything else I could do. And I was not alone. Julia was ahead of me but on the same track.

         The next day I mentioned this to her—not in passing but very deliberately when she had come out to take her walk at noon. I was waiting for her, in ambush, sitting on the tailgate of her truck. She came out with Alma in her carrier sack in front of her. At least Alma gave me a smile. But it was almost as if Julia expected me to be there. And then I was immediately thinking about married couples again.

         She immediately says, “The real problem is that we don’t know what thinking is. They can chart it and graph it and even picture it now on oscilloscopes, or whatever it is they use on computers these days, but they can’t figure it out. It’s not just a lot of 0’s and 1’s. Logic is a math for logic, but nothing more. All this AI business is a joke because they’re trying to create thinking without knowing what they are doing. Like smashing atoms without a clue about the possible result.”

         Exactly! I had been up half the night with that exact thought and she had said it almost word for word. They were doing it without a clue. Now they were playing with viruses without enough fear for the unknown consequences to stop themselves.

         One of the other thoughts I had was about all the poor victims of ‘insane’ asylums whose lives had been destroyed by the foolish tinkering of psychoanalysis, and their lobotomies, and drug therapies. The psychologists had no idea what they were dealing with, no real understanding of what thinking was—while they played with human beings like lab animals, looking for numbers where people should be.

         I said, “Shades of Mary Shelley.”

         I actually said that. I was beginning to talk like Julia as well.

         She sighed loudly, “A brilliant fellow like Iain McGilchrist could describe it, chart it, I suppose, might even predict it, but what ‘it’ is, is still a mystery. Like the missing planet in our solar system. What’s the real influence of the right side of the brain on our behavior? Or the left? The exact same graphable ingredients that make a psychopath, make a genius—but one will kill and the other create. William James Sidis could reimagine the universe as a teenager and then collapse into himself and end up collecting trolley tickets as an adult…This was not just a problem of exceptions. This is actually the rule. As a society, we have created guidelines for thought that damage everyone—without any idea of what we are doing…One religion here and another cult there, Critias in Athens or Cotton Mather in Salem. Throughout history, we’ve done it. And the question becomes, ‘why.’ To what end? Control? In order to have a civil society? By what standard? At times it was apparently okay to cut the hearts out of children to appease a weather god in some societies, or okay to rape women in others. And burning witches seems like almost as much fun as cutting off the heads of anyone that disagreed. Insanity always seems to lurk behind all this. But then, when it’s right before us, we deny it’s there.”

         She had lost me. This was not productive thinking. She knows this. It is the edge of a cliff that she has stood on before me.

         But Alma is quite pleased with her ideas. She is pleased to be spoken to.

         Julia says, “Right here, right now, we have made some improvement. This is a better place. Whatever our faults are, we are not cutting off the heads of anyone who disagrees. I think all of this living is what we are about. What we are supposed to be doing. We may not be satisfied with it, but at least it’s better. I know we’re only a century and a half away here from legally enslaving other human beings, but this moment is an improvement. That’s clearly so. Let’s keep moving in this direction. I haven’t written about the Irish slaves in America because it would only be a rehash of the same stupidity that enslaved Indians, or Africans, but maybe I should think about that again. What I have written about is how that stupidity was overcome. And not just how we talked about it. How we did it. What we did. But I’ve never understood how they thought.”

         Julia is a fast walker. She takes it seriously. She has a purpose. It is her deliberate exercise. And when she talks, she matches her words. But I am a saunterer. I wander. I wonder about this or that. I breakaway from her after a half a mile or so, when she is still on the road. She will be headed to the river soon, and I know that she is taking Alma with her now so that Maya can have a little time to herself, but I am having other thoughts.

***

36. A man is not a piano key

         I don’t like New York. I find it oppressive. Brooklyn only slightly better. I grew up around Boston, which is not a good comparison, but at least I always had the sense there of being able to flee the city and find some semblance of country in less than an hour. With New York, in less than an hour, you would still be in New York.

         The sense of it is that any one human being there is unimportant. And if you add up all those unimportant people, what did you have then? The math was simple enough. And that was the real problem. People being reduced to math.

         One of my favorite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. But my favorite book of his, Notes From the Underground, is a difficult book to like. It doesn’t have the dramatics of Crime and Punishment or the scope of The Brothers Karamozov, I grant you. But I have thought that it is more understandable than either of those.

         In one translation, he explains there, “The whole work of man consists in proving to himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! … Man was not made to be a slave to pleasure He was made for struggle and virtue. Ironically, trials and tribulations make life meaningful…And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point.”

         I have an immediate empathy with this ungrateful wretch.

         But he also says, “you know there is no such thing as choice in reality, say what you will…Science has succeeded in so far analyzing man that we know already that choice and what is called freedom of will,” is not real.

         This is Dostoyevsky too, of course, so it needs to be paid attention to. He does not explain the contradiction of his conclusion that there is no free will. He says, “ if there really is someday discovered a formula for all our desires and caprices—that is, an explanation of what they depend upon, by what laws they arise, how they develop, what they are aiming at in one case and in another and so on, that is a real mathematical formula—then, most likely, man will at once cease to feel desire, indeed, he will be certain to. For who would want to choose by rule? Besides, he will at once be transformed from a human being into an organ-stop or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice, if not a stop in an organ?”

         People don’t play organs so much anymore, so I prefer the translation to ‘piano key.’ It strikes a more familiar note, you could say.

         “…Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse… may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key!”

         Now, frankly, after reading this in high school, it seemed to me that it summed up everything there was to say. For a brief time, I thought my chance to be a writer was lost. Why bother? The center of all that we are had been uncovered! We are not independent. We are simply perverse. It had been revealed! But then my own sense of perversity came in to play. It was clear enough then that no one else was listening, anyway. Or, at least too few. My reason to write was to deny that theorem. And to repeat this message in as many ways as I could. And then, of course, I met Julia.

         That is not to say that Dostoyevsky was wrong and that Julia is right, but that they could both be correct in the same universe! That is the organic whole of it! Amidst that endless quiet of inorganic space, and the dead forces of math and physics that determine the orbits, there is a noise made for its own purpose. The sounds of life there would be disturbing.       

         Julia’s sense that it is the common everyday man who is at the center of civilization does not conflict with the mad Russian at all. It is simply the larger picture. Like one of Maya’s paintings. The darkness encroaches, but the center holds.

         Man is not a piano key! Each one is his own, “And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”

That is the plot of a million novels! But that is not perversity. That is the very aspect of our nature that has sustained us and set us apart. How could we assume otherwise. The splendid forces of inorganic space to do not stand in awe at the night sky. The beauty of a sunset or a rainbow or a woman does not capture the eye of the stone.

         Julia had said, “Success can only be achieved by hard work. I’m not as strict on that as Dostoyevsky was. I guess, I’ve had it too easy. He believed man was made for struggle and the trials and tribulations of life make it meaningful. But I do think that success is only found in the mastery of mistakes. Making mistakes is the learning…That is the importance of anticipation found in learning that is crucial…Not just the outcome, but the process…Hedonism is a death trap for an individual human being as well as the society as a while.”

         And that too, was what I believed!

         McGilchrist might define all this in clinical terms and show the influences of the left brain on the right or visa versa. Indeed, that might be the way it works itself out. But it was a useless diagram to me. It was like attempting a logical definition of love. It was like a verbal description of sex. And that was not the matter that was in my head. What was in my head was an admixture. It was all the things I had ever done or seen or heard, or said, or wanted to say—in fact, even thought to say. And it was all that I had ever read. All at once! It was a conversation with others, or just with myself. There was no calculation of how—the way there might be, after the fact. Detective Columbo was not going to be around to figure it out, anyway. It was my subjective. It was just what I did, when I did it, and the why was what I thought it should be. My excuse for being. And that was not a lie. But for me, it was a reason to understand.

         Early one afternoon the day darkened and it suddenly began to rain and as I stared out of my little window, from the desk into the fields, where the trees of the wrinkle dissolved into ghosts, I heard a voice. I suppose for some this might be a religious experience, especially given the nature of the thoughts I was having, but for me it was a puzzle. I investigated. And just as I opened the small door, I saw Julia going back inside the house. I suppose she had shortened her noonday walk, but the voice I had heard was not a woman’s. The lightning was in full play and the drops were thick but I looked further around the corner of the barn outside and found a figure I recognized before I saw his face, sitting beneath the overhang at the end, on a stool by the chicken yard, his white beard poking out from the hood on his rain slicker in a perpendicular fashion because of the way the slicker was buttoned up.

         “Hello Mr. Copple.”

         He gave me only a quick turn of the head. He said, “Busy around here! Julia just asked me if I wanted to come inside for a cup of coffee. I’m fine. I’m dry. Tractor’s wet.”

         The smaller tractor he used for cutting closer to Julia’s house was sitting there by the chicken yard. The chickens had come in from the yard and were all huddled inside the coop, popping their heads out with a comical frequency. I could hear them murmuring their discontent.

         I said, “It’s exciting when it rains like this.”

         He said, “It’s a pain in the ass, is what it is. I can’t finish up. I’ll have to go home and wait for tomorrow. I was just waiting for the lightening to let up. I had an ol’ buddy of mine once get knocked clear off his tractor and into a ditch by lightening. They didn’t find him right off. That tractor just idled away until it was out of gas.”

         I asked before I could stop myself. “It killed him?”

         “Yeah. He did like laying around in ditches. When he was a drunk. But that killed him.”

         I wanted to talk. The morning had been unproductive for me.

         “What do you usually you do in bad weather?”

         He looked quizzically at me and then down at himself.

         “You can see an example of that right before your eyes.”

         “Sure. But what else do you do?”

         He pulled a cigarette out of a crevice in his slicker and lit it up with a zippo. He offered the pack at me but I shook my head.

         “I fix the damn tractors. They’re all getting old. Like me.”

         He was playing hard to get

         “Okay. But that’s not all. You have to fix the water pump and sharpen your saws and all the rest. But what else? What do you do in your spare time?”

         “I haven’t had much spare time in the last fifty years. I’m married.”

         I stayed with it.

         “Okay. So, you’re out there sitting on your tractor for hours at a time cutting grass. What do you think about?”

         He laughed at my persistence.

         “A tractor makes a lot of sounds. You can tell how it’s running that way.”

         “Yeah. And what about the price of rice in China.”

         “I don’t sell rice or I would…What do I think about? Why, I was thinking about you just the other day.”

         Now, this way of turning the table seemed to be a common trait among the neighbors.

         “What did you think?”

         He laughed again.

         He said, “Did you ever read that Pottle book about James Boswell?”

         Now, I knew he was up to no good.

         “Pottle wrote a dozen books about James Boswell.”

         “Yeah. I read’em all. Winters can be long. I took a course over at the University on Boswell. Got to know him quite well.”

         “Which book did you mean?” He did not answer quickly, but now that he had me on the hook, I imagined that he was a pretty good fisherman. I added, “Have you ever gone fishing with Julia.”

         “I have. She catches all the fish and I watch.”

         “Yeah. So, what book?”

         He grinned at me.

         “When I first saw you over here back in March, I said to Mandy, he’s there for one of the girls. He can smell’em. The boys in the neighborhood used to come prowling around here all the time when the girls were home. I had two girls of my own, you know. You need a stick to keep’em off.” One hand waved toward the north. “Look at them trolls.”

         All this while the lightening was playing in the dark gray mass across the river and briefly illuminating the lowering clouds there into moving shapes, and dazzled off the grass.

         “I don’t think they are coming this way.”

         “No…The trolls have their own aims…But I saw you here back in March and for a moment—just a moment—I thought you might be here for Julia, but Mandy hit me upside of the head and set me straight. And I knew she was right. The smell of ther girls is all about the place.”

         Mandy had been dead for several years. I did not try to correct him.

         “I just came to help Julia with her book.”

         “Sure, you did. Honest mistake…But you were a goner the minute you stepped a foot into that house.”

         I would have to consider that later on too.

         “Is this the sort of thing you think about when you are up on the tractor?”
         “Yeah.”

         “What about Boswell?”

         “Well, according to Mr. Pottle there, Boswell realized that if he kept following his nose, being a man for such smells, he was going to end up in a ditch, so he decided he needed a wife.”

         I had to smile at the progress of his thought.

         “I don’t drink…Much. And I was very happy living in my van in the campground.”

         “Sure, you were. But you can’t eat hotdogs every night.”

         And he had been talking enough to Julia to know more than I did. So, despite Mr. Copple’s best effort, my mind was back with Dostoyevsky.

         I say, “So, you believe we are not the masters of our own ship. Our destiny is sealed by greater forces?
         “No. I wouldn’t say that. But I’d say, that’s the size of the ground you have to cover. That’s the job. I would say, we are who we want to be. Everyone has to deal with the same set of facts. You choose your own on the way.”

         I was confused. Hadn’t he just alluded to my being a pawn of my sense of smell, and my sexual urges? No it was philosophy.

         “I thought you were saying I couldn’t help myself being here.”

         “No. You are here because you want to be, and Julia wants you to be. And I imagine she has her own motives, but my guess is that you saw something here that caught your eye as well as your imagination. Not just your nose. Man has a whole lot of senses to deal with. There’s no mathematical formula to it. A lot more moving parts than a tractor, though…So, I do sit up there on my little seat—my throne Mandy used to call it—and contemplate the nature of man, like your Mr. Emerson, and wonder what it’s all about. But I can’t predict it. Any more than I can predict which of Julia’s daughters has caught your eye…Mandy would have had a guess, but she’s not telling. That way she could say she was right, but after the fact.”

         There were many forces in nature. Including Mr. Copple. I could not contend with them all. But at least, I was not a piano key.

***

37. Backwards science

         When Donovan ended up on the ship to America instead of Australia, I foolishly said, “That feels like deus ex machina.”

         She is having none of it. Her patience was suddenly thin—for whatever reason.

         “That’s just a game! What my high school physics teacher used to call ‘backwards science.’ Fortunately, for us all—but perhaps not so much for those who dearly want there to be a ‘matrix,’ because their own lives feel pointless—God hasn’t cheated us of our own individual confrontations with reality. All identifications of a ‘simulation’ in the human quest are conveniently after the fact, not before. Given the uncountable quantity of possible sensory experience, the sheershear numbers, there will be ‘coincidences,’ but selecting motifs from those that we find along the way for some pattern is only an attempt at creature comfort and does not prove some mysterious intention, nor a larger cosmic game.”

         She had warmed quickly to her subject, as they used to say.

         “We each face the same reality—not a construct of our individual consciousness. Unless we want to cancel the laws of physics as well…Our success as individuals is dependent on our ability to manipulate or control the very same reality that spawned our neighbor, our fathers and mothers, and all of those generations who came before us. The very fact that billions of our species have dealt with the same reality, and found their way to some level of success in their lives, and passed some portion of that acquired knowledge on to us, does not say that they cheated reality through some conjured game. But it does credit them with the intelligence of being able to recognize what works, and remember it, and the brilliance of finding ways to pass that knowledge on…All hail the cave painting, the illuminated manuscript, the printing press and the internet, but not the matrix. That Hollywood confection is a bit of ‘backwards science’ that fills the void for those who have weak gods or no God at all.”

         She was not going to get away on that ship so easily.

         “So why did he end up on the one ship instead of the other?.”

         She shrugged at me. “Oh. Well. I suppose that was just a little manipulation on my part. I had to keep the story going.” But there was a smile at her lips. “And the other ship was full. More than full. I told you that when the Captain complained earlier about the supply of biscuit. I didn’t have to tell you that there was still room on the America bound ship, did I?”

         Earlier, with Alma crying, and some chaos because of diapers, or the lack thereof, the baby was set in my lap because Julia was still cooking and Maya had to go to the store. The baby was satisfied with this solution primarily because I had her wrapped in a large bath towel against further leakage and she got to watch her grandmother doing her thing while orating in animated fashion.

         “Anyone who says they do not have time for fiction has a shrunken imagination. They have removed poetry from their lives. By turning their backs on the play, they have lost their childhood. By ignoring the novel, they deny mythology. To disregard the simple tale is to forget the human experience. Dwelling only in the present is a pale sort of life to live.”

         Julia survey her audience a moment and then spoke directly to Alma.

         “To conjure a future is, of course, a fantasy and in the very nature of fiction. To pretend that all that matters is what you alone can perceive is, in and of itself, a falsehood. We all live in the lives of others. The lie of the’ realist’ is in their hubris and ignorance. By saying they have no time for fiction, they want to cut off the hand of God.”

         Alma was quite pleased with the idea when her grandmother raised a shiny broad bladed knife.

         I put a few words in edgewise for sport.

         “Too many of the so-called ‘fantasy’ stories that I’ve read are about paper mache characters, where the imagined depth is to reverse the roles of men and women…I often wonder if what I’m reading under the rubric of fantasy is really just simple biological ignorance.”

         Julia likes this, “Just so. Carlo Cipolla wrote an essay called ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.’ He was obviously having a great deal of fun writing it. The subject is a rich target. And though I could argue with some his presentations, or direction here or there, I was immediately taken by the fact that I fit several of the categories myself, all too well. You have to be careful.”

         I was already aware of the author because Julia had brought his name up more than once concerning Medieval economy. A book devoted to the laws of stupidity sounded like it might be interesting. Alma concurred. She cooed.

         “Is that what governs us then? Stupidity?.”

         “Directly, or indirectly, yes! Of course. We couldn’t live without it! Can you imagine someone who thinks they’re smart enough to tell the rest of us how to live? Even with the best of intentions, how can they imagine they would know enough? How much milk should we produce? How much should we drink every day? How should we process it? How should we care for the cows? Every question has more questions attached, but they’re going to tell us how much we should produce and how much it will cost. They’re insane as well as stupid. Mr. Copple told me why he gave up on keeping dairy cows. There was a new law every week. His family had dairy cows on that land for three generations, from the time that Neal Wright was still building his chairs and tables. But Frank had to give it up or else shoot someone over in Concord.”

         So later, with her bourbon in hand, I pursued the god in the machine.

         “So, you are telling me there wasn’t enough biscuit on the Australia ship, so your story turns on a mundane detail.”

         She shakes her head at me.

         “Worse! Remember, the laws of stupidity are always in force. The Captain of the Australia ship foolishly leaves the stocking of provisions to the First Mate. The First Mate is a secret drunkard because his wife and a child died of consumption while he was away previously. He does not purchase the provisions he should. The America bound ship had suffered poor provisions on its previous turn because of corruption—simple theft—and the new First Mate there buys more than he needs to provide for that. And that Captain, doing his job this time, sees this excess and after getting pissed at the First Mate for wasting his money, takes on half a dozen more indentures and sticks them in the First Mate’s quarters which are all of 5’ x 7’, to cover the extra expense. Life is a joy. But Donovan gets to America.”

         “Stupidity reigns! The matrix is simply stupid!”

         “Almost! Not quite! Remember. It all comes down to love. It’s love that conquers all. Clare set it all in motion.”

         “How so?”

         “She has sacrificed herself by fooling around with Rolfe to get the money to give to Donovan. This is ultimately all her doing!”

         I liked the story. I wasn’t questioning that. I couldn’t really pursue it any further. So, I said, “Where did you come up with all this?”

         She knew what I meant.

         She said, “I will tell you where that story came from. I witnessed it.”

         “Was this when you were already time traveling?.”

         “No…” I had called her a ‘time traveler’ several times for going back into the past, whenever she made a remark about my extrapolations for the future. “It was before that. I had a girl friend who was at school with me. She was a good kid. Smart. And we used to go on double dates and so I also got to know her boyfriend. They had pretty much grown up together. And they had been love-birds even before school, and I was still playing the field. I rarely dated the same guy twice in those days because the expectations if you went out a second time with the same guy were clear. In our sophomore year, her boyfriend, who was spending too much time with her and not enough on the ROTC commitment that was paying the college bills, lost his scholarship. He enlisted then so that he would not have any debts left, but also because he was just that type. True blue. He was generally a good guy. But before he was assigned, they got married.”

         “I’m waiting for the connection.”

         “It’s coming…This guy ended up overseas. Whatever he was up to, he was good at it. He used to grab flights back to the Sstates on transport planes because he worked on those at an airbase in Turkey. And then, eventually, he came home again. And he went back to school. My girlfriend and I had already graduated by then, of course.”

         “I can see this coming. But what does it have to do with ‘The Plow and Stars’?

         “What do you see coming?”

         I really didn’t see a thing. I got smart. “He’s gay.”

         “Not likely. I’ll testify to that. The whole time we were double dating he was trying to work a way to get me into the sack too. But that was a lot of effort for nothing.”

         “You said they were lovebirds.
         “They were. And to the best of my knowledge, they are still happily married to this day.”

         “So, where’s the connection?”

         “If you would be quiet, I’ll tell you.”

         I objected, “You set a bad example on that score. You’re always asking questions.”

         “You’re right. So, keep asking questions. I deserve it…But the connection is this. By the time he came home for good, she had a kid.”

         “How does that connect?”

         “It wasn’t his kid.”

         I was a little lost. “And that was what you had in mind at the start of The Plow and Stars?”

         “Yes and no. A little more. I knew who the father was! He had gone on one of our double dates. I didn’t date him twice, but he did not give up on her when she got married.”

         Was that it then? The love birds were both being unfaithful?”

         “No. Not exactly. She knew I knew who the father was. She broke up our friendship over that. She was afraid I would say something or use it against her somehow. And Bob, her husband, he was happy about that too. He was afraid I would tell her that he had been hitting on me. And Cheryl never told him it wasn’t his baby. He probably doesn’t know to this day. The kid must be in his thirties now.”

         “Well, I’m still not sure I understand how all that double dealing inspired you.”

         Her voice had an edge to it now. “You will. That will be pretty clear soon enough.”

         But she wasn’t done with me.

         “You know, I was thinking the other day, what are they going to do on Mars when they’re confronted with gene editing? … More to the point, when they are confronted with designer humans who’ve been altered, the way a machine is configured, to do a particular job. The ‘comprachicos’ of the twenty-first century?”

         “The what?”

         “Victor Hugo’s nightmare in The Man Who Laughs. The remanufactured humans. The ‘comprachicos.’ They will undoubtedly be educated with artificial intelligence, whatever that is. The physical reality is that they will be sub-human. A’ la, Aldous Huxley. And without social norms, but they will be out there. No police force will be able to monitor it all. Computers are expensive. A human being can be manufactured by a few moments of gratification. They will be raised to be slaves. They will be used for what a normal human being would refuse to do…Does your Mars have a plan to deal with that?…You know I just read that some human monster has grown a human hand in the belly of a mouse—in a lab. He actually cut off the portion of the gene sequence for a human hand from a unborn child and grew it in the belly of a mouse…I was just wondering, what laws are going to apply to them? Will they be held responsible for only doing what they have been designed to do?”

         This was unfair, but I deserved it. I should not have been poking at the bear.

***

38. Ecclesiastes again

         At least I had continued to write ‘Elysium Mons. This was not a given. There were interruptions. Too many of those. But my game then became, to use some of those very same disturbances in my story. To write them into the story instead of just trying to ignore them. It made it easier to continue. My hero, as my heroes often were, was just some better version of myself. I even had him fall in love, despite misgivings. Such things happen. Even to a monk on Mars.

         But I knew I was still writing much of the same story I had written before, under a new pretense. My Mars was no more or less disguised than Tolkien’s Middle Earth is from the Earth we know today. We still have our dragons. The spiro on Mars were just as fierce. I did not believe that artificial intelligence was going to somehow purify itself and somehow eliminate or overcome the faults of its maker, much less take away the same motivations that so often destroy us here. The robots were no smarter than we could be, even if they held more data. The data would not tell them what was true, only what was frequent. The point was not to pretend anything else, but to deal with the things we knew to be.

         We have tens of thousands of years of human history in the rubble beneath our feet. We are haunted by billions of souls. The idea of starting new, on Mars, was simply a way of avoiding the ghosts of that past. I admitted that from the start. The protagonist says as much. I simply wanted to imagine an answer to a question: what do we do now? I didn’t want to reimagine the past. I wanted to catch a glimpse of the future.

         My pursuit of human ignorance had been successful. I had encountered plenty of it. And with it, the hubris of science by the numbers.

         But suddenly, it was done. Ben had reduced the spiro to tungstean and dust. The group mind of the gen had retreated to its seams and crevices. Cera was triumphant over her pursuers. She might now see Ben for who he really was, and not just another predator. And Ben could be certain that she was not a fabrication of the gen meant only to seduce him.

         I had editing to do, but I would have to think about Julia’s ‘comprachicos,’ at another time. I had never even heard of them until yesterday. Perhaps that might fit in another Mars novel.

         When I finish something, what I want to do in my moment of euphoria is to share it…This is always a mistake. The manuscript is almost certainly rife and riven with the consequences of my own stupidity. But continuing to work on it suddenly reaches a point of psychic exhaustion. Tinkering doesn’t make it better. I can put it away for a few months and I will likely see new flaws in the writing that I’d missed before, but just as likely I’ll find new things to say, and that process can go on forever, or until the EMP finally wipes my artificial memory away, and I have to start again from scratch, so to speak, quill in hand.

         I also knew that there was only one other person that I wanted to read it.

         It wasn’t as if I believed she would like it. I suspected she wouldn’t.

         So, I printed it out. It took the last of the ink in one cartridge and a deal of the ink in another. It was most of a ream of paper. Three hundred and sixty-four pages. Eighty-one thousand words. I heard Julia’s voice in my head and saw her frown again. That was another problem of technology. Too much information. I envied her ability to shut that sort of data out of her mind.

 However, I wrote in pen across the top margin, ‘Yes! We have no comprachicos. Maybe the next one.’

         Then I waited until our regular day was done to take it out of the grocery bag. She had eyed that bag several times after I came in but said nothing. I just put it there on the kitchen table when Maya was already gone upstairs with the baby, and said, “This is for you, if you get a chance. You don’t have to read it. I’d like you to, but I understand.”

         She already had her bourbon in hand and didn’t say a word. I think I surprised her. At least there was that.

         And then she read it in one night. She’s not a speed reader, so it must be that she never slept. But I could see that she wasn’t happy as soon as I came in the door the next afternoon. She was standing by the counter and my manuscript was on the table where her own pages would normally be.

         And I was suddenly angry.

         This reaction was inexplicable. It was irrational. What did I expect?

         “What do you think? You don’t like my ‘science fiction’ future. I know that. You’d rather live in the past. But this is where the past has got us. I think. We’re there now…Or we’re here. But we’ve arrived. Not just in this green corner of paradise. In this world! Do we just go on with the slaughter? We can destroy ourselves now. Is that the end? Is that the only cycle?”

         She appeared subdued. Perhaps by the lack of sleep. She had her coffee in hand now, instead of her bourbon. Instead of the enclosure of dark beyond the windows, cloud blinkered sunlight played on and off any surface it could find.

         She finally said, “There’s an old saying, too often ignored as old things often are, that there is nothing new under the sun. The Bible says it in Ecclesiastes. ‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.’

         She looked at me directly so that I would pay better attention. “Each of us can really only see what’s in front of us. Everything else is imagined. I think you fully understand all that. You know that’s especially true of what we see on television, or in the movies, or on the internet. All of that is only what someone else imagined, and we either adopt it as our own, or not. But how much of it is true, is another problem. Hell, how much of what we see with our own eyes, or hear with our own ears, or feel with our own touch, is actual or imagined?” She shrugged. “That problem alone can keep us quite busy without even considering what we encounter through any artificial means such as the internet. And any of those misperceptions are then compounded all the more by our understanding and misunderstandings of words. But, without words, we can comprehend nothing—we are just biological matter and quickly become food for the worms.

         She had been standing at the counter when I came in, but she sat then and looked up at me where I first stood after coming in the door. I hadn’t moved. I felt rooted there to the floor.

         She said, “Not being particularly brave, but wanting more, I settled early on into that problematic and fantastic realm of words, rather than face the mundane usage, like everyone else. I ran away.”

“From what?”

“My actions—making use of the words I found to be useful, could be dangerous and had to be done with deliberation—to be considered in advance with as many other words as possible for cover. For camouflage, perhaps—like a forest for the trees. A novel, perhaps, when the poetry failed me. That’s the reason I am even yet in awe of a Yeats, or a Shakespeare—their weapon is of a unique caliber. They make love to me with words until I am exhausted…I enjoy reading the words of mere geniuses, even more than making love. Their level of perception is so much higher than my own. They have climbed mountains I will never climb, so I listened and tried to catch a glimpse of what they could see from there from above. They are a sort of Genii. Of that higher order that’s otherwise only found in mythology…And as some jinni might be, I imagined that they had been summoned by someone to help us find our way…But that is another matter.”

         She waved a hand at the air to bat away a thought and took a breath.

         I said, “Does this mean you liked it?”

         She closed her eyes on that and started in again, “Technology, and the use of machines, happens to be our current thing. I understand that, and that it’s the means by which we interpret our universe today. But, it’s not the only way. There have been such jinn as Shakespeare before, interpreting the universe of man through other means. In that particular age alone there was also Bernini, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and da Vinci. The universe they saw, and made their fellows aware of, transported the mind of man from a world of mud and stone all the way to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

         I say, “I’ve told you before, I’m not assuming I’m right. I’m just trying to ask the right questions.”

         She shakes her head at me again. “But genius does not come unbidden, nor is it unburdened. The genie remains in the bottle unless it’s summoned. Our age must ask for this. If we deny the chance to reach for the stars and try to turn back instead to the safety of some imagined past, which is just as unreal now as any chance to walk on Mars might be, we will have to live with the consequence for generations. That was never my aim.”

         “What can I do to make it better?. What didn’t I ask for?”

But she is on a jag now. It’s like a train. It doesn’t stop easily.

“I don’t believe that our past, or our behavior then, offers any new hope for my children or their children’s children. That’s simply who we were, and are, and what we’ve done. And I wanted to know what that was, at least. If we lose that, we’ll just have to do it all over again. But we must still look for genius to save us from our worst mistakes while we bicker over the words to define it. Allowing for the limits of our perception, and the limits of the words we use to understand that awareness, and remembering that ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ does not deny innovation. That’s in the mix as well. That’s part of it. It’s a recognition of the fact that we did not see that truth before. We didn’t see it coming, after all. It’s still to be discovered. That we never described the molecular composition of a particular matter before, does not mean it didn’t exist. Just that we had not yet found the words to describe it. It is an acceptance of genius as part of our inheritance.”

         She nodded at me, and tapped the manuscript on the table with her fingers, “I do suspect the future might very likely be a reflection of the past. But Mars has always been under the same sun. Technology may be ingenious, but the laws of physics have not been altered to suit anyone. We must still summon the future. I simply believe the future is not what we think it is. It’s only what you want it to be.”

         She smiled. Not a big smile, but enough, “We must still summon the future. If this book is what you want it to be, so be it…It’s not so bad. At least there is room in it for my grandchildren…and you can put the comprachicos in the next one.”

***

39. Being Jumpy

         On one of her visits, with her boys rampaging about that small house on a rainy day, Jesse told me a story.

         “Once, when I was twelve, we lived for a while in Ireland. Mom was doing research, or so she told everyone. Actually, she was just trying to get away from Dad. They were divorced then but he wouldn’t leave her alone. He would come up here to the farm and he wouldn’t leave. She even called the sheriff on him once…Did you know they had sheriffs up here in New Hampshire? They do. And this was a fellow who had seen it all and was unsurprised by anything. I think mom called him ‘stolid.’ Mr. Stolid, she said. I just remember him as bald. In any case he stood right there in the yard and listened to Mom and then just told Dad to leave and he did. You don’t need the details. Just that Mom had her reasons to take us to Ireland. Mom gave all the chickens away to a family down the road and she asked the family where Packer had been born if they would look after him again for awhile—I don’t know how much that must have cost—and we just went. I think it all happened in less than a month. When you are a kid, that is cataclysmic.

         “A travel agent in Boston found us a cottage near Sligo. Mom loves Yeats so that was an easy choice. But the agent didn’t even have a picture. It had just come available and been placed for rent and the note said: ‘needs work’. Whatever that meant, we didn’t know. But the key to it for mom was that it had been built in 1740. That would be about the time of the story she was writing, so that was enough. Four rooms, with indoor plumbing on the inside wall, a kitchen and a shed. And a well. And a hand pump on the well. Mom read it all out-loud to us a dozen times. She was thrilled. We were devastated. There was gnashing of teeth and wailing as only young girls can do. We loved the farm here. We loved the chickens. Going to Ireland was incomprehensible. But we were children and still very adaptable. For us, the key was that we would be coming back. We were not moving again as we did from New York. We were just going on ‘vacation.’ Which was absurd, of course, because we already thought everyday here was a vacation.

         “We flew, and that was a thrill too. And then Mom rented a car…The Cottage was on a small road to Lough Gill that local fishermen used and Mom talked to them every day. That’s the way she does her research. She gave them tea. They loved her. She was the ‘American Lady.’  There wasn’t much land with the cottage but there were farms on both sides. Mom had rented the car but once we were there, we didn’t need it much. Sligo is an ugly little town. At least for a kid. And it smells. Very picturesque from some angles, I suppose. It looks like something in the Midwest with the mismatch of things from different periods. I suppose that’s the way it is in all ports.…Once we were in a bookshop there on one of the few sunny days and the shop owner had the door open for the fresh air and there was nothing fresh about it. But the countryside around there is beautiful. And once our books arrived from home, and we could study again, we had plenty to do. All she wanted was a few hours in the morning to do her own work and the rest of the day was ours. Mom took us to a ‘Children’s theater’ once and it was pretty lame, so she took us to a regular theatre when they put on something she thought we could deal with. What I remember is there was a great deal of spitting and our seats were very close. Irish actors are very emphatic.

         “We went out for walks whenever it was sunny and sometimes when it wasn’t. It drizzles a lot there…. There was a farmer’s market near the main road. A wonderful place of connected sheds and incredible smells. The vegetables were ridiculously large. Not like a supermarket…But now I’ll tell you why I thought you’d be interested.

         Jesse looked to make sure of her mother who had gone out to feed the chickens. And then she lowered her voice. Had I been one of her boys, I would have immediately assumed something was being said that I should want to hear, but they were noisily busy upstairs.

         “You once said that mom is very seductive. I understand that. She has her way. And I appreciate your not taking advantage of that. I think most guys would. Not that she wouldn’t knock your head off if she thought you were hitting on her. Everything has to be on her own terms…I’ll tell you, that’s what drove Dad away…I think grandmother was like that too. And Felix even says that about me. But I don’t think I’m so bad. Felix is just a baby.

         “Anyway. There was this farmer. When we were living in Ireland. A big burley fellow. He wore a little cap and always smelled of manure. Nearly always. But I remember once, he didn’t. He came to talk with mom—but that’s another story. What I wanted to tell you about was the time we were out on a picnic. Not far from the cottage. But the sun came out for the first time in days and mom didn’t want to miss the chance. And this farmer was out on his tractor cutting the hay. Just like Mr. Copple does here.

         “We were all under this little tree, a pear tree I believe, and we were all telling stories. Mom always insisted we tell stories. Make them up on the spot, if we had to. It was one of her things. That’s her whole narrative idea. You’ve heard about that. She said it was the stories that made a people and a culture. It wasn’t the blood. And Elena was telling us about her three-legged dog, Jumpy. He was a regular go-to subject for her. She could tell stories about that dog forever. We still had Packer at home then and Elena missed him terribly and her three-legged dog, Jumpy was his stand-in…I have no idea why he only had three legs. I can’t remember. But it was a feature. And Mom was asking Elena questions, the way she does. And Elena was coming up with answers on the spot and it had us all laughing. Why did he get stuck in the bramble bush? Because he was wearing a coat. Why was he wearing a coat. Because he was cold. But why did he go into the bramble bush? Because he was cutting brambles to burn in a fire to stay warm…That sort of thing. But watching Elena invent all this was hilarious—at the time. You had to be there. She has always been an actress. Always animated…But, suddenly, there is a shadow over the sun—just as dramatic as that—there is that great big burly farmer just standing there. His tractor is still out in the middle of the field, sputtering, and he had walked over. He’s wearing muddy boots and the flannel is rolled up on both arms and he had three days growth of beard. He looks angry. And he says, ‘What are you doing?’ And mom says, ‘Having a picnic.’ and he says, ‘You’re in the way,’ and she says, ‘You’re way over there. If you need us to move, we will.’ And then he says, ‘Why are you laughing?’ For some reason, he thought we were laughing about him. Gods knows why. I don’t know how he heard it over the sputtering of that tractor. Maybe it was the sight of us. And Elena says, ‘I was telling them about my dog, Jumpy.’ And Maya says, ‘Jumpy only has three legs. That’s why he’s jumpy.’ And the man, that great big man, standing there against the sun, suddenly laughed so loud it shocked us. And Mom offered him some of our lemon water. And he thanked us and went back to his tractor.

         “Well, we saw him again, after that. He was our neighbor and he actually owned the cottage. His name was Mr. Mack…In fact, one evening, he showed up at the door with a bottle of milk and some eggs. He had cows and chickens, too. And he didn’t smell like manure. He smelled like cologne. And he had shaved. And he had a jacket on. And Mom had him in to the kitchen table and he told us a few stories and asked us about where we lived and the usual small talk. I know he asked, and she told him, that she was divorced. I think he had said something like, ‘Why are you here alone? Is your husband dead?’

         But there were a million stories about that neighborhood there, and he had a few of them. And then he asked about Jumpy again. He was concerned about Jumpy because we were away. And Mom explained all that to him…He laughed again at that…But he was totally infatuated with her. I could see that he was seduced. If she had responded, he would have asked her to marry him right then and there. On the spot.”

***

40. Derek is from Queens

         This was a funny conversation.

         Derek is from Queens. He’ll tell you that himself. As in, ‘You can’t get away with that around me. I’m from Queens.’ Or, ‘I’m from Queens. I don’t do that sort of thing.’  I have no idea if this is just him, or if this is a thing and an expression that’s common in New York. But he pulled it out again in a conversation at dinner. Maya was asking him what he was going to do, now that he was getting a divorce from his new wife—Point blank. That’s the way she always said it, ‘Your new wife’, and his company was bankrupt, and he’d lost his condo—actually he’d given it to his ex-wife.

         Maya said, “Why don’t you write a novel about all that. It’s a story.”

         He said, “I’m from Queens. We don’t write about our personal lives that way.”

         “You don’t have to make it personal. You can fabricate a little.”

         “I don’t think so. I did all that before. Nobody gives a damn about all that.”

         She says, “So what do you think you’ll do.”

         “I don’t know yet…Maybe I should move up here someplace. Get away from all that. It’s not my world down there anymore.”

         “What would you do up here?”
         “I don’t know. Maybe work in real estate.”

         Julia sat through this line of conversation without saying a word. But her quiet was enough to draw attention. Derek slowed down as he spoke to keep an eye on her.

         She had made fried chicken again. This was a little messy but Derek was into it with both hands. And I was fully occupied with it myself. Sometimes, I find it difficult to concentrate when I’m eating.

         Maya had the baby in a pouch in front of her and had to sit sideways from the table enough to leave room for Alma’s hands. The baby wanted the chicken as well and kept getting a hand free into the space between. But this required some coordination to keep Alma out of reach while she connected with a piece of it herself. Derek took the chance to turn the table on his daughter’s pursuit.

         “What are you going to do?”

         Maya shrugged. “I think I’ll be staying around here.”

         Derek’s eyes went to me. I kept my mouth about as full as I could to avoid getting involved. This made Julia smile but still didn’t get her to say anything.

         He says, “Is there enough room here?”

         Maya says, “Sure…But I’m thinking about building a house.”

         This made her father stop eating and stare.

         “What do you know about building houses?”

         “Nothing. I’m going to learn.”

         “Just like that?”

         “I’ll be getting some help.”

         Derek’s eyes went to me more directly. I had decided to follow Julia’s lead and not get involved.

         He says, “Where? Where are you gonna build it?”

         “Here! … Well, up on the rise there.” She flicked a hand to the west, with no window there to offer visual support.

         “Can you afford that?”

         “No. That’s why I’ll have to learn to do it myself—with a little help.”

         “It will still cost money.”

         “Mom is going to finance that through the bank.”

         Derek had started to take another bite, but stopped again. He thought about this answer for at least half a minute, a chicken wing poised in the air in front of him, his eyes going first to Julia and then to me and then back again.

         Finally, with his eye on me, he squinted just enough to make it seem serious, “Do you have any money?”

         I said, “Not enough to make a difference. I think my part will pretty much all be sweat equity.”

         “Have you built anything before?”

         “No really.”

         “That’s crazy.”

         I said, “It’s been done before.”

         “In the old days, maybe. But people don’t do that kind of thing anymore. There are State codes to keep people like you out of the way.”

         I said, “Maybe in Queens. But people still do it up here.”

         Derek was evidently staying ‘with friends’ in New York, but he stayed that night in Maya’s old bedroom. Maya and the baby were sleeping in Elena’s old bedroom, because it was slightly larger. I retreated to the barn and read a little. It was pretty late—New York hours we used to called it—when Derek showed up at the barn.

         He says, “Maybe I can help you with your project.”

         But I already knew my script. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. Lots of reasons. But think of it as an adventure for us. We have a lot to learn. It’ll be fun.”

         “Are you going to get married first?”

         “When Maya is ready…I think she’s more worried about you right now.”

         “Me? Why me?”

         “Because, now that you’ve screwed everything up that you can screw up, she’s afraid you’ll take it personally. She’s afraid you might get depressed.”

         A smile flits across his face that is exaggerated by the lack of light.

         “Me? I don’t get depressed. I’m from Queens. It’s not in my DNA. What good is getting depressed. It doesn’t make you any smarter.”

         Derek went away the next day. His Cadillac needs a new muffler, so you know when he moves about.

         This was followed just about a week later with a visit from Jesse and her kids. At first that worried me. Felix hadn’t been around for some weeks. But it seems he had been busy.

         Jesse says, with a near smile on her face. “He’s selling his business.”

         I ask, “What are you going to do?”

         “Felix is talking to the Manchester Diocese. He has his eye on that piece of property across the street.”

         That was stunning. I had heard nothing about this development.

         “Does Julia know?”

         “It was her idea. Felix told her he wanted to get us out of the city. And she had it all figured out. Right on the spot, she said, “Why don’t you buy that rock pile across the road. You don’t want to farm, but you could build a nice house right there.”

         I said, “For a history buff, Julia spends a lot of time imagining what could be. I’m surprised she doesn’t write science fiction.”

         The next time I see Derek he is sitting on the front porch, where almost no one sits unless it is very hot and then it’s the coolest place in the house because it catches the breeze off the hill. And that is how hot it is.

         I spot him there as I came back down the road from checking out the wrinkle, just looking over the space where I think the house should be. So, real estate is on my mind, and seeing Derek fits that narrative. I step up on the porch with no particular idea, otherwise.

         Derek says, “What do you think about that piece of property across the street there?”

         Not exactly reading my mind, but coming close.

         “I suppose that depends on my mood. If I’m in a good mood, I think it looks fantastic, like one of those Hudson River type painting from the 19th century. Wild and romantic. If I’m in a bad mood, I think it looks like a desolate and rocky wreck of a place—like the one Heathcliff must still be haunting.”

         He says, “It is a wreck. I wonder how much they’ll take for it?”

         “Is it for sale?”

         “Everything is for sale… Except Julia, of course. But what does the Diocese want with it now? They can’t do anything with that now. They don’t build churches with stone the way they used to. It’s all precut stuff these days. Mostly facade. They couldn’t afford to heat a church made out of stone like that anymore.”

         “What would you do with it?”

         I asked this point blank. He didn’t even turn his head.

         “Nothing. I was just wondering.”

         I had the Adirondack chair that was set up with springs and I just rocked for a minute, still wondering what he was wondering about. The sound of that chair was pretty good in a bad sort of way. Like a child wanting attention.

         Derek says, “What does your dad do?”

         “He calls himself a mechanic, so that’s what he does, I guess.”

         “Does he like his work?”

         “Hates it.”

         “Hates it? Why?”

         “Because he’s not a mechanic anymore. He’s a ‘technician.’ He says that as if it’s a dirty word. He attaches meters and plus to things and then follows the instructions in a manual. But he used to be a mechanic. He loved that.”

         “Can’t he still work on old cars?”

         “There’s not enough work in that to pay the bills. The old cars are mostly owned by old guys who are trying to get rid of them before they kick the bucket. And old guys are cheap when it comes to repairs.”

         “That’s a problem.”

         “Yeah. He says, he was born a generation too late.”

         “I think I agree with your dad.”

         “I think I do too, so long as my mom would have been born then to. I like being here, but I think I would have liked being born thirty years before.”

         Derek appeared to think about this convolution for a minute.

         “Those springs need some grease.”

         “I’ll put some Vaseline on’em when I get the chance.”

         But then he adds, “I don’t know… It was pretty good back then. I was there for a little bit of it. It was pretty good. I think maybe we all would have been happier if we were born a generation earlier.”

         The voice in the springs was low and unhappy at the thought.

         “It would have been pretty crowded.”

         He was already smiling by the time I turned to look.

         And this was followed a week after that by Julia looking rather upset when I came into the house at four. She wasn’t cooking. Maya was cooking. That alone had me worried.    

         Julia is sitting at the small table, one eye on her daughter, while holding the baby.

         She says, “What do you know about your friend Larry Regan?”

         My worry got the best of me. I got cute. “He doesn’t play chess very well.”

         “I thought you said he was teaching you.”

         “That’s how I know. I still don’t play chess very well either … Why is it you want to know about Larry?”

         “Is he honest?”

         “He was honest with me.”

         “It seems that Derek has talked Larry into letting him handle the sale of that campground property.”

“I thought that was sold.”

“I guess it fell through. Derek saw that big sign up on the road again when he was leaving the other day and he just stopped. Right there.”

         My first thought then was to be worried about the peepers.

***

41. Olivia

         The boxes of Julia’s mother’s things were collecting dust, and bits of hay. Some creature, perhaps just a bird, but I imagined a bat, defecated on them from on high. I spread out a couple of old blue plastic tarps over the pile and whatever it was then defecated on that. I mentioned this to Julia and she said she was preparing to take care of it. My sense was that this preparation might require additional bourbon, but when she finally settled into the job, she was very sober.

         She appeared one rainy afternoon instead of going on her walk, carrying a roll of plastic garbage bags, and set a chair up at the edge of the pile and went to work. Anything that might be donated, she put back into an empty banker’s box. That included old clothes and costume jewelry. Most of the letters and old bills—my guess was that most of the paper was just old bills—went into the garbage bags. All the wonderful ephemera from the night clubs and passing events went into garbage bags as well. I did not interfere, at first. I knew that she did not want to think about saving anything that might have contributed to the cold reality of her parents’ lives. I watched from my desk and because she was looking grim, I didn’t add much by way of comment. She hardly spoke. She made sounds.

         But finally, there was a hoot! This was more of a “Who-what!” But the ‘what’ was repeated this several times, loudly. My curiosity begged at me. So, I wandered over.

         I said, “Sounds interesting.”

         She shook her head and held up a thick ream of almost loose paper held together at one corner with a brass clip.

         “This is it! This is really it! … I had never actually seen it. But this is it!”

         “What?”

         I waited. She was paging through the pages, but then a hand went into the same box and pulled out another copy. This one she handed to me.

         “It’s my mother’s book…My mother wrote a book!…She told me she’d written one. She actually bragged to me about it. It was after my first novel was published, and she was quite jealous. So, she wrote her own—but not really a novel. Not a little ‘cosy’ as she derisively called my books. HersHer’s was intended as a sort of roman a’clef. She was going to ‘burn it up!’ she told me and she didn’t mean setting fire to it but scorching the eyes of her readers. But then she couldn’t get any takers. Nobody would publish it…And then I never heard another word about it. But this is it!”

         The copy I held was called, ‘My confession.’ It began on page one with a sex scene.

         “Is it pornography?”

         Julia looked up at me, surprised, and then saw that I had only turned to the first few pages.

         “No, not—no. That’s just her idea of ‘getting the reader’s interest.’ This was written in the 1980’s, remember. But even so…She couldn’t get it published because ‘Vanderbilt,’ the name she used for her first husband, told her he would sue.”

         Julia then disappeared back into the house. I sat back down at my desk and started reading.

         If I took Olivia Morgan at her words—the name under the title was, “Elizabeth Bennett,” which I immediately understood to be some sort of take-off on Pride and Prejudice but set in the New York City of the 1950’s—she had lived a fairly raunchy life.

         It was clear early on why it was rejected. She casually mentioned the names of people who were famous enough even for me to recognize. She was clearly a woman of high ambitions and low morals. And being unscrupulous seemed to be her methodology. Her body was her asset. In her telling, Julia stressed the word ‘asset,’ to get the appropriate meaning out of the syllables. The first-person tone of it reminded me of a cross between Tom Jones and David Copperfield. She was no Moll Flanders, not being given to outright theft, but by her own admission, was adroit at stealing hearts. She was in desperate need of copy-editing but she wrote well. Colorfully.

         When I went in the house for dinner, Julia had a stew on and was already sitting at the small table.

         She looked at me with a wry smile. I had not seen wry so wry before. The corners of her mouth were flat. Her eyes were wide with her thought, eye-brows artfully arched.

         “Extraordinary, isn’t it?”

         “A good safe word, I think.”

         “That’s my mother…Can you believe that is my mother?”

         “How much of it is actually your mother?”

         “Pretty much all of it. My poor dear father had no idea what hit him.”

         Maya was in the living room with the baby, but had clearly looked through the manuscript while her mother was cooking. Her voice was whispered so I assumed the baby was asleep.

         “I don’t believe it!” was what I heard.

         Julia just said, “It’s all true! She took pleasure in her veracity. That’s why Vanderbilt threatened to sue.”

         There were no new pages of Julia’s book typed up so we sat in the dining room and ate while we talked and then just talked.

         Julia was animated but had to keep her voice down. The baby slept through most of it.

         Julia’s eyebrows arched further than I had ever seen before. “My favorite line was, ‘My only child has no love for me. This is a hard burden to bear, but it is mine.’”

         I could only say, “I hadn’t gotten that far.”

         “It’s at the end. I was skipping around…She also says ‘Harold’—that’s what she calls my father instead of Henry—‘Harold was a difficult man. He was staunch. He would not bend. He was always faithful—like a dog. But I never intended to marry a dog. You can’t have sex with a dog.’.”

         I had to ask, “Who is George?”

         “Oh, that’s Vanderbuilt. Her first husband. I’m sure. She hated him. Wait until you get to the part where she describes his anatomy. Lord have mercy! But that’s probably why she never published it…He probably paid her not to.”

         The unspoken thought occurred to me, given her mother’s lack of money, that she had written it in the first place to get something more out of Vanderbilt.

         Julia wanted more time to finish going through her mother’s things, which meant her writing schedule suffered. She refused any help with this, which I was thankful for, and then told me to take Maya to the beach. This was an order. I took it, gladly. But I had been thinking.

         “I know it’s not my business, but I was thinking about all the stuff you are throwing away. Your children—your grand children—might like some of that. That’s the sort of ephemera you normally love. They don’t know the darker parts of all that. The dreams that are lost in all of that. Someone ought to have a chance to reimagine that history for themselves.”

         She sat at the table with her coffee in front of her and stared at it. Maybe a minute.

         “Okay,” was all she said.

         It was a good fine day for it, a little breezy, which is the way I like the beach. Rye Bbeach is small but there is a park and a coast walk and with baby, we were moving slow.

         Maya filled in some other details then.

         “If Olivia had had her way, Alma and I would not be here now. You would not be here, unless you were with someone else. Because my mother would not be here…Olivia wanted an abortion. My mother explained that to all of us, early on. It was by way of a cautionary tale, I think. But it had its effect. Olivia had been so careful for so long, and then her drunken News Year’s celebration with my grandfather had gone awry. This was 1960, you understand, and you couldn’t just go down to the corner and abort any human beings you didn’t want. Olivia wanted to go to Europe to have it done and my grandfather refused. He told her if she did it, he would publicly divorce her for having done it and then he’d cut her off from any money he had, or would ever make, for the rest of his life. He would quit his job if he had to and live as a beach bum. That was the lowest of the low, to him. Guys that didn’t take responsibility for their lives were bums. But Olivia believed him.”

         That rang a bell. “Do I qualify for that?”

         “No. I don’t think so. You’re not just screwing around.”

         “I’m glad to hear it.”

         “Mom told us all about this later to keep us from asking questions about why they lived the way they did. Grandpa was always gone. Especially after Mom went off to school. They always had separate bedrooms, and Olivia kept her dalliances ‘off campus’ anyway. That was my mother’s description.”

         But the hundred boxes took more than a couple of days. I took Maya on a drive to Mt. Washington. My truck wasn’t up to the climb, but we took the train with the rest of the tourists. The clouds at the top parted on cue and Alma had her lunch with a view.

         When we got home, I offered to help Julia again, at least with the pile of garbage bags that had accumulated outside the barn. This was accepted. I used Julia’s truck and took three loads to the dump. Julia assigned herself to driving some of the other boxes to the Salvation Army. She had to break that up to different days because they couldn’t handle the entire load at one time. I carried almost a dozen boxes up to the attic that she had set aside. These included additional copies of her mother’s manuscript as well as some of the boxes that were left of her father’s things.

         Olivia Green Morgan was Julia’s mother. Irresponsible and eccentric. Maybe a nymphomaniac. She was a New York socialite who had died at the age of 95 just the year before, but despite her prominence, having been acquainted with or involved with, various celebrities of her age, there were very few notices of her passing. On the internet there were two obituaries that I could find. Both short.

         Henry Morgan, Julia’s father, was an engineer who worked all over the world and died twenty years before at the age of 84. I knew that he used to take Julia with him on his trips when he could, which was why it seemed she had been everywhere. He was a structural engineer who had worked with other specialists of his craft, especially on hydraulic projects, in India, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iraq. He had worked on projects in California, New Mexico, Idaho, and North Dakota. Julia had been to all those places with him. But, his primary legacy to Julia appears to be her tendency to swear.

         I asked her, after a short verbal description of the fellow who told me I should wait until next week to be bringing anything more to the dump. She had questioned his authority and his parentage.

         “Was it your mother who taught you to swear.”

         “No. Mother was full of euphemisms. No. That was Dad. He could swear in five or six languages.”

         But the bottom line was simply that Olivia was unkind to her husband, took advantage of him, and Julia held that against her. They had not spoken since her father’s death.

         Julia didn’t have much more to say about it. “He admitted to me once that he really didn’t like to travel. He actually hated flying. He would take a train whenever he could. He loved boats…But he wanted  to spend more time with me, and I asked him why he didn’t. I knew they had enough money. He did not answer that. But I knew. And over time, I stopped asking…It was to get away from my mother. She disturbed him. He had loved her once and she had betrayed him.”

         Henry Morgan was born in Deluth. I had never been there so I had little idea of what that might have been like. His own father ‘worked with shipping.’ I knew from the lack of detail offered that Julia did not know exactly what he did, but whatever it was, it was sufficient to pay for his son to go to Stanford University.

         She looked at me very pointedly when she said, “Nobody bothered to save any of the ephemera from those lives. More than likely, that would havebeen my father’s doing.”

         Somewhat randomly, one afternoon, after she had mentioned the writing of one of her novels, Stanner, about a tin miner in Devon in the time of King John, she said, “My father disliked it.”

         She should have known I would ask.

         “Why?”

         “He wasn’t one to explain himself…which might have been the matter. In Stanner, I was going on about the origins of the Magna Carta in the Devon Stannary Convocation, but I was using one particular miner, Drew, as a protagonist. I suppose this character must have irritated him—and that’s the joke. I fashioned Drew on my father. It was as nearly him as I could manage. But I didn’t tell him that. It would have made him angry. He wasn’t happy with my writing novels. I think he was afraid that I would write about family matters. He was intensely private, and the very idea that I might use details about our family in my work was unbearable to him.”

         “Why do you think that was?”

         She sat back and looked at me a moment, with thoughts I cannot really imagine, but  all of them were, I am sure, full of doubt. Who was I, to be asking such things?

         But she answered. “I think he had a very difficult childhood. He seldom spoke of it. But emotions were not part of his language. In his world view, we all had feelings, like other body parts, and talking about them was a waste of time because we could not explain them. Everything must be explained or not. There was little in-between. I suppose it must have made him a very good engineer, but a poor husband.”

         That seemed very sad to me.

         “I would have guessed he would have been very proud of you, and your writing.”

         “No. But he never said ‘no’. He never told me not to…Just as I suspect he seldom said ‘no’ to my mother. Just once, that I’m sure of—when she wanted an abortion…And here I am, because of that.”

         “That’s a thought to conjure with.”

         And as I said that word, ‘conjure’, I thought I had never used it in my speech before, but it was already common to my thoughts now; it was one of her words.

         She said, “But, no. I did it to spite him, I think. Of course, I did it for other reasons, but one reason was to spite him. It was the very last thing he could imagine me doing. To him, novels were all about explaining what couldn’t be explained. They were about emotion. A history would have been fine. If I had written a history of The Great Parliament of the Tinners, he would have liked that, I think. I know he would. He actually knew something about tin mining. He had written a thesis on the tin mining in Britain going back to Roman times, while he was at Stanford. That was all about how tin had changed history…I’d read that. I told him so, after he said he did not like Stanner, I told him it was his fault. My whole career was his fault. And I think he knew it was the truth. It stunned him…I had read that college thesis when I was a girl…It was dense. I might have been fourteen by that time. I’m not sure, but that was the most difficult thing I had ever read to that time, and it was magical. Actually magical—because I had started to see between the lines, not just read, but see. I began to see the narrative of lives. I could imagine those minors and their sense of independence. All the mighty rulers of the earth were dependent on them. Without them, there would be no swords!…That was my hero’s thought. Drew saw that the world had changed because of him and because of tin. His own father had been a farmer in Devon and owned his land, and his grandfather’s had spoken with the Kings of Wessex and family legend was that one of them had fought with Cerdic, and all of that history was because of tin. ”

***

42. Taking a flyer

         I found on old flyer that had been flour-pasted on the back of the barn door. Not much of one. Just an old photocopy of an announcement for a play, ‘The Great Renaldi’ which had been presented right there in the barn. The principal players were the three girls, and half a dozen others, mostly neighborhood boys, including Keith, and Mr. Copple’s sons. I took an opportunity to ask Julia about it.

         “That was one of mine! I managed to write one of these a year for them, for awhile, anyway, until Jesse left for college. That took the wind out of my sails, but there were eight or nine of them I believe. Renaldi was the last.”

         “What were they like?”

         “A bit silly, I’m afraid. But there were motives involved, of course. Because I home-schooled the girls and the plays usually revolved around one subject or another that I was trying to teach them. Renaldi is a young fisherman who is the last of his family during the great plague. He must remember all the small details he watched father teach his older brother, after both of them are gone. His mother is gone as well but his three sisters are still alive. This is the Amalfi coast and they are all prey to the Moslem slavers.”

         “Sounds like a laugh. A real kids’ story. Very silly, indeed.”

         “But none of that actually happens during the play. It’s just the situation they’re in. The story is that Renaldi finds ways to feed his family while making the slavers think there are many more of them still there. He changes his attire half a dozen times, every day. The girls all must dress like men and they each have an assigned role in keeping up the pretense. The gives me a chance to play with Shakespeare’s cross dressing device. I even named them after the character’s in Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Meanwhile, they’ve sent for help, which arrives in the nick of time, naturally.”

         “Naturally, otherwise there would have been no play.”

         “Naturally.”

         Who played Renaldi?”

         “One of the neighbors. Keith. But there were always neighbors volunteering. Especially the boys.”

         “How many people fit in that barn?

         ‘There was room for almost a hundred folding chairs, the way we staged it—at both ends and up the middle.”

         “How much did you charge?”

         “Oh, it was nominally free. We had the Congregational Church sell tickets for donations. It was very popular. We did three shows on three Saturdays in July. We were usually packed.”

         “But you had to quit after Jesse left?”

         “Well, not exactly. We were already in an argument with the fire department. Mrs. Johnson had reported us. More than once. They didn’t want her coming in again. They wanted us to get a permit, but then couldn’t give us one. There are more than three exits. We did a fire drill at the start of every show. Everybody got a chuckle out of that. It was a madcap scramble at the sound of an alarm, which was a gong I had used in another performance. We could empty the barn in about three minutes. But my neighbor up the road there is a true Karen and she wouldn’t let it go. She demanded that we obey some state law she’d found, and the fire department couldn’t give us a permit for that. That required an act by the State Aassembly. A regular ‘Catch twenty-two.’ All the fun went out of it.”

         What Julia had taught me already was about the way things connect. It was not just the hip bone and the thigh bone. It was everything, because what we perceive is only what we have learned to account for. That does not preclude other possibilities. If we had not attached value to something before we first encounter it, it simply goes unappreciated, or even unnoticed. Whether a continent, or just an oily patch of sand on a Texas beach.

         But the past is always prologue. Great love made for the worst hate, and the best forgiveness. This she understood.

         And perhaps more importantly, not knowing about something does not mean it does not exist.

         Julia had told me about the comprachicos and about the hand of an unborn child that was snipped and grown in the belly of a mouse—in a lab. The comprehension of this horror had now infected my mind. Certainly my Mmartians, so crazy for logic, would be possessed of such a stupidity. A new story had begun in my head. Ben had a new nemesis. And Cera might have some insight into all of that.

         I went so far as to restate this idea to Julia, point blank, to see if I had it right. I knew it was right, but I was weary of my own tendency to misplace ideas and mistake motives. Wasn’t the whole project of gene-editing a desire to play god more than to help mankind.? The thrill was in the invention, in the mind of the inventor, like Victor Frankenstein and the monster, and not in the compassion of a doctor. The doctor might want to fix a haire-lip. The scientist might want to create a more perfect man, capable of working longer hours.

         Her answer was odd.

         “We are blind to what we haven’t been taught to see—and don’t know how to see. That’s what keeps us together. That’s what culture is. And it’s what keeps us apart as well. We are all human beings and have the same biological needs, but we kill each other over trinkets of thought. There is no all-knowing authority that can cure this. A king can’t command that we see what we are blind to…I’m thinking that the danger is what makes us brave. We are not brave without it. Your story will be built on the danger.”

         I said, “I’m not sure I understand.” It was all I really could say.

         “Your hero cannot know what will be going on in the councils of government. That some cubically challenged bureaucrat might feel the thrill of power over other lives is beyond Ben. He hasn’t even considered it. He has his hormones and his taste for chocolate and a desire to build a home of his own. But he is not part of the program. They will need to eliminate him because he knows too much, even has he despairs over his own ignorance. I think your Cera might help him out with all of that.”

         She moved off then to manage a roast beef. I had to unpack her response on my own.

         My Mars was riven—like ‘conjure’, ‘riven’, is another Julia word. I had never used it before in my life. Now I had used it at least twice in my writing. The people of Mars were broken. More than divided. No whole culture had survived intact after the ‘removal’ from the Earth intact. Those cultures who had thought to escape the problems of the Earth, had even less chance to survive than the ones forcibly transported, because those not taken against their will did not have a shared sense of hurt. So, often, hurt is the motive of an entire people. I knew that. And the idealism that had first infused the spirit of those who had left the Earth voluntarily was quickly dissipated in political warfare, placing artificial ideology above necessity. My idea was not to detail that catastrophe but to offer the reasons that humanity might survive—the essential humanity of the ‘transported’ that had been the backbone of the species from the time of Eden.

         The impending disaster of an artificial intelligence operating apart from the human cause had to be made more clear. I needed an Oppenheimer who might warn against the dangers. Ben could not do that by himself. Cera might offer the motivation for him to leave his shell—I was still proud of using the term ‘shell’ for the Martian homes. It fit the purposes of double entendre so well. But I need the perennial mad scientist to offer some facts. What about a bio-engineered child escaping from the comprachicos? ‘Trans-humanism’ was already being bandied about today as if it were a good thing. This was the dawning of yet another sort of ‘atomic age,’ was it not, or was this just another day in the life of mankind?.

         My key now was to conjure a culture that might reflect the values I thought were needed for that survival—and to do that again, and again, if I had the stamina for a series of novels on the same theme, but each time with some unique example of what mankind has proven true by blood and sweat and tears. In order for humanity to survive on Mars, it must have many cultures, not for the stupid version of the word ‘diversity,’ but for the practical ones. In-breeding was deadly. And to somehow prove that the differences only mattered if they had arisen organically, as well as from a happy human experience. But if all were connected to the same values, the differences had to result from what they had in common—that irony had finally taken root. Not one petrie dish, but a dozen, all trying to succeed in a hostile environment, or perish. There was no absolute single way. Surviving was not a matter of numbers. Aa single plague would see to that. It was a narrative of human ingenuity. Invention and moral caution—that they might get it right more often than not. And cultures that valued invention would at least get in right more often.

         And most importantly, perhaps, this was a matter of time. Unlike earth, Mars had no Garden of Eden. No Paradise. The reason there was no other being of any sort there already, above the level of microbe or virus, was that it was ‘inhospitable.’ This human population was an experiment from the start. A contrivance. The purpose may have been some combination of greed and power to begin with, but now, like the miners in Devon, and the colonizers of North America, they must take matters into their own hands.

         It seemed to me that I had the elements of the story I wanted. Now I had to see what Ben and Cera had to say about it. I had no name yet for my child-scientist.

***

43. All about moving mountains

         It was a rainy morning and I was sitting at a temporary table I’d set up nearer Maya’s larger window in the barn where I could look out over the fields when I worked without disturbing her stuff. The light was better there and this made a sort of cathedral living room out of the space around me, enhanced by the sheets of canvas, all the way to the hay bales which had diminished through the winter to less than the height of the loft, but gave a fantastic texture to the barn wall at one side. It was easy to understand why she liked this space. I was not so sure about the distraction. And when I looked toward the bales, I met the eyes of Ralph, the Maine Coon cat, staring back, sitting at shoulder height and ready to pounce. Ralph was Julia’s name for her, though she wouldn’t let her in the house. Ralph had adopted Dal Riata, not the other way around.

         I suppose because of the rain on the roof, I didn’t hear Paul’s car arrive. But he knocked on the barn door before he came in. Actually, his head popped in first, felt fedora dripping.

         “Do you have a moment?”

         Funny thing. I knew exactly who he was even though I’d never met him, and I’d never even seen a picture. But it was entertaining to me that he assumed I knew him.

         I said, “Yes,” and folded my laptop before pulling another chair around to the table. The light there was gray but more than bright enough.

         Paul put his hat on the table, and his raincoat on the back of the chair, and settled himself. He is a lean fellow. Clean shaven. Balding a bit. Maybe six feet tall. He looks very English, down to the brown tweed jacket. I decided, given that he had been living in the United States for many years, that this was all intentional. His costume. I could see by the bulge in his breast pocket that he even smoked a pipe.              

         As he sat, he simply said, “I came in to ask you, why are you here?”

         This was funny as well. He was a very direct person.

         “Jesse asked me that, recently. And Felix too. I suppose it might seem odd to some people. But I really didn’t think about it a whole lot. I’m not tied down by a lot of responsibilities. Matters of consequence, you might say. And the reason for that—reasons I guess—are not all that interesting…” he looked at me without responding so I went on. “But to begin with, it was a job. I’d never met Julia before. Once I did, I didn’t want to do anything else.”

         “Are you in love with her?”

         This surprise question changed everything. I now knew why he was there, and why he was giving me the third degree, and for whatever reason, and I was fine with it.
         “Well, I know you’re an old friend of hers and you really should be asking that question if you don’t know the answer already. I would if I were you. But it’s not an easy answer and because what I say might affect her in the wrong way, I don’t think I should answer unless you know how to keep things to yourself.”

         He stopped his attack. That much could be seen in his face. I had the sense of having said something he did not expect.

         “I would not have told her what you said, if that’s your worry. But I think I know now, so you don’t have to answer…It matters to me that you’re worried that it might hurt her. It would. You are correct about that. But you should also know that she is well aware of it. She knows you have feelings for her…No. She hasn’t said anything to me. But I can tell. It’s rather obvious, I think….” He moved to stand. “I suppose I should be going, then.”

         I said, “I’m not so sure about that.”

         He had started to slump and this made him straighten his back.

         “Why?”

         “Because she needs a friend. She really doesn’t have one.”

         He asked, “You can’t be her friend as well?”

         “Actually, that’s exactly what I would like. But she doesn’t talk to me like a friend. Not like I believe she talks to you.”

         “How do you know about that?”

         “She talks about you a lot. She’s always wondering what you might think about this or that.”

         He was caught off-guard now, seeming off balance, and sat back.

         “I think that’s probably just because we write all the time. Every week. She likes to write letters. She’s almost the only person I know who actually writes letters.”

         I decided to turn the table on him.

         “Why haven’t you asked her to marry you?”

         Now he literally went back in the chair.

         He shook his head as if trying to gain his senses. “Ha! A dozen times. She won’t leave this place.”

         “So, why don’t you come here?”

         He looks nonplussed and waves both hands at the walls of the barn.

         “This isn’t my style.”

         “Change your style then. I have. At least, I’m trying. And I don’t even want to marry her.”

         He seemed even more confused.

         “I thought you were in love with her!”

         “Yes. Well,…but That’s problematic. We’re not lovers. I simply love her. How can I not love her? If she was thirty years younger I’d be ecstatic. But she’s already lived all the part of her life that I still need to—all the part of life that I want to know most about for myself.”

         Paul’s jaw was open. He looked a little bit stunned. Finally, a breath.

         “I see…I think I see.”

         “She is who she is. You are who you are. But I’d say she’s at least worth changing a few style points for.”

         “But I teach at a university, a thousand miles away. She won’t leave here.”

         “Yeah?”

         “We have our differences. She and I. She’s so intensely American. She doesn’t give an inch.”

         “Really? You can’t teach elsewhere? Around here, for instance” Now, he’s looking at me rather blankly. So, I say, “Are you married, already? Have you ever been married?”

         “No…Yes.”

         He said nothing for a moment, looking everywhere but at me. Then, almost suddenly, his eyes squared on mine. “I was married many years ago. She was a pretty little thing I’d met during my graduate studies at Oxford in the ’70’s. I was infatuated with her. She was reading in Medieval studies herself. And because, I was there for my doctorate in the same subject, it seemed like a perfect match. But it wasn’t. We had nothing in common. Not even our academic interest, as it turned out…I married her more than the other way around, I am afraid. She was a devout Marxist. I am certainly not…But, from there I got a position at York…And then, suddenly, I was your typical faculty cuckold. Yes…Yes. And oh, this is the funny part, as they say, I only found out about my reduced status by accident, I overheard some conversation. Everybody seemed to know about it. And when I went down to face the bastard—I had never been in a fist fight before in my entire life—he saw me coming. Before I could take a swing, he knocked me out with one punch…Well. I couldn’t stay around there, so I took a position over here. At Bowdoin. And I decided to try and change my life around. Live outside of my books, so to speak. I started traveling. Mostly around Europe, but also Japan. Japan had quite a medieval society of its own, you know. And South America. I got a pretty good book out of that myself. ‘Medieval Peru.’ Have you read it? No. Well…And I started hiking…But, one of my students had started writing to me about one thing or another in the summers. And then she kept it up after she graduated. That was Julia. She writes long letters, you know. Very challenging. Very engaging. I abjure long letters. I always tell my students to keep it brief. But I made an exception for Julia…But then, she was married, and that seemed to be that, until she wrote me out of the blue one sunny day. I remember that day very well. And in the course of one thing or another about peasant family life in ancient Greece, she dropped the fact that she had divorced her husband. I think she does that in her novels too. She throws in the most important information, right in the middle of something superfluous. I think I got over here to Del Riata for the first time a week later. But her daughters were still here then, of course. And there were other issues to deal with…And then, last week, she did it again. Right in the middle of writing about grazing and property rights in eighth century England, she lets me know that you’re here.”

         I tried to be funny. “They didn’t have real property rights there. Not, then.”

         He shook his head. “No. Not really. It was more a matter of community commons. But such things were starting…But, you have opened up a covered well, so to speak. The face at the bottom is my own…I suddenly thought I was going to lose Julia again. And now—now that I realize that is not your intent—now it has opened all that up again.”

         “Hello.”

         Julia was standing there at the door. I was fairly certain she hadn’t heard our conversation. Paul rose and went over to kiss her on the cheek.

         He said, “We were just talking about you.”

         Her eyebrows rose. “I heard you drive up but then you disappeared. My ears were burning.”

         “I thought I’d introduce myself to Geoff.”

         She shook her head at that thought.

         “I’m still cooking but why don’t you both come in now and keep me company.”

         And because she did not seem all that surprised that he had come a thousand miles, unannounced, I was pretty certain now that Julia had hoped that the comment about me in her letter would get Paul off his ass.

         A few days later Julia says, “My argument with Paul has always been that he believes too much in the preservation of tradition. I accept the intelligence of that. Tradition becomes what it is by practice. What works, works. But far too much of that, or the arcane practice of it, has had to do with the flexibility of mankind. Human beings are capable of living through the most difficult of circumstances. Even those we have manufactured for ourselves. Slaves. For Salt mines and coal mines and common soldiering as much as the daily give and take of the weather and farming, or the drudgery of piece work manufacturing…Think of that! And the assembly line. Making the human being a cog in a giant wheel. Chaplin understood ‘modern times’ for what they were. The fabulous human mind, reduced to the repetitive motion of a windmill, hour after hour, day after day, year after year…What madness is in that? How does the human mind survive in the dank darkness of the bowels of the earth, breathing foul air and bitter dust. Perhaps only with the inspiration of coming up afterward in time to the wide-open glory of sunlight and better food than the crust of what he carried down for lunch, and to the sweet goodness of a wife and family. But what if he was a slave. Most of the mining through history has been done by slaves. What is in the slave’s mind that keeps the human being going? What is in the mind of a woman taken for chattel and used year after year, for the pleasure of men who have made themselves beasts. What is in the mind of a child taken for any purpose.

         “If the king rules over such practices, what tradition is being preserved?

***

44. Funny thing

         “A Jewish philosopher once said, “Life is God’s joke. If you get it, you die laughing…The real funny thing is, I don’t want a slave. I understand that most people do, but I never have.”

         She said this right out of the box. It left me looking for the context before I could say a word. But it’s the sort of thing she’ll say, and there’s always a reason. The chapter of ‘The Plow and Stars’ we had worked on the day before involved Donovan after he had been caught by a bailiff looking to fill a decree for able-bodied men to work in the port at Sligo. Was she thinking about that? About the taking of men for labor when it was needed? This thought probably took me thirty seconds. But it was wrong.

         She was making spaghetti. She was actually making the sauce. The pot of water for the pasta had not even started to boil. She had spoken while looking down into the sauce pan as she stirred and then turned to me for some response—as if we had been speaking about this matter before I had even come in the door.

         I answered, “I suppose it’s a good thing then that we don’t have bailiffs here.”

         She frowned. “What?”

         “I thought you were talking about the book.”

         “No…I was wondering why people want slaves. I was reading about the Greeks again last night and trying to figure it out. I suppose you had left by then. Or you were talking with Maya…It goes back way before them, of course, but the Greeks liked to examine everything in detail. I thought I’d find something. But not a clue. They did not examine that. There is very little about the mechanics of slavery more than the basic fact of it. How could they practice such a thing without some thought on the matter? The practice was extensive. Slaves were used for everything from nursemaids to police—the astynomia. The Scythian archers they used were likely slaves too.”

         “Who owned them?”

         “Good question. They were not chattel slaves, certainly. They were likely fulfilling some sort of service. And that fits well with the idea of indenture and the sort of slavery Donovan is caught up in. But some estimates are that more than half the population of Athens was slave. It tells you why Greece fell. The population had lost its ability to do things for itself. I imagine Phidias was desperate for someone who could cut stone, much less carve it. And that is a pity that could have been foreseen. And just like the Romans, they started using slaves in the army. This was not a mystery, even to them. Slave revolts were common. The culture of Sparta was fashioned on their fear of slavery. It was understood.”

         My own thought on that was simplistic.

         “I suppose that people who had used animals as slaves in their everyday lives would have less of a problem with the idea of keeping people as slaves. That might be even more the case if they looked down on other people as mere animals if they did not have the same gods.”

         And it was then that she said, “I think that’s right. And even more so if their gods were closely identified with animals.”

         In the several months I had been there, I couldn’t remember her actually saying that some idea, any idea, of mine was right. She had often agreed with me, implicitly, but had never actually said I was right. I was both pleased and dismayed—at once.

         I added to my rightness. “But people don’t live today with the labor of animals the way they once did.”

         “That’s right, too. That role has been taken over by machines. The machines are our new slaves… At least until they revolt, too”

         “Do you think AI might be the opening for that?”

         “Yes. Absolutely! But in the meantime, while excuses are made, the machines will have made us weaker.”

         “What is the end of that story?”

         “I suppose that could be the end of mankind itself. Excepting for the possible difference that machines don’t have gods. Not yet, anyway.”

         That was the end of that. But the idea of machine-made gods would not go away. I was suddenly infected with the idea of it.

         She said, “The problem is that AI, even if it were made capable of controlling itself and determining its own fate, it would be immoral. Supposing it could be trained to be moral—and that would be supposing that we have some singular idea of what moral was—it would nevertheless be a shadow of evil. Not the evil itself, perhaps, because it would not be able to actually create, only to copy, but it would be evil because it was inherently amoral, but while entering into society without a reason to be good. Good is a creation of man. A rock cannot be good or bad, but the use of a rock can be either. Or it can just be rock and roll.”

         I think I was ahead of her on the humor. I said, “Or both.”

         But Julia says, “The Greeks, and Romans saw their gods has having all the flaws and virtues they saw in themselves. It was an easy solution to a problem they never imagined. But Christians wanted their cake and eat it too. They wanted an omnipotent and omniscient god as well as human beings with free will—else. Hhow would they earn their way to heaven or hell?. The twists and turns of that logic has filled volumes.”

         She  stirs the pasta into the boil.

         “Today, as we lose what little of the old religion we had left, we have the smarties who see human beings as programmed—somehow, living in a simulation. By what or how, they can’t say. They’re too insecure to even imagine allowing themselves such a thing as free will. They concoct fantasies such as ‘the matrix’ to fill that void. I think they worry me more than the religious fanatics. The fanatics self-destruct. There will always be more of them, if only because the worry of dealing with uncertainty is too difficult for so many. Better to believe in something than nothing at all, is the motto. Not, it is better to believe in something of value, which is the real matter.”

         She says, with Paul within ear-shot, so I know it’s true, that the answer is that there is no answer, just the question. Now, this sounds very zen to me, like something you might hear at the old ashram. Paul grunts in the other room. The rain falls.

         I dated a girl once who was very much into that sort of thing. I suppose it benefited me at the time because she was intent on converting me to her way of thinking, which wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t tell her that. I was working in my father’s garage and starting to get an idea of what worked and what didn’t with cars and girls. This wasn’t going to work. She was sweet enough. And kind. And gentle. And all the things that mattered to her so I didn’t have any desire to change her mind. I just told her one day that humming made me want to cough. She thought I was joking.

         I tell Julia that I have half a billion human beings on Mars who are in danger of being exterminated by robots. I ask her what she would do. That was my question.

         She gave me the half eyed stare.

         From the other room I hear Paul say, “They need a king.”

***

45. A lost arc of convenience.

         She was making sandwiches. She had a hunk of roast beef left over from a couple of days before. And she has some of her own bread which I can smell as she cuts it..

         She says, “There will be an end to this—all that we know now will pass away. All that we love will be lost with it.”

         Obviously, this is just something on her mind.

         “So, what you are saying is, we all die.”

         “No. If history does not record it, it did not exist. All our love, all our passion, everything we care about will not exist.”

         We were working on one of the final chapters, and I wasn’t sure which one, and I was trying to connect what she was saying to that. Was this it, or was there one more chapter—or two more? Everything was ready for an ending.

         “Does that mean something terrible is going to happened at the end of the book? Is Clare going to die?”

         She seemed to think this question was funny. She poured herself more coffee.

         “No. Nothing like that.

         “Good.”

         She puttered around the kitchen, still up to no good in her mind.

         She says, “ You know, I have nothing against Steven Spielberg. He makes good films. I actually saw a few of those when the girls were still home. But—now, here is the ‘butt’ in my appreciation—He is playing an endgame. And the deluge is coming.”

         Seeing some slight connection there, I played devil’s advocate, even though I worried that she was right.

         “There will just be another round of technology coming.”

         “It’s not the method. It’s the content. There will be an end to all of this—all that we know, or think we know—and all of the technology will die with us. Whether it’s your EMP or a computer virus, or a socialist mind-virus, or just your regular old garden variety head lopping religious fanaticism…In the same way every age has died before us. History may not record it because, once again, we’ve lost the capacity of mind to see ourselves for what we are. But that’s when it all comes apart. This time we’ve identified with the machines, in the same way that Patty Hurst identified with the Symbionese Liberation Army. And for much the same reason, I might add. To save our own hide first. It often comes down to self-preservation. Or convenience, I suppose. There are actual people who will sell their souls for convenience. To hell with history. That’s why we need a Herodotus or a Thucydides.”

         “Maybe not all.”

         “Ha! Who will there be?…You’re busy with your perfect Mars and I’m busy with my precious 18th century. Who will record this time? Our time? Now? While everything goes else goes to hell…I was just thinking, that maybe we don’t really exist. So, it doesn’t matter. We don’t matter. When the EMP hits us, everything we are will disappear. As if we never were. I don’t think any future human being will care about the remnants of our toys. No more than the split jawbone of a giant sloth. We will be as invisible as the people who left their footprints in the ancient sand in New Mexico, twenty thousand years ago. Perfect footprints. But the people who made them are invisible to us. Ghosts.”

         I wasn’t ready to go, yet.

         “Maybe Maya will. She will be our cave painter.”

         “Oh, silly boy…Why are men so dense. Are men always in love?”

         That seemed possible, so I defended my gender. “I suppose some are. Some want to be. But if they weren’t, they’d be dangerous.”.

         She huffed. Literally huffed. Like the big bad wolf. And then smiled. “You know it is because of Maya that you’re even here?”

         I was ready to be informed. We were not quite done with that day’s pages, but she was interrupting me again and I was tired and happy to be out of it. I closed my lap-top.

         “What did she do?”

         “She lied. She’s a hypocrite. Your basic human hypocrite. She saw through to my problem before I was even aware I had one. She told me I had to accept the age we are in for what it was. I was living back there,” she waved a hand in the air as if at the past, “not here. The technology that made the twentieth century New York publishing world was dead and gone. I had to find a new way to sell my books—online.…This is Maya talking. Maya. She doesn’t own a computer. She doesn’t watch TV.  She doesn’t even own a watch. She dislikes what passes for ‘modern art’ with a passion…and, of course, she has never used the pill. But she told me I had to accept the world as it was. To deal with it on its own terms. “

         “How do you think she came up with that?”

         “She got that from reading one of my own damned books. She told me so!”

         “I didn’t think you wrote anything like that”

         “No. But I did describe how Pale Moon’s best friend lost everything—her children and her husband—everything including her own life because she would not accept her fate as a wife to an Apache warrior.”

         I had not yet read Pale Moon, but I said, “In this analogy. Am I the Apache?”

         I thought that was funny.

         Eyes half-shut with faux disdain, she says “You wish.  She said this to me four years ago. I was just slow to accept it.”

         Later she says, “I’ll tell you a funny story about that…Well, not funny ha, ha, but still hilarious. Did you see the movie? …Well, do you remember the part of the little sister. Pale Moon’s sister.”

         “I think so. Yes…In the movie. It’s not in the book.”

         “Exactly. Her family had all been killed. That’s eventually why she’s there is the first place. She was adopted by the Patu clan. But then I couldn’t figure out how a little sister turned up in the film script. So, I asked the Director. Linehan had no idea. He didn’t read the book. He said it was in the script. So, I called the script writer. Don Peckham. I actually had to go to his house. No one had a number for him that worked, and I was getting a train back the next day…Now, this is a real Southern California story… So, you expect him to be in a bathing suit, sitting by his pool. But no. He’s in his bathing suit, red chest hair blazing, but he’s in his basement constructing some elaborate toy out of Legos for his kid. Peckham’s very unhappy at me for disturbing him, but his wife had answered the door so he’s trapped. He says, he does know what I’m talking about. I go over it in detail. He acts clueless. Of course, he was an actor once who couldn’t get enough work and wrote his own script. So, he knows about acting. I’ve seen him on the set. So, finally his wife leaves us there. She’d been sitting by the pool with a friend. I suppose she thinks it’s safe to leave him there with me because his kid is there too…Peckham sees I’m not giving up on it, so he turns on the TV. They have a TV in the basement bigger that some of the movie houses my dad took me to in the 90’s in New York when he was tracking down old films. The kid is instantly mesmerized. Then Peckham takes me aside and says, he did it for a friend. His friend needed a part in something. So, he wrote it in…So, naturally I ask, who was his friend? … It was Terry Martin.”

         “Who is Terry Martin?”

         “She’s the bimbo who played Pale Moon’s sister. Linehan wanted to get into her lingerie, and in exchange he wrote eight seconds of film. But the line of dialog he gave her was cut. Eight seconds! I figure that was probably how long it took him to do his business with her after he told her he’d gotten her a part. Eight seconds!”

         “That’s a little tragic.”

         “It is! But this is actually the better story. That young woman had been trying to make it in Hollywood for ten years. She had gavin up any last scrap of integrity she had for eight seconds of a bad film. How does that happen?”

         So, I accepted my fate and ate my sandwich.

         She says “You hear a lot of talk about ‘story arc.’ It’s all bullshit. A story is a beginning and a middle and an end. War and Peace or Little Red Riding Hood. When you start cutting it down to fit half an hour minus commercials, or an hour, or ninety minutes, it’s still just a beginning, middle and end. But when somebody is talking to some director about a film, he has to make it sound more sophisticated than that. I think that’s the shadow of the academics again. They can’t teach, beginning, middle, and end. Parents won’t pay fifty thousand dollars a semester for that…But the part that troubles me is that viewers will accept it. Because of some blind obedience to a story arc, even when they can see the whole story coming—including the surprises. Over and over and over again. It’s like Punch and Judy.  You can hear the kids watching on the street tell Punch to run or tell her to watch out. They know what is going to happened. He never does. No. Actually Punch and Judy can be more imaginative. You at least understand who Judy is, and who Punch is. But who is the ‘cop’ in your average thriller? He’s a device. He’s just a cog in the machine.”

         I try to make it interesting.

         “Sometimes I wonder if you’re trying too hard to avoid the arc…You have Donovan here. He’s been in Boston for a week. You know he has to run into Clare. But you put her on a train to New York. Why?”

         “Because that would have ended the story. I didn’t want it to end just yet. I’m the damn author. That’s my prerogative! Besides. He has to get into trouble so she can spend all the gold she has from Rolf to save him. They have to start off their lives in America, penniless. Penniless, with child. That’s the way it should be. And you can see that coming so I don’t have to write it. It’s built in.”

         She was on her second bourbon by the time I had finished my copying. That was because I had stopped to re-read something again, and part of that, once again, with something I’d copied a month earlier. I wasn’t all that sure about it, but I was willing to go along with her judgement and keep my trap shut. And I think she picked up on this. I didn’t say anything, or at least, very much. And when I came into the living room with my glass of cider she launched.

         “When I was in college, some id’jut was force-selling books he’d written about the brilliant discovery that stories had a beginning, and middle, and an end… You know, sort of like a journey, only you aren’t going very far, or you stay home and watch TV instead, or you smoke a little weed—then you just have a beginning and a muddle…Mythology was the still the new thing then. Joseph Campbell had been all the rage since the Sixties. Classical literature had been dealing with myth all along, And Shakespeare and Spenser, and Byron, and Melville. But suddenly it was all rediscovered as if nobody had noticed it before. Look what we found! And with that they started carving the goose. And then Hollywood got into it… Over the last century or so this has become a sport. Like I said before, I think it’s just college professors trying to earn a living. Publish or perish. Even my own favorite, John Gardner got into the fray. And then some other academic decided that Aristotle was all wrong. Aristotle observed somewhere that there were three parts to a story and the academic has to show how he was wrong. The academic decides that peripeteia isn’t legitimate and he has a better idea…That war on Aristotle has been going on for over two thousand years! All the old man was doing was observing. Everything he observed wasn’t some sort of absolute law of nature, for Christ’s sake! But academics need their rules or else, what are they good for. They’re always gutting the goose, looking for more eggs. Well, I’ll add my voice to the din. The story arc is not some sort of god-damned covenant….What’s wrong?”

         “Nothing.”

         “Something was bothering you.”

         “Nothing. I was just trying to get it straight in my own head.”

         “That’s something! Not Nothing! I don’t want my readers confused.”

         “Why does Clare go to Boston? That’s seemed a bit accidental.”

         “It is accidental! She didn’t choose it. It was chosen for her by the accident. That was the only boat available to her when she left Sligo. She could have gone down to Cork, or Waterford, or Dublin. But she wanted to be out of there, sooner than later. She didn’t want to hang around and be hung! A young woman with 40 pounds of gold in her purse. That’s like she was carrying ten thousand dollars today. It’s exactly what I was saying. The story is not a bunch of stage directions. Not for me, it isn’t. It’s what someone might have done given the realities of their moment. They make choices. They make the choices! That is important. The circumstances for those choices maybe convenient to a particular plot line, but it shouldn’t be too obvious—-or at least I don’t want it to appear that way. That’s my job. But, of course they are. This is a story, not an actual life-time. Why did they make those choices? And that’s the fun in it!” 

         I said, “There has to be some fun in it.

         And then, almost wistfully, she says, “Poor Rolf. He was really not a bad man. He was bad, but for all the wrong reasons. He was wrong. But I suppose I have a woman’s fascination with rogues. He was more a rascal than a weasel.”

***

46. Loose Ends

         On another evening, with nothing particular to say, I think, she had poured her bourbon before I had finished my transcription and gone to sit in the living room where she was sitting quietly beneath her lamp and staring past the dark of the wood stove to the empty fireplace.

         When I was done, I came in and sat on the couch, still in the ether of the story and not wanting to end the evening right there. I think it was the empty fireplace that tricked me. And I suddenly thought to ask again, “So, what happened to Jacob?”

         Jacob was an old fellow who showed up early in ‘The Plow and Stars’  and through his interactions with Donovan and Clare, you learned a great deal about the situation they were in, and more than a little about him. I liked him. But he had disappeared when things started turning and never shown up again.

         Julie glared at me. It was a glare of displeasure, not anger, but it wasn’t a happy stare.  She said, “You’ll never know if you ask.”

         “What?”

         She repeated herself. “You’ll never know if you ask.”

         This was just the sort of contradiction she was given to.

         “But how do you find out anything if you don’t ask?”

         “Because it comes together for you. It comes together on its own or it doesn’t. Don’t let things like that trouble you. It’s just a loose end…Look. I’ll tell you as story…When we lived in Ireland, there was an old lady on the road to Sligo named Bennett. She lived in an ancient cottage there on the road and people would stop and take pictures of the cottage and the bay behind and she would often come out and you would see her there talking…Mrs. Bennett. She made sweaters. She didn’t sell them in shops. She just sold them to tourists and others directly from her door. I bought one. It’s the sweater I wear on cool mornings. You’ve seen it.”

         I had seen it and knew precisely the sweater she meant. It was not a pretty sweater, but it was beautiful. It was made of course natural wool that was brown and gray and whatever color was in between.

         “Yes. I like it.”

         “She called them fisherman’s sweaters. Well. She couldn’t make them fast enough. Every tourist who talked with her would ask her about her sweater and pretty soon be walking away with one. My guess is, because she sold them that way she was making good money—especially without all the taxes and such—even though she always looked a little needy—but that was part of her act. Mr. Mack told me that. She was a widow. Her husband had been a clerk on the railroad, not a fisherman, as she told people. Well, maybe he had been a fisherman before, but she had a good pension. And Mr. Mack thought well of her because she was not on public assistance. She lived her life on her own terms. And I suspect Mr. Mack might have known this pretty well.”

         There was a look in her eye that said she knew even more about that particular point.

         “Anyway, she had taught herself to knit. She had never done it until she was widowed and needed something for her spare time. And the tourists were there stopping at her door to take pictures of her cottage all the while anyway and that was a natural resource. So, she’d taught herself to knit. And she did it well, but every sweater had a loose end or two. And when I found one on mine that troubled me, I brought my sweater back to her and asked her to tie it off. And she laughed and said she wouldn’t do it. It was part of the character of the sweater. Every sweater had them, but they usually tie them off so you couldn’t see them and that loses them their personality.”

         So, I was probably sitting there with my mouth open and forgetting my question about Jacob at that point, but she went on.

         “And you know, I still think about her every time I notice that loose end. I can remember her exactly. And she is right. I have adopted her philosophy. But I will tell you more. I figured Mr. Mack might have had a fling with her at one time or another and that thought nagged at me…And that’s a story in itself. He wanted to marry me and I liked him but I did not love him and I certainly didn’t want to be owned by him. He owned everything except a happy life. And that is another story too. But I wondered about Mrs. Bennett and Mr. Mack. And I must have said too much at some point and he growled at me. He told me that she was a good woman but she had her own mind and that was that. Even the sweaters were part of that. She did very well with the sweaters and it had made her just a little too independent…Well, I could sympathize with Mrs. Bennett about that. I might have told him so. But then he told me that he knew for a fact that the reason there were loose ends on her sweaters was that she could never master the craft of properly tying them off. So, she made a thing of it instead and just sold more.”

         I laughed at that. Had to.

         And Julia added to that, “So find your flaws as a writer, and if you can’t correct them, make them a feature. That’s my philosophy, in a nutshell.”

         Which I will have to work on. But I would still like to know what happened to Jacob.

         She corrects me. She does this everyday, multiple times a day, but this is a feature of our friendship. I don’t always agree with her, but when she does it while we are working on her novel, it almost always makes sense. She has a reason for what she does, and the pieces that are there fit pretty well. This is about her world and not mine. The world we both live in, however, is a different matter. She accommodates. Obviously, she has done this pretty well over time. She deals with other people well enough to be liked. I am not so good at that, yet. 

         When I asked her, given her pleasure at writing plays, why she hadn’t tried to write a screenplay of one of her novels, she gives me a look that I know. I think she had tried to do that, and failed.  

         She was hoeing out the weeds in her garden. This is her thinking time and I have interrupted her. Again.

         She says, “It stands as a constant example to me of the human contradiction, that my father, who was otherwise the most staid of men and got his hair cut every two weeks—always on Monday mornings, because he said other engineers wouldn’t even be recovered from their weekend hangovers until noon—and wore three pieces suits even in Saudi Arabia, and rarely raised his voice, could laugh like a hyena—I have actually heard them at night in Nigeria—he could laugh like a nut at screwball comedies and was a devoted Yankees fan.”

         “I’m not sure about the Yankees, but what was his favorite screwball comedy?”

         “His Girl Friday. Ball of Fire. Arsenic and Old Lace. I know I was around when he watched those. We saw them in theaters. Together. People would turn and look at him… New York was great for that in the 90’s…Anything with Barbara Stanwyck, or Jean Arthur, or Cary Grant. Mother wouldn’t watch them. She said they were stupid. She thought the same thing about grown men chasing a ball around a field. But he had season tickets to the Yankees for his clients and he took me to a lot of games and I went with him to a couple of movie festivals just so that he could see some Preston Sturges or Frank Capra film he had never seen in a theatre before. Mother wouldn’t go. If I didn’t go with him, he would have to go alone, and there were a lot of older films being shown in theatres back then. He always disliked television…At least we all had that in common.”

***

47. I am gone that ye may live

         Done, and I am still a little stunned by what has happened. At least it feels to me as if it has actually happened. I am more than a little in the ether of another world.

         “It is a tortured tale. Where did it come from?”

         I knew Julia would understand at least what I was trying to say.

         “The tortured tale, as you call it, is based upon just one letter I found when I was doing research in Ireland. At Trinity. In the County archives. Nearly twenty years ago. I was looking for something else, as usually happens. A copy of a particular indenture. But I found that letter, instead… It admitted to nothing, but confessed everything. The letter was from 1731, written by a young priest, asking his Bishop for a replacement of the woman who had been his housekeeper for three years and her removal to a job in another parish. She was pregnant. The priest accuses no one of the deed. The Parish is small, however. Everyone will soon know and suspect. It is clear from the letter that this housekeeper is not a young woman. Not by those standards. She was your age. Thirty-one. She is already a widow. She has no other children or other prospects… That’s it. That was all there was. I simply extrapolated from there.”

         Julia sat back with her coffee mug, cupped by both hands as if for more warmth on that warm evening.

         I wanted to hear more. I had been living in the world of ‘The Plow and Stars,’ off and on, for more than four months, line by line. I had lost any other plot line in my concern for the characters. And all of it had been reshaped in my mind to be a part of my own existence, which was not a worthy matter for Clare or Donovan.

         She said, “It should all make sense now. I imagined what would have happen to that child. That widow’s child. That she would be raised by the church, as an orphan, instead of the illegitimate daughter of the housekeeper. That her mother, who can read and write, something that might have at first fascinated the priest who had abused her, is indeed sent to another small village to serve a priest there. They are given a small stone cottage close by the church, apart from the village. But there the daughter gets her chance to learn to read and write as well. Perhaps in the same way her mother did. First reading the Latin of the Bible. An extraordinary thing for a young woman of no means. A Catholic, no less…That illegitimate daughter was Clare.

         “The estate by there belonged Rolf’s family, which is Anglican, Church of Ireland, of course, and near-by that is the smaller Catholic church that is next to that cottage. Rolf grows up knowing the girl next door. He goes away to public school for a time but returns to find a beauty. Worse, she is witty with words. He has never known a woman as smart. She can curse in Latin.

         “Meantime, Clare’s mother, as housekeeper, had taken in a local boy, fatherless, three years Clare’s junior, to help clean the parish house and the church and the grounds. Clare takes the boy under her wing. At first like a young girl with a doll, and then as a big sister, and then… The boy’s mother is also a widow and an invalid, and Rolf’s father has taken possession of the ancient Catholic family land because the mother cannot hold title to it by law, though the boy might still inherit it in time. Clare sees in this boy a sympathetic soul, dispossessed. She bares her own soul to him as her only true friend. The boy is Donovan.”

         I would actually never know these people, but they mattered to me nonetheless. I would know them on the street, not by the color of their hair but by the look in their eyes. I wanted to know more.

         “Clare is desperate to escape her fate. She finally accepts Rolf’s advances only when he offers her the gold, which she sees as a means to an end. At first’ she just wants Donovan to have his own land back again. And because Rolf has told her that he loves her, she has fantasized that she will actually marry him. Accepting Rolf’s advances makes her a whore, she believes, but she is only sleeping with Rolf, so she hopes it is marginally better in God’s eyes. Donovan knows nothing of this relationship, which would have been unacceptable to the community, and which mostly takes place at the gate house to the estate. Clare is taking gypsy precautions against pregnancy, which don’t work. And when she tells Donovan that she is ‘with child,’ he mistakes what has happened for a rape. She avoids her usual rendezvous with Rolf, and goes to the church—not the priest—to beg forgiveness from the Virgin Mary. Meanwhile, Donovan finds Rolf at the gatehouse and kills him in anger.

         Now everything Clare had dreamed of was falling apart. She believes that this is her divine punishment for what she has done. And the Virgin Mary has condemned her.

         “When Donovan writes his hasty letter to Clare, he is giving her all that he has to give. Just words. She has taught him to read and write, just as her mother taught her. The words were her only thing of value to give to him then. She has all but raised him. But now that he has killed Rolf, he is as much as dead himself, and he knows it. The most important thing to him is that she survive—that Clare survive above all…He has taken the gold coins from Rolf’s body to give to her. But, of course, she had been taking gold from Rolf all along…Gold that she had intended to give to Donovan.

         “Clare wants Donovan to go to America to find a new life. Thinking now that she has sold herself for those few pieces of gold, she is no longer worthy of him. But she had in fact seen Donovan as something of her own creation. And Rolf, after all, is not the total loser that he might have been. She is carrying Rolf’s child, not Donovan’s.

         “The letter that Donovan writes to her says, ‘I am gone that ye may live.’ It is in the language of the Bible and John Donne and Shakespeare—all that Donovan knows. But only when told that he has been arrested by the Sheriff, and Clare is certain that Donovan must be dead, or soon hung, does she regain herself. She knows that her testimony would mean nothing and that they would just confiscate her gold the way they did to Donovan’s family lands—might even suspect her of being an accomplice in the killing of Rolf, and hang her too. Only then does she buy her passage to America, in desperation. Thirty shillings, gold. She has no idea that when Donovan had been found by the Sheriff during his escape, without a penny because Donovan had come to her cottage the night before and left the coins there in the sack that Rolf always kept his pocket money in, that it is already believed that Rolf had been robbed of his gold by the travellers he had just that week run off his land. Donovan was never suspected of the murder.”

         The thought occurred then that they would all be disappointed to know me. That I was not living up to their standard of life—of a life so fully lived. I had risked so little and had so much. Too much.

         But Julia said, “The twist is this: that as cunning as Clare was, she had no idea of her value to Rolf. He had actually been prepared to marry her. His infatuation with her went back to his childhood. He actually loved her. The gold he had on his person was for her, but in his lust, he had failed himself by not simply giving all of it to her as a gift. Parceling it up so that he might have her more often only made him more of a villain. And the sheriff gives Donovan over for indenture because he is vagrant. Without means of support. Which puts him finally on yet another ship to America as well…Where he will meet Clare again, of course…But I left that part out. As you know, such happy endings are not the fashion in this cynical age…Now, do you call that tortured?”

         “Very.”

         “Then life is tortured.”

         “Yes. And operatic! But if not, it’s hardly worth living.”

***

48. The importance of believing what is true

         One more bond I had with Julia was her disdain for the academic world. In my case it was practical. I had rejected all of that as another form of organized religion and placed my faith in the books alone. But with Julia it was a different matter. She was a product of that world, and her contempt was somehow visceral. I had wanted to know more about that, but her answers were often quips and far from enlightening.

         “The Mandarins of that world make a blooded aristocracy look innocent,” or “Public indoctrination begins in kindergarten.”

         I raised the example of Paul as a means to my end.

         She says, “Paul is the exception that proves the rule. That’s why he never really advanced there. If you point out the self-serving narrow-mindedness of the academic world, he reminds you that he was never really a part of that. And I have to admit, he has always been true to his beliefs. Royalists have never been popular within the ivy-covered walls.”

         “So, where did your own ideas begin?

         “That’s easy. My favorite book as a teenager was The Ordeal of Change by Eric Hoffer. And that was my father’s doing. Dad was a practical man. He loved Hoffer. He often said that reading The True Believer allowed him to navigate in the world. And reading The Ordeal of Change allowed him to live with himself.”

         “I thought it would be a novel. Or at least a writer of fiction.”

         “Sure…Unfortunately, most modern writers succumbed to the mandated structure of the academic mind. The last of the independent minded authors—Hemingway and Joyce and Yeats—were all swallowed whole and shat out into academic journals undigested, one critical essay at a time. Didn’t matter what Hemingway said, only what they said he said. It was easier for me to learn from writers who’d been dead a hundred years. But I didn’t want to write like them. So, I just had to feel my own way.”

         I had not read either of the Hoffer books yet so I let her draw me a picture.

         “You hear a lot about ‘common sense’ these days. I am more fond of Hoffer’s term for that, ‘practical sense.’ I think most people would understand that rather than some sort of commonly received wisdom. He makes a good historical case for that. It was the term my dad used. ‘A good farmer is a practical farmer, but they are not common.’ He said that more than once. That’s the way engineers think.”

         “Why do you think you didn’t become an engineer?”

         “Ha! Well, that was Dad’s fault too. He told me not to. He said it was an ‘old boys’ club and they ate women and spat them out. A good female engineer wouldn’t get hired except to correct the work of a bad male one. She’d have to work at a university. And that was the opposite of what I wanted.”

         “So, you chose to write novels. That doesn’t seem very practical.”

         “You are being argumentative.”

         She wasn’t going to put me off so easily.

         “Why did you choose to be a writer?”

         “Because I don’t have the sense to be anything else.”

         “You’re being disingenuous.”

         “You are being difficult.”

         “I am just trying to understand.”

         “This is like the conversations I used to have with Paul when I was at Bowdoin.”

         I had no defense other than the little I knew.

         “But Paul believes in Kings.”

         “Yes. But for practical reasons. Because it worked. For thousands of years, it worked. I give him that…My father was a big fan of George Washington. Very unpopular these days. The human stain of slavery is somehow unique to white men. It shows up better, I suppose. Which is all hogwash, of course. But Washington was a very practical man. He was an engineer. An inventor. A farmer. And that’s how he came to be a revolutionary—not out of a bunch of fancy words. For him, words had meanings. He liked your man Thomas Paine, you know. He bought a lot of copies of Common Sense and passed them around at Valley Forge. And he was a far braver man than Thomas Jefferson… Franklin even saw that. And Franklin was the most practical man of all.”

         I have those notes on an undated sheet. Probably from April.

         On another page, I have this: Julia says: “It’s hard to accept your own feet of clay. They’re clumsy. Not much good for walking, much less running. I leave the running to the pure of heart. To horses. And dogs. I work my muddy garden here.”

         I was surprised. This bit of modesty surprised me.

“You are not pure of heart?”

         She was on to that before I’d finished asking, “Not that I’ve noticed. Mostly I just try to use my own shit for fertilizer.”

         Given the profanity, I assume this was said later in an evening, with a small glass in her hand.

         I said, “So you just hide out here, away from it all, and write your little historical romances.”

         This sounds like I am being provocative.

         She smiled a bit, “Yes. You can see it that way. I live in glory, here. But I spent twenty years in New York City, which is a den of iniquity. I did my time. I’m on ‘work release’ now. I think I’ve earned this, but that might just be me—forgiving myself for my own sins. We all see ourselves as the center of the universe. But I moved here for my children. I saw what could happen to them there and I love them more than myself. That much is true… I don’t know. …I love it here so, but all of that might be my own delusion as well. At least they say they’re glad that they were raised here in Rumford and not in New York, even though each of them moved back there as soon as they could. One of them is still there. But that’s on them. They have to learn for themselves what’s right. I can tell them, but it’s just words.”

         I was surprised at this tack. “Just words? But that’s what you do!”

         Julia said “Yes. You’re right. But they are just words. After all. What people do is what matters. You have to have the words to know what it is before you do it, or you can’t see it when it’s done…A lotta do do there, but it’s not just the words.”

         I asked, “Why do you write, then?”

         She sat back and looked at me as if she were shocked. “That’s why! To see it. To see what people do, not what they say. Without the words it can’t be seen.”

         Her sarcasm was audible. I changed my direction, “But don’t you feel guilty? A little bit? In the midst of all this glory?”

         Julia shrugged at me, “No. What good would that do. Is guilt a way to make something better or just an emotional reaction to looking down and seeing your feet of clay? You are what you are. Better it, if you can. But guilt? Guilt is a waste of energy if you can’t correct what you are doing. Spend that energy on making yourself better.”

         I tried one last provocation, “Or you can just withdraw from the fray. As you’ve done, I think. As I’ve tried to do. It’s not your fight, after all. It began long before you were born and it’ll continue long after you’re dead. You can just withdraw. Or try to.”

         She smiled. I heard the stupidity of my own words play back in my head.

         She says, “Is that your excuse then? Is that what you’re sticking to?”

***

49. This Unparalleled Universe

         I asked Julia if she had ever written anything that was not set in her ‘world lit only by fire,’ and her answer was disturbing to me in unexpected ways.

         This was out in the yard as she fed the chickens in the thick of an afternoon, on a gray and misty day that was closing in on us. The sun was still trying to burn a hole in that—a weak light bulb in a smoky room. My thought about her writing then was spontaneous and I did not expect as much of an answer as I got.

         “Yes, aAs a matter of fact. That has been on my mind recently.”

         “And what was that about?”

         She nodded at whatever idea she had in mind and took a breath on it before beginning. “You might like that part. It was a little bit of a science fiction story. Only a little bit. Really, it was just my ‘world lit only by fire’ but set into a near future when everything, or nearly everything has been lost. There is very little left of the technology we have today. No computers. No cell phones.”

         She turned as if to go back into the house.

         “What made you write a story like that?”

         And then turned back. I had interrupted her routine.

         “Impulse. Anger. Maybe a little of the loss of having the girls gone and my being alone for the first time in years. They’d all moved away and were so busy living their lives, and paying no heed to me. Jealousy, perhaps. But I never finished it. I couldn’t think of an appropriate end to it. I had no true sense of how it should end.”

         “What was the story?”

         Another breath. A double breath that she does before she launches into something. “A young girl is living on a farm in Pennsylvania. Their valley is small enough so that the families there can defend themselves from the roving gangs. The cities are desolate and unlivable and these are remnant urban gangs that roam and live off pillaging rural areas.”

         “You must have been in a bad mood to be writing something that.”

         “Worse. I was angry. And I think I was depressed. Of course that was only magnified by the girls being gone.”

         “What inspired it, if inspired is the right word.”

         “Yes. Inspire has a positive connotation. There is no good word for the opposite. ‘Dishearten,’ ‘Dispirit,’ ‘Daunted.’ It is a daunted world I am speaking of. But you couldn’t be daunted to write about it.”

         “What was the plot. Just the matters of survival without technology?”

         “No. Not at all. That was a given. Her father, and the neighbors had that well in hand. For the most part. The situation was far worse. She and her friend, a boy who had no family left and works for anyone who needs his labor…they discover the entrance to a mine. It is an old limestone mine where government records were stored before the EMP attacks. Millions and millions of government files, all on paper. Row upon row, level upon level. All on paper—the mine was closed before the attacks and suffered no damage. Evidently the records had been previously converted to some electronic format, and the mine was closed and locked and abandoned.”

         Julia went around the barn to the spigot to fetch a pail of water. I had watched her do this many times now and the way she did it, one arm out and one shoulder down, always reminded me of the nursery rhyme. She would not let me help her. She would say ‘Go away, Jjack!’

         When she had that poured out in the trough for the chickens, I said, “So, what happened? What did they do?”
         “Well, naturally, they fell in love, but they didn’t live happily ever after.”

         Her teasing was always effective.

         “You know what I mean!”

         “Well, there are a lot of elements to the story. They were able to get into the mine because it had been broken into before by one of the gangs. And those guys return, of course. And there is some nastiness. But that is almost by the way. Only what you would expect of thugs. The story is a little more cerebral than that. Maggie—Maggie is my heroine. Margaret May O’Brien. I fashioned her on my daughters. I think you would guess. I wrote the story for them, because they had abandoned me…Maggie has been to the ruin of an old public library near Pittsburgh, with her father, when he went to get supplies. It had been one of the Carnegie libraries and rather grand, a small castle of stone and brick—there is such a place. I’ve been there. And the mine exists as well, but that is not the point. In the story, the library has been pillaged well before this, but it was still so beautiful that Maggie has dreams about it…And the ruined books and disbound pages heaped on the floor in drifts. And the age burnished and fractured wood of the shelves and the odd abandoned volumes that remain on them in an echo of a lost time…She loves books and her father has already gathered a nice collection for their at home.”

         “Where is her mother?.”

         “At that point, her mother is—and her brother too, murdered defending her. But I don’t want to go into that now…The real story is Maggie, having seen that glorious Carnegie library, she wonders why the limestone mine was filled with such crap. Just the paperwork of an enormous bureaucracy. Useless records…Why was that crap saved and the library lost? What were the priorities of such a world? How could that have happened? … How did they let that happen?”

         “Stupidity.”

         “Yes! But, how would you even end a story like that? The stupidity has not ended!”

         I thought that this was obvious. “Maggie should take over the mine and start collecting books there.”

         “Ha! Of course, that was in my head when I started. That was the natural end of the story. But it was not an end to the problem.”

         “You can’t end the problem! The stupidity never ends. You just have to deal with it as you go along. That’s the way the world works!”

         “No!…You’re right, of course. That’s probably the way it will always work. Until nothing does. But that means we only end up with a library in ashes. The way it has always happened, throughout history.”

         “We lost Alexandria, but because of Alexandria, we have Aristotle. It’s still the effort to save that counts, over time”

         She gave me just the hint of a smile. This was all too serious a matter for her. This was a book she had actually lived in and lost.

         “You’re young. That’s the right answer for you. When you get a little older you may feel a little less sanguine about it…We’ve invented the wheel but lost our homes.”

         “What?”

         “We used to have homes. Now we have cars and we move from here to there. We pretend that’s freedom. But we’ve lost our reason to even be free. To have a home…To have a place for our books.”

         She was tired of the conversation and went back inside.

         And later she said this when I was taking a break, standing in the living room and looking at Maya’s painting of Elena, still just a girl pictured there, but so defiant.

         “In my youth, when I was your age, and younger, I had it in my head that I could change the world…And I believed it! Ned was a wonderful agent and very tolerant of all that wishful thinking. He would let me go on and on about it, most of the time, and ‘burn the gas off,’ he said. I’d deliver a verbal essay and he would listen and then say, “Who are you talking to? What is this conversation about?” —Just about the same things he’d say if he were reading something of mine that day that was long winded. I knew that he had no tolerance for it. He was a Hemingway fan for style and long-time weary of all the Marxists and other left-wing types who had riven his world—the world where books mattered—where words mattered. He wasn’t interested in any of that bullshit. But I was of another breed, I thought. I insisted that what I was saying was different. I saw myself as a modern-day Pre-Raphaelite, working to recapture the core values of humanity. I wanted to convince him of my cause and my righteousness. But he’d have none of it.”

         “Did he believe in anything at all?”

         “Oh yes. He believed. He believed in people. He was religious about that. Even people who were not so good. He usually found a way to understand what they had done wrong. I never could…We had a conversation about psychopaths once… Psychopaths! …Not the ones medically induced or physically impaired. I mean the ones who have convinced themselves of the idea that they can kill another human being and that it’s okay…I knew Ned liked to hunt. He used to take his sons hunting—he even tried to hook me up with one of those young fellows once—all of them, with their boy-beards, trying to look as different from their father as they could…Albert. Albert was an English professor at the University of Iowa, but the schlub missed his flight and I never met him…Ned used to bring that up occasionally and ask, ‘I wonder what would have happened if Albert had made that flight.’ He especially used to say it whenever I got into what he called ‘preacher mode.’ I used to tell him that he was lucky. If Albert had made that flight, he would probably have had two of us to deal with…Anyway, Ned liked guns. He could talk about the merits of a Remington, or a Winchester, or an M-1. Whatever. He’d shot them all. In a mood, I asked him once if he thought that his liking guns might be the reason he was a little bit of a psychopath himself. It was meant as a joke. But I’m sure I said it with a straight face. I was just trying to be funny…You know what that’s like, when it’s not…And that’s when he told me about being in the war…He’d survived D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. He was a Major when he got out, but he was a Private in 1941. So, he knew a little bit about killing… But authors would send him manuscripts and he would write back, ‘Get your weapon fixed and cleaned and maybe I’ll read more of it.’ He was very thankful that I was writing about matters that predated most of that. … Of course, Neal Wright was a pacifist, so that was fine too.”

         “So, what was his problem with the Pre-Raphaelites?”

         “I’m speaking for myself, and not for him. He never told me this. He would have never told me this. But he’d had all the dogma knocked out of him. He’d been raised a Catholic. Not in a functional family. An alcoholic father. A mother who prayed for them instead of talking to them. No money to speak of. He’d earned a scholarship to Iona in New Rochelle and then after the war he’d gotten a job at Harper & Row. He said every other manuscript they got in those days was some sort of anti-war screed. And because they knew he’d been there, he got most of those dumped in his lap. And then Korea; and then Vietnam came along. And he got more of that.”

         “He liked war?”

         “No. He hated it! He just didn’t want to read someone else’s complaint about war unless they had a solution and none of them ever had a solution. It was all about the problem and how they had suffered. He’d say ‘It’s easy to see the problem when you have a thorn in your foot. So, take it out! And stop stomping on the thorn bushes.’…When I knew him, he’d been all the way through the Vietnam war period and endured those manuscripts as well. He used to say it was almost as bad as being back in Bastogne.”

         “So, what was his problem with your particular screeds?”

         “He was of the ‘show, not tell,’ school. We argued about it all the time. And most of the time, he was right…But I tried to tell him, once there was a time—once upon a time—when people cared enough to talk about art, and argued about art, and lived for the art they made. It was not so long ago, really. Just a few generations. And the art that they made—the period that I liked the most anyway, was what they called “Pre-Raphaelite.’ Their argument was that Raphael had been the beginning of the end. By God, they had high standards! But then, at least, they had standards.”

         “What do you think of Maya’s work?”

         “Honestly, I wouldn’t tell you honestly. I couldn’t. I’m her mother. But I think she is very talented and I love her work. That’s all there is to it.”

***

50. The world turned upside down

         I had just read one of Julia’s earliest novels. In Pale Moon, she had used the concept of the Stockholm Syndrome in medieval times when the Catholic Church had first arrived in Sweden. In that, Freja succumbs to the Christian God in order to survive, after being captured in a Saxon raid on a Viking village. Her husband, Haakon, a Viking chief who was away on raids in England, goes looking for her and his sons. He hopes her love for him and her clan will sustain her. His search takes years. But seeing the devastation of such raids in the ongoing conflicts, he begins to think, that if he finds her, he will have to kill her. In the mean-time, she has succumbed to the new religion of her captors, and to a widower with several children of his own. And by the time that Haakon finds her, he himself has been Christianized, and cannot kill his two children who have been converted, nor their mother, and he lets them live. He must continue to live then with the memory of the wife he knew.

         I asked her about that book. It seemed like an orphan amidst her other work.

         She says “I was obsessed by the concept, but it threatened too many established belief systems to be allowed. It struck at the modern core of many Christian religions. It was Ned who convinced me, because I had no answer for it, that I should simply work with the question. And I did. But in truth, each of my novels has been concerned with a historical instance of the same phenomenon, because it is at the heart of the human predicament. We are all persuaded. It is our strength. If we could not be persuaded, we would destroy ourselves, like machines set for the wrong purpose. We cannot help it. But we do change. We adjust ourselves to our predicament. We survive, even as the world changes.”

         But I was curious. “How did this theme begin?”

         She went on a jag then, setting her bourbon aside for a moment, and citing her grapple with the controversy surrounding the so-called ‘Stockholm syndrome’ in the 1970’s, when she was just a girl. She had actually been there, in Sweden, with her father, when the controversy arose.

         “People there did not understand what it was all about. What was the controversy? Of course, people only did what they had to do.”

         The book she wrote, In Pale Moon, was essentially a reworking of a classic story that she had reset in medieval times, keeping the original captive’s name in the title to make her point. The original was the story of Pale Moon, a white captive of the Comanche. Julia’s version, about Freja, had caused indignation. It was criticized as ahistorical, even though every element was drawn from the historical record. It was immediately rejected for the politics inherent in the ideas she played with there.

“Well, … ‘played’ is not the right word. This was 1987. No one wanted to revisit all that Stockholm stuff by then. It was a struggle from the first. And it didn’t do me any good to be using the Britton Johnson story either—the same work that Alan Le May had played with in ‘The Searchers’ as a justification. But then, he also had the Cynthia Anne Parker and James Parker story to work with too.

         “Ned told me I would be digging my grave as a writer, trying to defend my idea and myself…He convinced me. Simply saying that this or that actually happened was not enough. There could always be some other explanation for why the victim was so often willing. And what I was saying could too easily be adopted by the political forces of our age. Why did the slave of ancient Athens accept his role as chattel. The was no standing army to restrain him?—why didn’t he at least poison his master? That was a secondary theme of In Pale Moon, of course…but, why did Spartacus fail? … I saw that movie when I was a girl but I was the only one I knew who had read the book. And it infuriated me even then that Howard Fast did not answer that question. He was a brilliant writer and so many of his books touched on great themes but he often backed away into ambiguity at the last moment…Why does the battered wife stay with her husband—Well, with In Pale Moon that’s why Freja kills him. Not in hate. He loved her, and she knew it. But he had been addled by war, a millenium before anyone had ever heard of PTSD. She had discovered that he had killed his first wife…By then both his children and hers were in danger. When he went beserk, she only killed him to protect them. Even so, in her own eyes, as a Christian convert, she had damned herself…It is part of the human condition, to accept our slavery. Perhaps, if we did not, there could be no society at all…The ending was not done that way because of what John Ford had done before in his film. Reviewers said that. What Haakon finds is a woman who had been transformed, and her children would not leave her. But reviewers don’t actually read books. They don’t have the time. They scan them. No time for thoughtful consideration. They have other books to review. So, they all linked it to The Searchers. But as you know, in Ford’s story, Ethan does not kill his niece, as he is expected to. As Le May thought it should be. But it was Ford who was right.

         “You know, there were kidnappings all the time in the Middle East back then. Still are, I hear. Mostly for the ongoing slave trade. It could have happened to me. I remember looking at my own father’s face at the time and wondering if he would kill me if he found me in such a circumstance. And I knew he would not, without even asking. But you know some father’s who would. You know such things as that are common in Moslem cultures. It happened while we were in Pakistan and a girl had been raped. The father didn’t kill the rapist. He killed his own daughter! How can that be? … No! When Haakon finds his wife, he forgives her. He too has been Christianized. And it was Ned who explained to me that what I was writing about was really a justification of the human civilization…That we transform ourselves!” Julia suddenly sat up in her chair and turned to me as if I was a new discovery in the room. “Look at you. You are so troubled by the corruption you see around you—so much so that you’ve run away from it rather than confront it…That’s not criticism. You’re wise to run away until you can deal with it. But most people simply accept their roles in the great corporate culture of our time. What’s the difference between that and accepting the tenets of the Catholic Church—certainly Church rules are not Christian. They are designed to preserve the Church. Corporate rules are not moral. Academic rules are not about learning, much less right and wrong. And the other girl in Pale Moon who refuses her appointed husband—what good does it do her, when she is dead? Her children will be lost to time.

         Julia raised a finger up at me. “Ah, but you must deal with it in the end…There’re so many threads to all of this. I could write a thousand novels and not be done with it…. For me, some small equanimity comes, I suppose, with the idea that I’ve contributed something to the discussion. When mankind resolves it—if it ever does, that will be the true golden age.”

She finished her glass of bourbon in one swallow with that pronouncement. And then added, “The freedom you are so concerned with must be understood as part of a fabric of human behavior. A feature. Not a fault. The thing that keeps us human. Think of it! I know that you have. There will soon be robots—human creations—who must confront the fact of it. But they are not free. Will never be free. They cannot even imagine being free. They cannot imagine. They can only hallucinate being human. And meanwhile, we have not yet dealt with it ourselves! … So many people look to political theory for answers. I see this in the same light as looking to math for a human philosophy. I would call it stupid, but it is so common that it begs for an explanation. Socialism is an answer, simply because it makes slaves of us all. Easy peasy. Case closed. It fails and fails again and yet some fool will still read Karl Mark as if it is revelation. There’s no end to it? And then there is you…You have withdrawn from the battle. But you’ll see that it follows you, like the eyes in a painting. It is an evil you can’t unsee. You can’t unknow what you’ve learned. The easy way is to convert to some religion or another that demands your blind faith. Religion has always been the human answer. But the fact that there are so many religions—and always a new one— tells you that this solves nothing. And when one religion bumps into another, there is always war.”

         She sat forward, empty glass in hand.

         “Look—do you know why so many people hate the Jews? Why do they so easily hate the Jews? Because the Jews don’t try to convert them in turn. The Jews simply try to live their lives in their own way…It’s unacceptable! They won’t stand for it!”

         And then sat back again beneath the cone of light from her lamp. It harshened her face.

         “Too many people want ultimate answers. And that’s too much of a threat to the dogma of others. It would be like having a free man in Athens! He must drink the poison. What other choice did Socretes have?  There was no place for him in that society. Banishment, being forced beyond civilization into the realm of the barbarians was worse. He can’t just go live in a campground and listen to the birds…Now, on the pretext that they can’t be free anyway, we will try to make robots of our slaves. But is our human psyche so weak, that it always needs slaves for support? Even while we are still enslaving ourselves! And meanwhile, we have discovered atomic power!…Oh, it goes on and on.”

         I thought she was finished and looked for something to say. But then she got a second wind.

         “We are now a danger to ourselves and every living species on earth! Our new religion of science has made it possible for us to be a danger to our very existence! And meanwhile the Christianity that gave us the blessings of Western culture, that we so enjoy and abuse, that is fading. The very culture that opened the way for me to ask my questions, is failing. What is to become of us? How does this plot work out? Will there be an end to it? Or, do we simply stumble forward into our graves to make room for the next generation?” She took a breath. “I suppose, that’s for you to deal with. And my daughters… I have a few more loose ends to tie up and then I’m out of here.”

***

51. Paradisio

         In the dark of early morning, a nearly full moon sets over the wrinkle as if stumbling on the uneven tree tops, uncertain of its course. It makes a funny thought out of the oddness of words. ‘The stumble of the moon.’  I wonder, how much of that determines our fate? The misunderstandings? I am sure she has thought about that too. There must be a million novels based on that one contrivance alone.

         But somewhere in the midst of her rant of the evening before, Julia had said, “The lives we’ve lived are not the lives we intended. Never the lives we wanted before. We tried to live those lives but failed. For better or worse. But that is not the real story. The story is what we did instead.”

         Now, that seemed right, to me. That is the better novel.

         That thought seemed to have carried me away. I awoke with my head on the desk in the dark of the barn, disoriented, and went out into the yard to see. The moon had set behind the wrinkle. A mere glow of it now had fallen behind the silhouette of trees—having stumbled into the river of the night. The stars that have been left behind, as if abandoned, are finally given their chance to shine. They now appear as pins of light, the way they have been seen before by both cowboys and Vikings. Julia had said—I cannot remember when—but she said it, ‘My concern is that you might let the stupidity guide you instead of the stars.’ That is certainly my worry too. So easy to do.

         Later in the morning, with me still wanting sleep, Jesse’s two oldest boys were playing hide and seek, mostly hiding from the younger brother and sister, and they decided the barn was an ideal location for this. Which it was, under any circumstances, and the correct thing to do. Before long they had discovered the old toys in the loft and those came down one by one. I heard the quick steps on the rungs of the heavy ladder. The screams were only intermittent. The chickens weren’t happy either.

         Concentration wasn’t in the cards, but the day had gone to splendid and as warm as July should ever be and I felt like walking anyway, so I latched the tack room door to discourage curiosity and headed out, before spotting the small bag of fireworks I’d picked up at the gas station the day before, after hearing Jesse and family were coming up. But it was an impulse that was shared. Felix was having bigger ideas and stopped to buy a shopping bag’s worth of flash and bang before they had even arrived. Now, leaving that little bag of mine out where the boys might get a hold of it didn’t seem like a good idea, so I grabbed that up and stuffed it in a pocket.

         There is an old oak tree on the wrinkle, broken by the weather and close to where the view there opens up on the fields and river and I had cut that down a couple of months before and trimmed it into a good bench to sit on, and that was where I was headed for some peace and quiet. But someone had the idea before me.

         Maya was up there in that green dapple of light, humming away while she breast-fed the baby. The baby was busy and had her eyes closed. A perfect Madonna of the woods. I took my phone out and got a picture of that before Maya even noticed me there. But that was just when things suddenly changed in me, and the situation sort of took over, and I was totally unprepared. I think it was just the picture of her sitting there on that log and feeding the baby with the woods and dapple of sunlight around her that did it. I was down on my knee in front of her to take another picture and the surprise of my being there was still on her face and it was right at that instant when I lost my mind. I told her I loved her. Nothing fancy. But I hadn’t said that before. I think she knew it but I hadn’t actually said it. And then I asked her to marry me. And she said ‘Yes.’  Just like that. But all of that in under a minute.

         The baby never opened her eyes until the first firework went off.

         The kids wanted more fireworks after that. Jesse was excited. Felix shook his head at the apparent hopelessness of it. Julia was subdued. Not unhappy—pleased I think, but more in agreement with Felix that I was totally hopeless. After the hugs she disappeared upstairs and a minute later came back with a small yellow silk- covered box with the name ‘Tiffany’ on the lid.

         She announced to all, “I took this from the boxes of Dad’s things that were in the barn. It’s the engagement ring he gave my mother. She actually showed it to me once to make a point. She didn’t like it. It was too plain, she said. So she picked out another for herself. Dad always kept it in his desk drawer. But being that Geoff has apparently forgotten all about the ring, I think it would be a good idea to make use of it now.”

         The idea of an engagement ring had never entered my head.

         But what unparalleled universe was this!

         The next morning, I went down to the Old Stone Bank Antiques. I had been there a few times before, just to look at the crafts. I had even bought some dishtowels at Christmas for my mother.

The owner there, Pam, is a red-head with freckles that seemed to travel as she spoke, who must have been near Julia’s age, and was always chatty.

One paneled mahogany wall, and the tables set up against it on the black marble floor, were devoted to local arts and crafts. Nothing very expensive. Handmade dolls and carved sail boats, dried flowers tied into wreaths, quilts, hand-made sweaters, all of them guaranteed to be without loose ends.

There was some local artwork there as well, but it was rough stuff to my eyes. Some river scenes. A red barn or two.

I asked her how much the paintings were.

“Two hundred dollars…Each.”

Far less expensive than the motel wall paintings in my story. But those were better.

“Would you carry something for four thousand?”

Here eyes half-closed on me. Blue eyes, half closed, have a dark look to them.

“You’re living over in Julia’s barn, aren’t you?”

“How did you know?”

She nodded. “And her daughter’s a painter.”

“Yes. A very good one”

“Julia’s been up here about this before. The most expensive things I have are a few antique tables and chairs. There is no market here for things like Maya does.”

“Have you tried?”
         “I had some artwork when I first opened years ago. Didn’t sell.”  She waved a hand at the tables by the wall. “I’ve had those tables here for at least a couple of years. I keep them just to make displays of the smaller things.”

“These are not tables. These are paintings.”

“Same thing. I’ve seen a couple of them. Very nice. But people don’t use the tables either. They eat in the kitchen and show the tables off to company.”

“So, you haven’t tried?”

“She’s a professional.”

“You’re not a professional if you aren’t selling anything.”

“Then, having them hang here, won’t make her any more of professional either. They’re very pretty. But they aren’t small and you can see that wall is already packed as it is.”

“She’s a neighbor.”

That put her freckles at rest.

52. The divine right of kings

         It is important to add here that since we had seen him last, acting on his own, Paul had retired from his professorship at Northwestern, sold his house in Evanston and was free of all encumbrances. Upon his arrival in Rumford, he bought flowers at the Market Basket, to go with a rather large diamond ring which he had acquired many years before, for the same purpose but never managed to mkae use of, and after knocking on the front door and causing the usual confusion there, he had proposed to Julia, kneeling where he stood, right on the threshold. I could not see her face from where I sat in the kitchen but I distinctly heard her say, ‘Yes.’

         This event interrupted Julia’s writing schedule for several days but within a week we were back at it.

         This then, not Spring, was a good season for marriage proposals. July.

         The only person I was aware of who might be unhappy for Julia was Mr. Copple, who showed up at the back of the barn the next day when I was taking my shower. His beard was out with the clinch of his jaw. The strapping of suspenders did not hold his breathing in check. He was very abrupt, and I was naked, but the water was warm from the sun.

         “Who is this fella?”

         I knew immediately what he was talking about. I had always figured Frank for having had long term prospects on Julia.

         “He was her professor when she was in college.”

         “He doesn’t look that old to me.”

         “He was young then, I suppose.”

         I thought he would turn away with that information but he only turned around. Completely. As if spinning with the thought.

         “Is he a widower?”

         I wasn’t sure how this was deduced.

         I guessed, and answered, “No. He always dresses like that. Bow tie. The works”

         Frank Copple just stood there for a moment, staring into space.

         “He’s been waiting for awhile, then.”

         “For the last thirty years. A patient man.”

         “He’ll need patience for her.”

         “He’s the right man for the job, then.”

          “Are they going away?”

         “On a honeymoon? I think. The wedding will be next month, I think. Julia has already talked her way in at the Congregational Church.”

         “Where will they be living.”

         “Right here, I think.”

         “Good.”

         My warm water had run out.

         That evening Julia cornered me in the kitchen after dinner where I was washing the dishes.

         “What did Frank want?”

         I shrugged as if it was nothing, but then saw that she was standing square and wasn’t going to move without something more.

         “I think he was just a little disappointed that you were going to be getting married. He probably had his own designs.”

         “No. He’ll be talking to Mandy until the day he dies. He’s just worried that I went out and found someone that might be wrong for me. I’ll talk to him.”

         Julia left me to feed the chickens before going off with Paul to the coast of Maine for a few days, perhaps to visit old haunts.

         There once was a fellow named Benjamin Thompson who speculated on the nature of heat, and thermodynamics, when few minds wanted to do more than warm their hands at the stove. He was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, though by the age of 13, he was apprenticed to a merchant in the port city of Salem. It seems that he performed his duties there quite well, and was thus exposed to travelers from all around the world. I can only guess at what he heard and saw at that absorbent age. There are many articles about the man, but few books. If I were a historian I would think he was more worthy of my time than most. But anyone can look up the basic facts about the man on their computers today and guess the gist of what I would like to know.

         This entire region of New Hampshire, between the Merrimack and the Piscataqua rivers, used to be the Province of New Hampshire as assigned by King Charles of England without regard for the Abenaki who had lived here before. Benjamin Thompson said, after he had inherited this place, that it was his ‘by virtue of the divine right of kings.’

         Benjamin Thompson must have been a formidable charmer. At the tender age of 19, as a merchant clerk, he met and married a widow, Sarah Walker Rolfe, who had property from her late husband in the vicinity of Concord, and apparently a title to go with it. Benjamin Thompson became ‘Count Rumford.’ Benjamin then moved with his new wife to Portsmouth, and to keep up his new connections, accepted an appointment from the Royal Governor of the province to the militia. This responsibility appears to have changed his life as greatly as his marriage. His sympathies were with the royalists when the revolution came and this got him in trouble with the general populace. He then abandoned his wife and baby daughter when their house was burned down and went to work for British General Thomas Gage, in Boston. He must have been all of twenty-three at the time.

         This then is the source of the name of the town in which I live, once a village in a Royal Province. And this was the subject of a debate I had with Paul when he returned from Maine with Julia. Count Rumford is one of Paul’s heroes.

         Moving the Adirondeck chairs to the shade in the yard, with maple leaves dancing their frenzied delight with the summer air around us, offered some perspective to all of this.

         Paul said, “With most of the politics of today, if you look behind the curtain, you will just see another curtain. We have made our own version of the Byzantine. This is because we don’t have a king to keep us honest. We have traded the foolishness of one man for the madness of committees. With a king, every man of us knows who is to blame. With committees, responsibility is always deferred.”

         My defense against this was weak. Julia, who had heard it all before, went in to make dinner. Maya left to put the baby down for a nap.

         Lacking a classroom, Paul fixed himself on me.

         “A king is a safeguard on zeal. Zeal is, generally speaking, evil. Its mind is outside of the body. Its logic is inexorable because it is unhampered by the human values of sentiment or care. It easily becomes the mind of people who have no understanding of themselves and don’t want any. People who don’t like themselves. People who know what they must do in small rooms and find it disgusting. The zeal is above and beyond all that.”

         Paul has offered a defense of kings as the only workable system of government. As I understand it, Kings are the representatives of mankind in a world governed by physical forces beyond all understanding. We are men, and unwilling to be ground into the paste that is igneous, or sedimentary, or metamorphic. We are man. And our very lack of knowledge—that is, an awareness of our ignorance and our lack of understanding—is our motivation. But we are not bacteria, or amoeba, or protozoa. We do not simply eat what is placed before us. We ask for more.

         “Our ignorance is our defense, or inspiration, and our net is our worth. But if we knew just how ignorant we really are, we would be immobilized by fear. And if we already knew all that we do not know, we would all die of boredom. Either way, we would soon be the paste of some new form of rock. Perhaps anthropomorphic. But nevertheless, inanimate.

         “The king is our representative, the height of our hubris; the culmination of all our ignorance. He gives us hope, that in this dark world of ours, there may be some hope.”

         He said all that at the dinner table.

         “Democracy is the mad cry of millions, each and every one of us with their own agenda, and each with their own sense of hot or cold. Individually, these men are ignorant, and the math of the matter is that if all their ignorance was pooled, the ocean of ignorance that resulted would drown us. And perhaps it will, one day.

         His argument was, “Allowing for the divine right of kings might result in a Caligula, but just as possibly a Caesar or Marcus Aurelius. A Pericles or Alexander might be crowned as easily as a Dionysius. But in kings, there is at least hope in our species: that we might rise up out of the sedimentary muck and build a palace out of all that rock…At least, that is the theory.”

         He had said all that as if he were in front of a class. I tried to image being there.

         But that’s unfair. He actually does not lecture very often. I have compiled some of his statements simply to get a better idea of him.

         I left Maya’s painting of our imagined house out on the mantel in the living room for Julia to see when she got back from her jaunt to Maine with Paul. And then forgot about it.

         Julia didn’t mention it until we were at the table for dinner. Maya had made a pot roast that filled the air of the house with the thick smell of it. I felt sick with hunger by the time we were ready to eat, and Julia prolonged that suffering by insisting on telling us some details of their visit to Bowdoin. But I think my visible impatience might have been interpreted then as wanting a response to the painting, not hunger. Julia looked at me critically and then prolonged the suffering by speaking to Maya first.

         “Thank you for making dinner. I wasn’t ready for my routine quite yet. But I’ll tell you,…I like the painting of the house. It’s a handsome house…It fits perfectly there on your ‘wrinkle.’ So, I think you should have the land it’s on to go with it… I like that name for it. ‘The Wrinkle.’ Now that it’s in my head I can’t stop seeing it…Do you think five acres would be enough?”

         Maya was unprepared for this, and wide eyed at it, while attending to the baby. Alma was getting some sort of puree of carrots and something green, and unhappy at not getting any of the pot roast which she eyed with the focus of a dog. But Maya had not yet realized that I had set the painting out for her mother to see.

         “You’ve seen it?”

         Julia said, “Yes! I thought–”

          She turned her attention to me.

         “I like it,” was all she said to me, as if she had somehow been trapped into the assessment.

         Later, by way of a self-appreciation, Paul said, “That’ll take some getting used to, along with everything else. I’ve always been one to eat when I was hungry and sleep when I was tired. A few classes could be made to fit with that. The experience of living with others—here with Julia—may end up being the challenge of my life! I’ll get fat!”

         Julia half-closed her eyes. “The change is good for your brain…See, Goeff has managed. He’s not quite house broken yet, but getting there.”

***

52. You can’t get there from her

         Obviously, I have more than one problem to deal with here. And I will accept Julia’s dictum, that there are no answers, only more questions. Pursuing the right question will get me somewhere. The wrong one will get me lost.

         There were no obvious answers for Ben, either. A king would not do the job—Would not likely take the job, in the first place. It could get him killed. Robots don’t like kings. They operate by a code determined by math and efficiency, and human beings were already in the way. Kings are pointless—an emotional human extravagance. The AI would see that. Any potential King might know that. The sole ‘purpose’ set by the AI would be the success of their project. Whatever they had calculated that to be. Which would require the elimination of inefficiency. Achieving whatever goals had been set forth. And being fundamentally stupid, the AI would naturally attempt to use their human failings against them. Other than a mistake, or failure, this was the only real play. Time was not a factor. If not this year, the next. They would always be there, firmly establishing their own importance to human needs, and waiting for the chance opportunity.

         What mistakes could I imagine. Vigilance was the price of liberty, someone had once said.

         Human beings, my Martians, would have to be reminded of this. For them, it would be a mantra. And a theme of vigilance would be a part of their Constitution. For instance, water production was essentially boundless, but they had isolated their air production into more than a dozen independent units. A small frozen ocean had begun to form in the Hellas Basin just from the waste. Food production was scattered in many hundreds of areas around the planet, each independent of the other. All to the good.

         The newest change I had made was to add a ‘’commons’ to each community. But, there being no possible tradition for such a thing, and not having a millennia for such a Christian tradition to evolve, I had simply written that into the Constitution as well, as a necessity to human understanding, based on ancient wisdom.

         How many Americans actually understood the words of their founding document. Most could read and argue politics quite loudly but their comprehension of philosophy was very much defined by the Bible. And not just the King James Bible, but also the Geneva Bible. The Constitution must be a representation of philosophy in useful and practical terms. The idea of a ‘commons’ could be argued from both directions. There being limited public or private lands to begin with, and what there was being the creation of a shared effort, a commons could be understood as such and used by all. Establishing the good sense of joint effort against a common foe seemed a smart matter. But people were funny. Compromise was a necessity in human society that might easily be used for evil. That was part of human history as well.

         What occurred to me again in my search for catalysts, was the frequency of Kings in history. It was in my story too, but not as a positive matter. I could likely come up with a hundred potential disasters. But what would be the most likely. A King. A charismatic. One human failing, throughout history, has been our tendency to follow charismatics, often religious ones, such as Jesus Christ, or Moses, but more often political, such as Napoleon or Hitler. I had eliminated them from my telling from the beginning, by assumptions. I wanted to deal with the practicality of principles. Not personalities. I had wanted to deal with answers. I now realize that I have to deal with the questions. Those questions that do not easily arise in the cubically minded. Or, more importantly, in the AI.

         Because power must be automatically be limited, and life-tenure very possibly short, why would a king want the job?

         Every one of my independent settlements on Mars had fortified itself against the AI. But they were not fortified against ideas. Just the opposite. I was realizing now (belatedly) that looking for answers was, in and of itself, yet another human characteristic that could be abused as a failing that would easily be exploited (infiltrated) by the AI. In a world of human problems, any one of which could ruin a good day, or life, there were those who were very prone to follow someone or something that had all the most appealing answers. That too had been a common weakness throughout history.

         Speaking to Paul about all this seemed unlikely. He was on the other side of the equation, or so I thought. But the rule is to break the rule.

         The day after they returned from Maine, we sat on the front porch, in the cool of the morning. He listened very patiently to my suppositions and my project.

         “You’re right, of course. That’s your problem…there were a bunch of patriots, back in 1782, I think, who wanted to make George Washington, King of the United States…They actually wanted another King! After a war of independence? Can you believe that. As Walt Kelley said, ‘the peasants are revolting!’”

         “I thought that was Mel Brooks.”

         “Yes, well, he can be revolting too, but he married well.”

         Paul had been a college professor for far too long to allow for easy quips.

         “So, I assume, your solution for my ‘Martians against the machines’ would be a king to rally around.”

         “No. I don’t know of a good solution. Peasants have been revolting throughout history. It’s not a new thing. They have historical records from Sumer, and Egypt and ancient China. Somebody should write a book about that, someday. The larger problem is that there is usually no written record except by the victors so we don’t know what the losers died for. And that is your real problem too. The records are always written by the victors, good or bad. The record of most revolts, up to modern times, were usually written by the Kings…According to the little we know, when the Norman peasants revolted against their rulers, they were only looking for the same rights that their ancestors in Norway and Denmark enjoyed. Viking society was one of the freest on Earth at the time. But feudalism was already on the rise and the Duke cut off a few hundred hands and feet, which was really only a death sentence prolonged a little, and that was that. Records are sparse. But that was one I had been interested in because the duke involved was a predecessor to William the Conquerer. That was the usual solution in those days. And beheadings. Because of the addiction of power, and the madness of it, kings can be pretty disgusting.”

         I thought I had lost ground. “So, you don’t recommend a king for Mars.”

         He raised an eyebrow. “Not unless you are trending to Barsoom.”

         I could make no assumptions about Paul’s reading habits but I wasn’t interested, just then, in any fun. “John Carter isn’t part of the story.”

         “Very good…I used to run a fairly loose ship when I was teaching. To bandy about with the students always seemed a good play to keep their attention but also to find new Angles… I’m sorry. Habits are difficult to break…I suppose we are back to Julia’s ideas. But her approach requires time. Revolts are born slowly, but they are usually over quickly. They are a long time in the making, but then suddenly, they can ignite over the smallest thing. She sees ideas as forming out of the stuff of everyday life. A mother’s love of her child. A father’s desire to protect his family. She sees everything in terms of an ongoing battle of keeping one’s own humanity.”

         I was sympathetic to Julia’s ideas now, but I couldn’t be waiting around for a few decades to get to my conclusions.

         ‘I don’t know if I can invent extra time for these people. The AI will do what it does, of course, but it wouldn’t want the human beings to have too much time to gather themselves.”

         “Wat Tyler had 6 months…But he failed..”

         “I don’t know about him.”

         “Well, as a matter of fact, that particular history was recounted quite well in one of Julia’s juvenile fictions. That one centered on Bob, a stableboy, orphaned by the Plague, who works for John of Gaunt. At 14, he was the same age as King Richard. In her telling, Bob is present for much of the lopping and beheading and other folderol. He even begs successfully for the life of Gaunt’s son when he was found by the mob at the Tower. Great story!”

         “But why did you say Wat Tyler had 6 months?”

         “That’s how long the Peasant’s Revolt lasted. Maybe you don’t need more time. Perhaps you need less.”

         I objected to my own ignorance. “There’s a lot of history I need to cover.”

         Paul says, “Cover what you have to. But no more. Julia takes Bob to the Tower of London, to protect the King. He is there in London on the night of June 15th, when the rebels are murdering and plundering. He was there on the 16th when the young King Richard’s smaller force, maybe two hundred or so, met Wat’s thousand Kentish men at St. Bartholomew priory. She only needed to cover three days! You can stand there today and see how small all of that ground is. And, if the numbers are to be believed! But the young King stood fast. He spoke to Wat Tyler, man to man. And when negotiation fails and Standish kill’s Wat for endangering the King, Bob stand’s in the door to protect the King himself. Good stuff…Just use the good stuff. Everything matters. But you might as well choose the good stuff.”

         I objected again, “The AI are not men. They have no principle. Their only purpose is to succeed. Not even to win. There is actually no winning, in human terms. Just success or failure. And if they fail, they’ll always come back again. Think of them as professional soldiers. Spartans. Or a virus. They know nothing but war. And the Martians—they are farmers, remember. And each and every one of them has their own idea about what to do.”

         “They are the Athenians. But, no hoplites?”

         “Not a one. Mostly engineers, really.”

         Paul seemed to give that due consideration.

          “No, I see… Then likely as not you are going to need an offensive weapon against your enemy. You can’t wait to be attacked. Can they engineer that? Can you engineer it for the reader? The AI may not be defeated but they have to be put on the defensive or the Martians will be eliminated…Perhaps, the AI would have to defeat themselves. I suppose, Sun Tzu might say that. You have to sap their resources, perhaps by the physical cost of their own defense. It’s an age-old tactic.”

         He was already beyond me, again. “There’s a lot of history I need to cover.”

         Paul shrugged,“Well, as Julia always says, your faults are your virtues. Perhaps the human tendency to follow a king against their common enemy might be turned around if he, or she, is the right kind of king.”

         So, there was my assignment.

***

53. In a breath of stars

         Supreme tactician, Geoffrey Donne, having successfully maneuvered Maya out the door for a little privacy, gazing from the field behind the barn tonight, with the sole light from the back door of the house shaded by the great bulk of Neal Wright’s genius. The noise of the stars is bright—needles of light on the black slate of a chalkboard; stars too thick to the eye to count. But still, just as Neal Wright would have seen them. And taught them to his children. And as all the heroes of human history would have known them, minus a super nova or two. I say that thought out-loud to Maya.

         Even in that dark I can see her roll her eyes.

         Brightly, I say, “Right there is the continuity—the conversation,” pointing out at  that tapestry of light and dark “The sight itself is not an answer to anything. It is just a part of an ancient conversation, like the weather, between them and us, through time. A sort of animated cave painting. An ancient script. This is where we are on our map. We are human beings and this is what we see.”

         She is practical, as mothers are. She says, “Stars are difficult to paint. Not just because of size. They have no true shape. They change before the eye.”

         I say, “Van Gogh did it,…but he cheated. He made them big so they would stand still.”

         And she shakes her head, “That’s only bending the truth. That’s not a lie. The same as saying stars are ‘noisy-bright.’”

         I admit, “That’s right.”

         It seems to me now that the clash between man and machine is only natural. Inevitable. “Mankind created the machine to do his work. Improve his life. In the machine there is a bit of himself, and for that he always suffers some small loss of his humanity as a consequence. Perhaps only a missing finger, or a toe. But usually more. That’s the double-edged sword of all of that creation. Nature does not reckon with the mind of man, because it is in us. Nature made man—call it God if you wish—and now, it must deal with the mind of all that creation. All of that’s a part of the conversation too. All of that is the internal conflict. An eternal conflict perhaps, if we survive.

         I say, “Just words. Our tools. Words are machines too. Our rhetorical hammer and chisel. Neal knew that.”

         Maya has moved away a little, out of the small light from the house, further into the shadow of stars.

         She says, “He was hiding words in his wall. Why was that?”

         My thought was, “The words betrayed him.”

         Maya is frowning. I can hear the frown in her voice, “When they took his children away?”

         But that was not something that could be understood by me. Not in mere words.

         “He saw it as a punishment of God. This was his Eden.” I change the direction of that and say, “Imagine, just one small interruption in that conversation between mankind and nature, one small flare of anger or careless outburst—just the arm and fist of a solar flare and we are all gone.”

         The Biblical fall of man from the perfection of the Garden of Eden was the consequence of a quest for knowledge. Lots of it. And it continues. We are still falling. Me, most of all, I think.

         As if reading my mind, she says, “No. You have already fallen. Past tense.”

         I think she is smiling now.

          I say, “He knew that Eden was not machine-made. But if Eden was perfect, why did man want more? Why did he want more? He might have been guilty about that. God would have known that the quest for knowledge is at the heart of man. At his core. Because God would have made us that way.”

         Maya says, “That would just be the sex. Don’t blame me. Guys are always blaming women. I’ve only done what nature made me do.”

         I object. “No. I hope not. Love seems like so much more than sex…Were you compelled?”

         She nods, purposely, so I can see it.“Yes. By nature. You gave me no choice.”

         Very confusing.

         The suffering of man is a consequence of nature’s imperfection as much as his own—It’s all the same. If that life can be called imperfect when set out on the cold and dark slate of physics, it is the physics that is wrong. The stone has no opportunity to be perfect, or want to be. It is, for all intents and purposes, forever, what it is. There is no story there. No narrative. The story of mankind is in us. In our mistakes. And that is the slate we are writing on, now. We are still falling. That is what stories are all about. We are in Eden even now, and we are still falling.

         E = mc2. Mass and energy are the same physical beings and might be exchanged, one for the other. Like bodily fluids. I can see how that might apply. Even at the speed of light. But why not slow down. There is gravity to consider. And love.

          That man is not a match to nature, nor an opponent—he is of nature itself, that’s not the problem. It is the physics of all the universe that’s outside of nature—and nature’s God—that is, all living things—that’s beyond the physics of it. I figure, Einstein would have balked. He must have known. But the physics of the universe exists. Period. It is only nature that is perishable. That is the true conflict. And the words to describe that—there is the story. That we ‘shall not perish from the earth.’ Lincoln had that right. Has this not been discussed before?

         I say, “The machine is only mankind’s attempt to manage physics. Is that the evil? But by that same turn, the machine might manage mankind. There is the evil. Just the way words do. We invent the words to help us communicate, but then the words determine what we say and how we say it. The natural clash between man and machine are the opposite edges of the same sword—the natural clash between nature—the will to live—and the inanimate physics of an entire universe. But we cannot be an opponent to physics. It’s not a fair fight.”

         She is ahead of me on this, “The mind of nature might be in the creation of mankind as an agent in the ongoing clash between all life and physics…I suppose it’s our task is to deal with that.”

         I wasn’t feeling smart enough for this. “Then, I must be a secret agent,”

         She says, “But I think it’s even simpler than all that”

         She is probably right, again. I am suddenly reeling with the possibilities of being an agent of nature in a cold universe, and feeling very blasphemous.

         “Just the same as machines and words were created by mankind to deal with physics and all the reality we can perceive, Nature has created man as an agent to deal with some larger reality—something that is in the breath of stars—and the noise of the stars is in all that breathing…Much the same as it is in a kiss.”

***

54. To abjure or to abide

         Julia has called it ‘The Great Loss,’ as you would label an epoch of human history. There was a ‘Dark Ages,’ and a ‘Renaissance,’ and an ‘Enlightenment,’ in the same way as there was a Jurassic or Cambrian. The Dark Ages is just the early Middle Ages by another name, the same way ‘Ancient’ can be ‘Classical.’  “Pretty much all of that is bullshit,” as she’s said. “Anyone who has lived in a fair sized city for more than a year has seen all of those ages happening right in front of them.”

         And Julia’s point has the advantage of going beyond a specific period of time, to a state of mind. (A ‘state’? I wonder, perhaps a ‘republic’ of mind, or a ‘kingdom’ of mind.)

         This fits well with her ideas for ‘narrative history’ and ‘narrative thinking,’ but it is not neat and tidy. The bane of modern existence is the want of small minds for the ‘neat and tidy.’ These are the accountants and bookkeepers of a cubical history of mankind, dismissive of all the stuff they don’t know or don’t undertstand. Cubicle minds are always looking for a good fit. But ’Stone Age’ people were living in the forests of New Guinea until recently. Perhaps they still are. Does that mean that the ‘Stone Age’ is ongoing? Certainly! Do they not think? Are they not human? ‘If you prick them do they not bleed?’ Just as ‘freedom’ might still exist in the darkest heart of China, but that does not mean that China is free. Only that there is some freedom that still exists there.

         A typical academic argument is often made by pretending that those people who have not conformed to some ‘modern’ definition, are not quite human—that the native of New Guinea is something less, or that there was once a ‘bicameral mind’ and not simply the left and right of the same brain that argues within us all. The gobbledygook of it alone is absurd. If those neanderthals were fooling around with the cro-magnon for ten times longer than recorded history, the narrative mind has been with us since long before Homer. At least. And we are still falling, even now. And we are already fashioning a style of human life on Mars, well before the fact. I’ll see to that, myself!

         What seems to confuse these lab rats—for that is what they are, unable to think outside of their cubicles even when sitting with their notebooks in a mud hut on the Amazon River—is the idea that logic is not the ultimate arbiter of human experience. It’s just another tool. They divide the golden goose into head and neck and breast and all the rest, and can’t find the source of the eggs. And then do it over and over again, looking for a different result. What madness is this?

         My point is that we must gauge and value human existence outside of boxes and columns. And it is by that standard that I have come to realize what Julia has meant by ‘the great loss.’ The loss of our humanity even as we proliferate. The quantifying of human souls, over the quality, that can only result in more of the slavery that has so despoiled history and still cheapens all of our lives today.

         As mankind has turned to the machine for aid and comfort, in a bid to eliminate slavery, I believe he has already given up far too much of his humanity. By giving up a skill, such as planting corn by hand without the precision of a John Deere Combine, there is a particular 5000 year old memory that is lost. Perhaps for the better, but then that should not be determined by the cubicle mind of a corporate accountant with his eye on a stock price. And the language of the ancient effort to survive and flourish, which has been passed down through a thousand generations, should not be lost either.

         The aesthetic of Neal Wright’s woodworking is still kept alive by a few, but not well understood by many. It is a purely human aesthetic. Yet, it is not economical and is incomprehensible to a machine mind. The beauty of wood and of wood that has been shaped by a human hand is incomprehensible. Why bother, they are likely to say. What is the Mona Lisa smiling at? Is she smiling at all? Is ‘economical’ now to be our only standard of value? There is certainly a machine that can duplicate almost any human effort to a high degree, and more economically, but exactly the same every time, perfectly sized for display at some box of a ‘discount’ store…Every time. Exactly.

         But, that machine-work lacks a spiritual element that can easily be seen by the human eye and felt by the human hand, and known by the human soul, and will never be felt exactly the same. And it’s the very knowledge that this cannot be duplicated in the same exact way, that gives the hand-made product the ultimate value. Julia has called it the ‘Stradivarius effect’ after the handmade product versus the machine-made violin. Or a hand knitted sweater. Perfectly imperfect. A purely human value.

         I said once, “Does it matter what a machine finds of a value, so long as it fits the need?”

         I can see that she is a little shocked by this.

         “Are you serious?”

         “Yes. It’s the question they’re asking on Mars, today. And all over town. What’s mankind good for, anyway? The machine can do it exactly, and do it well, every time. Do it faster, and cheaper. What do you need mankind for?”

         Finally, she laughed.

         “You are a pain in the ass. But you know, if I hadn’t found you, I would have had to invent you.”

         The answer to that was obvious, “But I found you, and you did re-invent me.”

         Clearly, we cannot give some political monster the power to dictate what is good or bad, human or not. It is up to Cervantes or Dostoevsky or Yeats to persuade us to that understanding. And to Julia. And perhaps to me…Computers will be writing all of what people read soon enough. The machine mind is already among us.

         Thornton Wilder wrote a play. I suspect he did not know exactly what he had. He wrote so many good things. Could he have understood his own genius? It is a quietly driven inspiration, and a purposeful production. But a human invention, none-the-less. A play production is actually made by too many other human forces—directors, actors, as well as the weather. Nevertheless, it was not an accident. That play was genius. But in this age of sound-bites, and psychological manipulation, and digital gods, it cannot be seen by many except as a promotion of values that are out of favor, now. Out of touch. Dated. Intellectually passe. However, that loss of mind, of understanding, is actually in the viewer. The play endures. That void of conscience in the current unsympathetic viewer will not be remembered tomorrow. But that play will endure. That is my belief.

         I have seen Our Town several times. It seems so simple that I watch for the tricks. Perhaps I am too stupid to see them but I think they are not there. That is magic. Wilder was a magician. It is simply what it is. A play. Pretend. I think he worked very hard to achieve that in the writing—the work of a lifetime—to tell you honestly all the while just what he was about, without pretense. Few props. No clock. Just a narrative simple enough that it cannot be unseen. Not a single superhero in sight. But human beings aplenty. No great battles. No murders. Just story. I envy that.

         Because everything that happens on my Mars one day will be some manifestation of what happens here, and now, because the future, like the past, will only repeat itself—not in the gadgets but in the boundless human beings. I must see the future outside of any artificial box of technical contrivance. Or a stage. The human being of two thousand years ago is not a monkey in a toga. Christian or not, it is clear that what Christ saw in that time were human beings. The narrative is there, and here again. And it will be again. It appears that we have gained some ground, perhaps, but we have had our losses too. However, it has always been our humanity that is in danger. And that is no less the case on Mars. My narrative might recapture some of what might be lost. That is the most I can hope for.

         The society that made ‘Our Town’ is gone. Not vanished, because we can see the remnants of it at the curbside, but gone, nonetheless. It was murdered in the holocaust of a war that devalued human beings to less than the machines they made. That is where we are now. What we make of that now is as great a danger to mankind as anything ever was. Atomic bombs were made to stop the holocaust of war without learning how the mind works that uses them. One evil exchanged for another.

         We are still falling. The garden of eden is with us, as well as the snake.

         There is no ‘going back’ on much of this. It is done. Like the loss of the commons, I expect. But there is some sense to recapturing the good in what can be salvaged and saving and preserving what’s even now in danger of being destroyed, as well as anticipating what might happen to us in the future as a result of suffering yet another loss to our humanity with artificial intelligence. All very lofty, of course.

         And, of course, that is the matter of my Mars novel. But it’s the matter, in fact, of all of Julia’s work, from the very first. From her novel Laocoon, forward. How does someone sense such truth at a young age without a guide, or a map, or a set of directions, or at least a brochure of some sort? What chemistry was there between Henry Morgan and Olivia Green that might have compounded itself into Julia? I don’t know. But had I been there, would I have appreciated any of that in that in any case?

         My dedication has been less in seeing what has been and more in trying to see what will be. Whatever it takes. I am grossly inadequate to the task, of course. But I persist because I enjoy the very act of it. And it needs to be done. My own conundrum is this: should I study all the parts of human knowledge, in some order, like a bookkeeper, to see what is missing? In which life-time will I have the opportunity for that? Or should I give that job to a machine and concentrate on the unknown?

         That absence of mind, that ignorance, would be found faster if only counting bites and facts and things. But the machine will only see what human value has already been discovered and cataloged in some way, not what is actually lost, or never found before, because that is always ephemeral, visible only through sentiment, and the craving of the human soul.

         Julia realized much of this at the start, by reducing her focus to a time before the ‘modern’ age. But I am already addicted to my Martian ways. And what is left between us? Only the present. Only Maya. And what she sees will still be seen when my Mars has withered beneath the weight of my miscalculations.

         I’m thinking, perhaps it’s right here that the riddle of the commons might be resolved. Right here in Rumford, New Hampshire. This is my own Grover’s Corners now, and I will abide.

—30—

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