Читать книгу Mudwoman - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 7

October 2002

Readied. She believed yes, she was.

She was not one to be taken by surprise.

“Carlos, stop! Please. Let me out here.”

In the rearview mirror the driver’s eyes moved onto her, startled.

“Ma’am? Here?”

“I mean—Carlos—I’d like to stop for just a minute. Stretch my legs.”

This was so awkwardly phrased, and so seemingly fraudulent—stretch my legs!

Politely the driver protested: “Ma’am—it’s less than an hour to Ithaca.”

He was regarding her with a look of mild alarm in the rearview mirror. Very much, she disliked being observed in that mirror.

“Please just park on the shoulder of the road, Carlos. I won’t be a minute.”

Now she did speak sharply.

Though continuing to smile of course. For it was unavoidable, in this new phase of her life she was being observed.

The bridge!

She had never seen the bridge before, she was sure. And yet—how familiar it was to her.

It was not a distinguished or even an unusual bridge but an old-style truss bridge of the 1930s, with a single span: wrought-iron girders marked with elaborate encrustations of rust like ancient and unreadable hieroglyphics. Already M.R. knew, without needing to see, that the bridge was bare planking and would rattle beneath crossing vehicles; all of the bridge would vibrate finely, like a great tuning fork.

Like the bridges of M.R.’s memory, this bridge had been built high above the stream below, which was a small river, or a creek, that flooded its banks after rainstorms. To cross the bridge you had to ascend a steep paved ramp. Both the bridge and the ramp were narrower by several inches than the two-lane state highway that led to the bridge and so in its approach to the bridge the road conspicuously narrowed and the shoulder was sharply attenuated. All this happened without warning—you had to know the bridge, not to blunder onto it when a large vehicle like a van or a truck was crossing.

There was no shoulder here upon which to park safely, at least not a vehicle the size of the Lincoln Town Car, but canny Carlos had discovered an unpaved service lane at the foot of the bridge ramp, that led to the bank of the stream. The lane was rutted, muddy. In a swath of underbrush the limousine came to a jolting stop only a few yards from rushing water.

Some subtle way in which the driver both obeyed his impulsive employer, and resisted her, made M.R.’s heart quicken in opposition to him. Clearly Carlos understood that this was an imprudent stop to have made, within an hour of their destination; the very alacrity with which he’d driven the shiny black limousine off the road and into underbrush was a rebuke to her, who had issued a command to him.

“Carlos, thank you. I won’t be a—a minute …”

Won’t be a minute. Like stretch my legs this phrase sounded in her ears forced and alien to her, as if another spoke through her mouth, and M.R. was the ventriloquist’s dummy.

Quickly before Carlos could climb out of the car to open the door for her, M.R. opened the door for herself. She couldn’t seem to accustom herself to being treated with such deference and formality!—it wasn’t M.R.’s nature.

M.R., whom excessive attention and even moderate flattery embarrassed terribly; as if, by instinct, she understood the mockery that underscores formality.

“I’ll be right back! I promise.”

She spoke cheerily, gaily. M.R. couldn’t bear for any employee—any member of her staff—to feel uncomfortable in her presence.

As, teaching, when she’d approach a seminar room hearing the voices and laughter of the students inside, she’d hesitate to intrude—to evoke an abrupt and too-respectful silence.

Her power over others was that they liked her. Such liking could only be volitional, free choice.

She was walking along the embankment thinking these thoughts. By degrees the rushing water drowned out her thoughts—hypnotic, just slightly edgy. There is always a gravitational pull toward water: to rushing water. One is drawn forward, one is drawn in.

Now. Here. Come. It is time….

She smiled hearing voices in the water. The illusion of voices in the water.

But here was an impediment: the bank was tangled with briars, vines. An agonized twisting of something resembling guts. It wasn’t a good idea for M.R. to be walking in her charcoal-gray woolen trousers and her pinching-new Italian shoes.

Yet if you looked closely, with a child’s eye, you could discern a faint trail amid the underbrush. Children, fishermen. Obviously, people made their way along the stream, sometimes.

A nameless stream—creek, or river. Seemingly shallow, yet wide. A sprawl of boulders, flat shale-like rock. Froth of the hue and seeming substance of the most nouveau of haute cuisine—foam-food, pureed and juiced, all substance leached from it, terrible food! Tasteless and unsatisfying and yet M.R. had been several times obliged to admire it, dining at the Manhattan homes of one or another of the University’s wealthy trustees, who kept in their employ full-time chefs.

The creek, or river, was much smaller than the Black Snake River that flowed south and west out of the southern Adirondacks, traversing Beechum County at a diagonal—the river of M.R.’s childhood. Yet—here was the identical river-smell. If M.R. shut her eyes and inhaled deeply, she was there.

Here was an odor of something brackish and just slightly sour—rancid/rotted—decaying leaves—rich damp dark earth that sank beneath her heels as she made her way along the bank, shading her eyes against the watery glitter like tinfoil.

Mingled with the river-smell was an odor of something burning, like rubber. Smoldering tires, garbage. A wet-feather smell. But faint enough that it wasn’t unpleasant.

All that M.R. could see—on the farther bank of the stream—was a wall of dark-brick buildings with only a few windows on each floor; and beyond the windows, nothing visible. High on the sides of the buildings were advertisements—product names and pictures of—faces? human figures?—eroded by time and now indecipherable, lost to all meaning.

“‘Mohawk Meats and Poultry.’”

The words came to her. The memory was random, and fleeting.

“‘Boudreau Women’s Gloves and Hosiery.’”

But that had been Carthage, long ago. These ghost-signs, M.R. could not read at all.

Carlos was surely correct, they weren’t far from the small city of Ithaca—which meant the vast sprawling spectacular campus of Cornell University where M.R. had been an undergraduate twenty years before and had graduated summa cum laude, in another lifetime. Yet she had no idea of the name of this small town or where exactly they were except south and west of Ithaca in the glacier-ravaged countryside of Tompkins County.

It was a bright chilly October day. It was a day splotched with sumac like bursts of flame.

The not-very-prosperous small town of faded-brick storefronts and cracked sidewalks reminded M.R. of the small city in which she’d grown up in Beechum County in the foothills of the southern Adirondacks. Vaguely she was thinking I should have planned to visit them. It has been so long.

Her father lived there still—in Carthage.

She had not told Konrad Neukirchen that she would be spending three nights within a hundred miles of Carthage since virtually every minute of the conference would be filled with appointments, engagements, panels, talks—and yet more people would request time with M.R., once the conference began. She had not wanted to disappoint her father, who’d always been so proud of her.

Her father, and also her mother of course. Both the Neukirchens: Konrad and Agatha.

How painful it was to M.R., to disappoint others! Her elders, who’d invested so much in her. Their love for her was a heavy cloak upon her shoulders, like one of those lead-shield cloaks laid upon you in the dentist’s office to shield you from X-rays—you were grateful for the cloak but more grateful when it was removed.

Far rather would M.R. be disappointed by others, than to be the agent of disappointment herself. For M.R. could forgive—readily; she was very good at forgiveness.

She was very good at forgetting, also. To forget is the very principle of forgiveness.

Perhaps it was a Quaker principle, or ought to have been, which she’d inherited from her parents: forget, forgive.

Boldly now she walked on the bank of the nameless river amid broken things. An observer on the bridge some distance away would have been surprised to see her: a well-dressed woman, alone, in this place so impractical for walking, amid a slovenly sort of quasi-wilderness. M.R. was a tall woman whom an erect backbone and held-high head made taller—a woman of youthful middle-age with an appealingly girlish face—fleshy, flush-cheeked. Her eyes were both shy and quick-darting, assessing. In fact the eyes were a falcon’s eyes, in a girl’s face.

How strange she felt in this place! The glittery light—lights—reflected in the swift-running water seemed to suffuse her heart. She felt both exhilarated and apprehensive, as if she were approaching danger. Not a visible danger perhaps. Yet she must go forward.

This was a common feeling of course. Common to all who inhabit a “public” role. She would be addressing an audience in which there was sure to be some opposition to her prepared words.

Her keynote address, upon which she’d worked intermittently, for weeks, was only to be twenty minutes long: “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism.’” This was the first time that M. R. Neukirchen had been invited to address the National Conference of the prestigious American Association of Learned Societies. There would be hostile questions put to her at the conclusion of her talk, she supposed. At her own University where the faculty so supported her liberal position, yet there were dissenting voices from the right. But overwhelmingly her audience that evening would support her, she was sure.

It would be thrilling—to speak to this distinguished group, and to make an impression on them. Somehow it had happened, the shy schoolgirl had become, with the passage of not so many years, an impassioned and effective public speaker—a Valkyrie of a figure—fiercely articulate, intense. You could see that she cared so much—almost, at moments, M.R. quivered with feeling, as if about to stammer.

Audiences were transfixed by her, in the narrow and rarified academic world in which she dwelt.

I am baring my soul to you. I care so deeply!

Often she felt faint, beforehand. A turmoil in her stomach as if she might be physically ill.

The way an actor might feel, stepping into a magisterial role. The way an athlete might feel, on the cusp of a great triumph—or loss.

Her (secret) lover had once assured her It isn’t panic you feel, Meredith. It isn’t even fear. It’s excitement: anticipation.

Her (secret) lover was a brilliant but not entirely reliable man, an astronomer/cosmologist happiest in the depths of the Universe. Andre Litovik’s travels took him into extragalactic space far from M.R. yet he, too, was proud of her, and did love her in his way. So she wished to believe.

They saw each other infrequently. They did not even communicate often, for Andre was negligent about answering e-mail. Yet, they thought of each other continuously—or so M.R. wished to believe.

Possibly unwisely, given the dense underbrush here, M.R. was approaching the bridge from beneath. She’d been correct: the floor was planking—you could see sunlight through the cracks—as vehicles passed, the plank floor rattled. A pickup truck, several cars—the bridge was so narrow, traffic slowed to five miles an hour.

She’d learned to drive over such a bridge. Long ago.

She felt the old frisson of dread—a visceral unease she experienced now mainly when flying in turbulent weather—Return to your seats please, fasten your seat belts please, the captain has requested you return to your seats please.

At such times the terrible thought came to her: To die among strangers! To die in flaming wreckage.

Such curious, uncharacteristic thoughts M. R. Neukirchen hid from those who knew her intimately. But there was no one really, who knew M. R. Neukirchen intimately.

In a way it was strange to her, this curious fact: she had not (yet) died.

As the pre-Socratics pondered Why is there something and not rather nothing?—so M.R. pondered Why am I here, and not rather—nowhere?

A purely intellectual speculation, this was. M.R.’s professional philosophizing wasn’t tainted by the merely personal.

Yet, these questions were strange, and wonderful. Not an hour of her life when she did not give thanks.

M.R. had been an only child. An entire psychology has been devised involving the only child, a variant of the first-born.

The only child is not inevitably the first-born, however. The only child may be the survivor.

The only child is more likely to be gifted than a child with numerous siblings. Obviously, the only child is likely to be lonely.

Self-reliant, self-sufficient. “Creative.”

Did M.R. believe in such theories? Or did she believe, for this was closer to her personal experience, that personalities are distinct, individual and unique, and unfathomable—in terms of influences and causality, inexplicable?

She’d been trained as a philosopher, she had a Ph.D. in European philosophy from one of the great philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. Yet she’d taken graduate courses in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, international law. She’d participated in bioethics colloquia. She’d published a frequently anthologized essay titled “How Do You Know What You ‘Know’: Skepticism as Moral Imperative.” As the president of a distinguished research university in which theories of every sort were devised, debated, maintained, and defended—an abundance like a spring field blooming and buzzing with a profusion of life—M.R. wasn’t obliged to believe but she was obliged to take seriously, to respect.

My dream is to be—of service! I want to do good.

She was quite serious. She was wholly without irony.

The Convent Street bridge, in Carthage. Of course, that was the bridge she was trying to recall.

And other bridges, other waterways, streams—M.R. couldn’t quite recall.

In a kind of trance she was staring, smiling. As a child, she’d learned quickly. Of all human reflexes, the most valuable.

The river was a fast shallow stream on which boulders emerged like bleached bone. Fallen tree limbs lay in the water sunken and rotted and on these mud turtles basked in the October sun, motionless as creatures carved of stone. M.R. knew from her rural childhood that if you approached these turtles, even at a distance they would arouse themselves, waken and slip into the water; seemingly asleep, in reptilian stillness, they were yet highly alert, vigilant.

A memory came to her of boys who’d caught a mud turtle, shouting and flinging the poor creature down onto the rocks, dropping rocks on it, cracking its shell….

Why would you do such a thing? Why kill …?

It was a question no one asked. You would not ask. You would be ridiculed, if you asked.

She had failed to defend the poor turtle against the boys. She’d been too young—very young. The boys had been older. Always there were too many of them—the enemy.

These small failures, long ago. No one knew now. No one who knew her now. If she’d tried to tell them they would stare at her, uncomprehending. Are you serious? You can’t be serious.

Certainly she was serious: a serious woman. The first female president of the University.

Not that femaleness was an issue, it was not.

Without hesitation M.R. would claim, and in interviews would elaborate, that not once in her professional career, nor in her years as a student, had she been discriminated against, as a woman.

It was the truth, as M.R. knew it. She was not one to lodge complaints or to speak in disdain, hurt, or reproach.

What was that—something moving upstream? A child wading? But the air was too cold for wading and the figure too white: a snowy egret.

Beautiful long-legged bird searching for fish in the swift shallow water. M.R. watched it for several seconds—such stillness! Such patience.

At last, as if uneasy with M.R.’s presence, the egret seemed to shake itself, lifted its wide wings, and flew away.

Nearby but invisible were birds—jays, crows. Raucous cries of crows.

Quickly M.R. turned away. The harsh-clawing sound of a crow’s cry was disturbing to her.

“Oh!”—in her eagerness to leave this place she’d turned her ankle, or nearly.

She should not have stopped to walk here, Carlos was right to disapprove. Now her heels sank in the soft mucky earth. So clumsy!

As a young athlete M.R. had been quick on her feet for a girl of her height and (“Amazonian”) body-type but soon after her teens she’d begun to lose this reflexive speed, the hand-eye coordination an athlete takes for granted until it begins to abandon her.

“Ma’am? Let me help you.”

Ma’am. What a rebuke to her foolishness!

Carlos had approached to stand just a few feet away. M.R. didn’t want to think that her driver had been watching her, protectively, all along.

“I’m all right, Carlos, thank you. I think….”

But M.R. was limping, in pain. It was a quick stabbing pain she hoped would fade within a few minutes but she hadn’t much choice except to lean on Carlos’s arm as they made their way back to the car, along the faint path through the underbrush.

Her heart was beating rapidly, strangely. The birds’ cries—the crows’ cries—were both jeering and beautiful: strange wild cries of yearning, summons.

But what was this?—something stuck to the bottom of one of her shoes. The newly purchased Italian black-leather shoes she’d felt obliged to buy, several times more expensive than any other shoes M.R. had ever purchased.

And on her trouser cuffs—briars, burrs.

And what was in her hair?—she hoped it wasn’t bird droppings from the underside of that damned bridge.

“Excuse me, ma’am …”

“Thanks, Carlos! I’m fine.”

“Ma’am, wait …”

Gallant Carlos stooped to detach whatever it was stuck to M.R.’s shoe. M.R. had been trying to kick it free without exactly seeing it, and without allowing Carlos to see it; yet of course, Carlos had seen. How ridiculous this was! She was chagrined, embarrassed. The last thing she wanted was her uniformed Hispanic driver stooping at her feet but of course Carlos insisted upon doing just this, deftly he detached whatever had been stuck to the sole of her shoe and flicked it into the underbrush and when M.R. asked what it was he said quietly not meeting her eye:

“Nothing, ma’am. It’s gone.”

It was October 2002. In the U.S. capital, war was being readied.

If objects pass into the space “neglected” after brain damage, they disappear. If the right brain is injured, the deficit will manifest itself in the left visual field.

The paradox is: how do we know what we can’t know when it does not appear to us.

How do we know what we have failed to see because we have failed to see it, thus cannot know that we have failed to see it.

Unless—the shadow of what-is-not-seen can be seen by us.

A wide-winged shadow swiftly passing across the surface of Earth.

In the late night—her brain too excited for sleep—she’d been working on a philosophy paper—a problem in epistemology. How do we know what we cannot know: what are the perimeters of “knowing”…

As a university president she’d vowed she would keep up with her field—after this first, inaugural year as president she would resume teaching a graduate seminar in philosophy/ethics each semester. All problems of philosophy seemed to her essentially problems of epistemology. But of course these were problems in perception: neuropsychology.

The leap from a problem in epistemology/neuropsychology to politics—this was risky.

For had not Nietzsche observed—Madness in individuals is rare but in nations, common.

Yet she would make this leap, she thought—for this evening was her great opportunity. Her audience at the conference would be approximately fifteen hundred individuals—professors, scholars, archivists, research scientists, university and college administrators, journalists, editors of learned journals and university presses. A writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education was scheduled to interview M. R. Neukirchen the following morning, and a reporter for the New York Times Education Supplement was eager to meet with her. A shortened version of “The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism’” would be published as an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. M. R. Neukirchen was a new president of an “historic” university that had not even admitted women until the 1970s and so boldly in her keynote address she would speak of the unspeakable: the cynical plot being contrived in the U.S. capital to authorize the president to employ “military force” against a Middle Eastern country demonized as an “enemy”—an “enemy of democracy.” She would find a way to speak of such things in her presentation—it would not be difficult—in addressing the issue of the Patriot Act, the need for vigilance against government surveillance, detention of “terrorist suspects”—the terrible example of Vietnam.

But this was too emotional—was it? Yet she could not speak coolly, she dared not speak ironically. In her radiant Valkyrie mode, irony was not possible.

She would call her lover in Cambridge, Massachusetts—to ask of him Should I? Dare I? Or is this a mistake?

For she had not made any mistakes, yet. She had not made any mistakes of significance, in her role as higher educator.

She should call him, or perhaps another friend—though it was difficult for M.R., to betray weaknesses to her friends who looked to her for—uplift, encouragement, good cheer, optimism….

She should not behave rashly, she should not give an impression of being political, partisan. Her original intention for the address was to consider John Dewey’s classic Democracy and Education in twenty-first-century terms.

She was an idealist. She could not take seriously any principle of moral behavior that was not a principle for all—universally. She could not believe that “relativism” was any sort of morality except the morality of expediency. But of course as an educator, she was sometimes obliged to be pragmatic: expedient.

Education floats upon the economy, and the goodwill of the people.

Even private institutions are hostages to the economy, and the good—enlightened—will of the people.

She would call her (secret) lover when she arrived at the conference center hotel. Just to ask What do you advise? Do you think I am risking too much?

Just to ask Do you love me? Do you even think of me? Do you remember me—when I am not with you?

It was M.R.’s practice to start a project early—in this case, months early—when she’d first been invited to give the keynote address at the conference, back in April—and to write, rewrite, revise and rewrite through a succession of drafts until her words were finely honed and shimmering—invincible as a shield. A twenty-minute presentation, brilliant in concision and emphasis, would be far more effective than a fifty-minute presentation. And it would be M.R.’s strategy, too, to end early—just slightly early. She would aim for eighteen minutes. To take her audience off guard, to end on a dramatic note …

Madness in individuals is rare but in nations, common.

Unless: this was too dire, too smugly “prophetic”? Unless: this would strike a wrong note?

“Carlos! Please put the radio on, will you? I think the dial is set—NPR.”

It was noon: news. But not good news.

In the backseat of the limousine M.R. listened. How credulous the media had become since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, how uncritical the reporting—it made her ill, it made her want to weep in frustration and anger, the callow voice of the defense secretary of the United States warning of weapons of mass destruction believed to be stored in readiness for attack by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein … Biological warfare, nuclear warfare, threat to U.S. democracy, global catastrophe.

“What do you think, Carlos? Is this ridiculous? ‘Fanning the flames’…”

“Don’t know, ma’am. It’s a bad thing.”

Guardedly Carlos replied. What Carlos felt in his heart, Carlos was not likely to reveal.

“I think you said—you served in Vietnam….”

Fanning the flames. Served in Vietnam. How clumsy her stock phrases, like ill-fitting prostheses.

It hadn’t been Carlos, but one of her assistants who’d mentioned to M.R. that Carlos had been in the Vietnam War and had “some sort of medal—‘Purple Heart’”—of which he never spoke. And reluctantly now Carlos responded:

“Ma’am, yes.”

In the rearview mirror she saw his forehead crease. He was a handsome man, or had been—olive-dark skin, a swath of silver hair at his forehead. His lips moved but all she could really hear was ma’am.

She was feeling edgy, agitated. They were nearing Ithaca—at last.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘ma’am,’ Carlos! It makes me feel—like a spinster of a bygone era.”

She’d meant to change the subject and to change the tone of their exchange but the humor in her remark seemed to be lost as often, when she spoke to Carlos, and others on her staff, the good humor for which M. R. Neukirchen was known among her colleagues seemed to be lost and she drew blank expressions from them.

“Sorry, ma’am.”

Carlos stiffened, realizing what he’d said. Surely his face went hot with embarrassment.

Yet—she knew!—it wasn’t reasonable for M.R. to expect her driver to address her in some other way—as President Neukirchen for instance. If he did he stumbled over the awkward words—Pres’dent New-kirtch-n.

She’d asked Carlos to call her “M.R.”—as most of her University colleagues did—but he had not, ever. Nor had anyone on her staff. This was strange to her, disconcerting, for M.R. prided herself on her lack of pretension, her friendliness.

Her predecessor had insisted that everyone call him by his first name—“Leander.” He’d been an enormously popular president though not, in his final years, a very productive or even a very attentive president; like a grandfather clock winding down, M.R. had thought. He’d spent most of his time away from campus and among wealthy donors—as house guest, traveling companion, speaker to alumni groups. As a once-noted historian he’d seen his prize territory—Civil War and Reconstruction—so transformed by the inroads of feminist, African American studies, and Marxist scholarship as to be unrecognizable to him, and impossible for him to re-enter, like a door that has locked behind you, once you have stepped through. An individual of such absolute vanity, he wished to be perceived as totally without vanity—just a “common man.” Though Leander Huddle had accumulated a small fortune—reputedly, somewhere near ten million dollars—by way of his University salary and its perquisites and investments in his trustee-friends’ businesses.

M.R.’s presidency would be very different!

Of course, M.R. was not going to invest money in any businesses owned by trustees. M.R. was not going to accumulate a small fortune through her University connections. M.R. would establish a scholarship financed—(secretly)—by her own salary….

It will be change—radical change!—that works through me.

Neukirchen will be but the agent. Invisible!

She did have radical ideas for the University. She did want to reform its “historic” (i.e., Caucasian-patriarchal/hierarchical) structure and she did want to hire more women and minority faculty, and above all, she wanted to implement a new tuition/scholarship policy that would transform the student body within a few years. At the present time an uncomfortably high percentage of undergraduates were the sons and daughters of the most wealthy economic class, as well as University “legacies”—(that is, the children of alumni); there were scholarships for “poor” students, that constituted a small percentage; but the children of middle-income parents constituted a precarious 5 percent of admissions … M.R. intended to increase these, considerably.

For M. R. Neukirchen was herself the daughter of “middle-income” parents, who could never have afforded to send her to this Ivy League university.

Of course, M. R. Neukirchen would not appear radical, but rather sensible, pragmatic and timely.

She’d assembled an excellent team of assistants and aides. And an excellent staff. Immediately when she’d been named president, she’d begun recruiting the very best people she could; she’d kept on only a few key individuals on Leander’s staff.

At all public occasions, in all her public pronouncements, M. R. Neukirchen stressed that the presidency of the University was a “team effort”—publicly she thanked her team, and she thanked individuals. She was the most generous of presidents—she would take blame for mistakes but share credit for successes. (Of course, no mistakes of any consequence had yet been made since M.R. had taken over the office.) To all whom she met in her official capacity she appealed in her eager earnest somewhat breathless manner that masked her intelligence—as it masked her willfulness; sometimes, in an excess of feeling, this new president of the University was known to clasp hands in hers, that were unusually large strong warm hands.

It was the influence of her mother Agatha. As Agatha had also influenced M.R. to keep a cheerful heart, and keep busy.

As both Agatha and Konrad were likely to say, as Quakers—I hope.

For it was Quaker custom to say, not I think or I know or This is the way it must be but more provisionally, and more tenderly—I hope.

“Yes. I hope.”

In the front seat the radio voice was loud enough to obscure whatever it was M.R. had said. And Carlos was just slightly hard of hearing.

“You can turn off the radio, please, Carlos. Thanks.”

Since the incident at the bridge there was a palpable stiffness between them. No one has more of a sense of propriety than an older staffer, or a servant—one who has been in the employ of a predecessor, and can’t help but compare his present employer with this predecessor. And M.R. was only just acquiring a way of talking to subordinates that wasn’t formal yet wasn’t inappropriately informal; a way of giving orders that didn’t sound aggressive, coercive. Even the word Please felt coercive to her. When you said Please to those who, like Carlos, had no option but to obey, what were you really saying?

And she wondered was the driver thinking now It isn’t the same, driving for a woman. Not this woman.

She wondered was he thinking She is alone too much. You begin to behave strangely when you are alone too much—your brain never clicks off.

The desk clerk frowned into the computer.

“‘M. R. Neukirchen’”—the name sounded, on his lips, faintly improbable, comical—“yesss—we have your reservation, Mz. Neukirchen—for two nights. But I’m afraid—the suite isn’t quite ready. The maid is just finishing up….”

Even after the unscheduled stop, she’d arrived early!

She hadn’t even instructed Carlos to drive past her old residence Balch Hall—for which she felt a stab of nostalgia.

Not for the naïve girl she’d been as an undergraduate, nor even for the several quite nice roommates she’d had—(like herself, scholarship girls)—but for the thrilling experience of discovering, for the first time, the livingness of the intellectual enterprise, that had been, to her, the daughter of bookish parents, previously confined to books.

M.R. told the desk clerk that that was fine. She could wait. Of course. There was no problem.

“… no more than ten or fifteen minutes, Mz. Neukirchen. You can check in now, and wait in our library-lounge, and I will call you.”

“Thank you! This is ideal.”

Smile! Win more flies with honey than with vinegar Agatha would advise though this was not why, in fact, Agatha smiled so frequently, and so genuinely. And there was Konrad’s dry rebuttal, with a wink of the eye for their young impressionable daughter.

Sure thing! If it’s flies you want.

The library-lounge was an attractive wood-paneled room where M.R. could spread her things out on an oak table and continue to work.

Always it is a good thing: to arrive early.

The impulsive stop in the nameless little town by the nameless little creek or river hadn’t been a blunder after all—only just a curious episode in M.R.’s (private) life, to be forgotten.

Arrive early. Bring work.

She’d begun to acquire a reputation for being the most astonishing zealot of work.

It was known, M.R. was very bright—very earnest, idealistic—but it had not been quite known, how hard M.R. was willing to work.

For this brief trip, she’d brought along enough work for several days. And, of course, she would be in constant communication with Salvager Hall—the president’s team of aides, assistants, secretarial staff. In a constant stream e-mail messages came to her as president of the University, and these she dealt with both expeditiously and with an air of schoolgirl pleasure so it was known, and it would become more widely known, that M.R. never failed to include personal queries and remarks in her e-mail messages, she was irrepressibly friendly.

For we love our work. No more potent narcotic than work!

And M.R.’s administrative work was very different from her work as a writer/philosopher—administration is the skillful organizing of others, its center of gravity is exterior; all that matters, all that is significant, urgent—profound—is exterior.

“I want to be ‘of service.’ I do not want to be ‘served.’”

This too was a legacy of the Neukirchens. For the Quaker, the commonweal outweighs the merely personal.

Critically now M.R. was re-examining her address—“The Role of the University in an Era of ‘Patriotism’”—even as she found herself distracted by a memory of the bridge and the sharp water-smells—the mysterious faded lettering on the dark-brick building on the farther bank.

In the lobby, uplifted voices. Her fellow conferees were arriving.

She felt a stirring of apprehension, excitement. For soon, her anonymity would vanish.

The desk clerk had no idea who she was—(this was a relief!)—but others would know her, recognize her. This past year M. R. Neukirchen had become renowned in academic circles. She could not but think her elevation very unnerving, and very strange—accidental, really.

God has chosen you, dear Merry! God is a principle in the universe for good, and God has chosen you to implement His work.

In emotional moments her mother spoke like this—warmly, earnestly. It was something of a small shock to M.R. to realize that Agatha probably did believe in such a personal destiny for her daughter.

Another time M.R. leafed through the conference program—to check her name, to see if it was really there.

The program was a large glossy-white booklet with gilt letters on its cover: Fiftieth Annual National Conference of the American Association of Learned Societies. October 11–13, 2002. The conference was scheduled to begin with a 5:30 P.M. reception at which M.R. and other speakers were to be honored. Dinner was at 7 P.M. and at 8 P.M. the keynote speaker was listed—M. R. Neukirchen.

She’d given many talks, of course. Many lectures, speeches—presentations—but mostly in her academic field, philosophy. It was an honor for her to have been invited to speak to this organization, not the largest but the most distinguished of American intellectual/academic societies, for membership was limited and selective.

M.R. had herself been inducted into the organization young—not yet thirty, and an associate professor of philosophy at the University.

“Oh! Damn.”

She’d discovered mud on the cuffs of her trousers, and in the creases of her shoes. Irritably she brushed at the stains, that were still damp.

She touched her hair discovering something cobwebby-sticky in her hair, that must have sifted down from the wrought-iron bridge.

Fortunately, she’d brought other clothes to the conference. She would wash her face—check her hair—change quickly once she was given her room.

She had good clothes to wear, this evening. Since she’d become president of the University her female staffers had seen to it that M.R. looked “stylish”—her assistant Audrey Myles had insisted upon taking M.R. to New York City to shop and they’d come back with a chic Chanel-imitation Champagne-colored wool suit—with a skirt—by an American designer. And Audrey had convinced M.R. to buy handsome new shoes as well, with a one-inch heel—bringing M.R.’s height to a teetering five feet ten and a half inches.

At such a height, you could not hide. You had best imagine yourself as a prow on a ship—a brave Amazon girl-warrior with breastplates, spear uplifted in her right hand.

Her astronomer-lover, when he’d first sighted her on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, years before, had described her in his way. He’d claimed to have fallen in love with her, in this first sighting. And her hair in a tight-woven braid hanging down between her shoulder blades like a glittery bronze-brown snake.

Since she’d risen in administration at the University, M.R. had long since gotten rid of the girl-scholar braid. As she’d tried to rid herself of a naive sentimentality about the sort of love her astronomer-lover could provide her. Now her hair was cropped short, trimmed and styled by a New York City hairdresser, at Audrey’s insistence: it was dense, springy, no longer golden brown but the ambiguous hue of a winter-ravaged field threaded with metallic-gray hairs that glittered like filaments.

In official biographies, M. R. Neukirchen was forty-one years old in September 2002. And looking much younger.

As a little girl she’d seen her birth certificate. Her parents had shown her. A document stamped with the heraldic New York State gold seal stating her birth date, her name—her names.

Our secret you need to tell no one.

Our secret, God has blessed our family.

She was “Merry” then—“Meredith Ruth Neukirchen.” Her birthday was September 21. A very nice time of year, the Neukirchens believed: a prelude to the beautiful season of autumn. Which was why they’d chosen it for her.

Which was why she often forgot her birthday, and was surprised when others reminded her.

She hadn’t minded not being beautiful, as a girl in Carthage, New York. She’d learned to be objective about such matters. There were those who liked her well enough—who loved her, in a way—for her fierce wide smile that resembled a grimace of pain, and her stoicism in the face of actual pain or discomfort; she’d had to laugh seeing her picture in local papers, the expression of longing in her face that was so scrubbed-looking plain it might have been a boy’s face and not that of a young woman of eighteen:

MEREDITH RUTH NEUKIRCHEN, CLASS OF ’79 VALEDICTORIAN CARTHAGE HIGH SCHOOL.

It had been the kind of upstate New York, small-city school in which, as in a drain, the least-qualified and -inspired teachers wound up, bemused and stoical and resigned; there had been several teachers who’d seen in Meredith something promising, even exciting—but only one who had inspired her, though not to emulate him personally. And when poor Meredith—“Merry”—hadn’t even been asked to the senior prom, though she’d been not only valedictorian of her graduating class but also its vice president, one of the women teachers had consoled her—“You’ll just have to make your way somehow else, Meredith”—with fumbling directness though meaning to be kind.

Not as a woman, and not sexual.

Somehow else.

Soon after the senior prom to which M.R. had not been invited, M.R.’s prettiest girl-classmates were married, and pregnant; pregnant, and married. Some were soon divorced, and became “single mothers”—a very different domestic destiny from the one they’d envisioned for themselves.

Very few of M.R.’s classmates, female or male, went on to college. Very few achieved what one might call careers. Of her graduating class of 118 students very few left Carthage or Beechum County or the southern Adirondacks, where the economy had been severely depressed for decades.

One of those regions in America, M.R. had said, trying to describe her background to her astronomer-lover who traveled more frequently to Europe than to the rural interior of the United States, where poverty has become a natural resource: social workers, welfare workers, community-medical workers, public defenders, prison and psychiatric hospital staffers, family court officials—all thrived in such barren soil. Only fleetingly had M.R. considered returning, as an educator—once she’d left, she had scarcely looked back.

Don’t forget us, Meredith! Come visit, stay a while …

We love our Merry.

M.R. had pushed her laptop aside and was examining road maps, laid out on a table in the library-lounge for hotel guests.

Particularly M.R. was intrigued by a detailed map of Tompkins County. She hoped to determine where she’d asked Carlos to stop. South and west of Ithaca were small towns—Edensville, Burnt Ridge, Shedd—but none appeared to be the town M.R. was looking for. With her forefinger M.R. traced a thin curvy blue stream—this must be the river, or the creek—south of Ithaca; but there was only a tiny dot on that stream as of a settlement too minuscule to be named, or extinct.

“Why is this important? It is not important.”

She whispered aloud. She was puzzled by her disappointment.

Abruptly the map ended at the northern border of Tompkins County but there were maps of adjoining New York State counties; there was a road map of New York State that M.R. eagerly unfolded, with no hope that she could fold it neatly back up again. Some crucial genetic component was missing in M.R., she could never fold road maps neatly back up again once she unfolded them….

In the Neukirchen household, Konrad had been the one to carefully, painstakingly re-fold maps. Agatha had been totally incapable, vexed and anxious.

It feels like some kind of trick. It can’t be done!

M.R. saw: to the north and east of Tompkins County was Cortland County—beyond Cortland, Madison—then Herkimer, so curiously elongated among other, chunkier counties; beyond Herkimer, in the Adirondacks, the largest and least populated county in New York State, Beechum.

At the northwestern edge of Beechum County, the city of Carthage.

How many miles was it? How far could she drive, on a whim? It looked like less than two hundred miles, to the southernmost curve of the Black Snake River in Beechum County. Which computed to about three hours if she drove at sixty miles an hour. Of course, she wouldn’t have to drive as far as Carthage; she could simply drive, with no particular destination, see how far she got after two hours—then turn, and drive back.

How quickly her heart was beating!

M.R. calculated: it was just 1:08 P.M. She’d been waiting for her hotel room for nearly twenty minutes. Surely in another few minutes, the desk clerk would summon her, and she could check into the room?

The reception began at 5:30 P.M.—but no one would be on time. And then, at about 6 P.M., everyone would arrive at once, the room would be crammed with people, no one would notice if M.R. arrived late. Dinner was more essential of course since M.R. was seated at the speakers’ table—that wasn’t until 7 P.M. And of course, the keynote address at 8 P.M….

There was time—or was there? Her brain balked at calculations like a faulty machine.

“Absurd. No. Just stop.”

The spell was broken by the cell phone ringing at M.R.’s elbow. The first stirring notes of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

M.R. saw that the caller ID was UNIVERSITY—meaning the president’s office. Of course, they were waiting to hear from her there.

“Yes, I’ve arrived. Everything is fine. In a few minutes I’ll be checked in. And Carlos is on his way back home.”

It was a fact: Carlos had departed. M.R. had thanked him and dismissed him. Late in the afternoon of the third day of the conference Carlos would return, to drive M.R. back to the University.

Of course, M.R. had suggested that Carlos stay the night—this night—at the hotel—at the University’s expense—to avoid the strain of driving a second five-hour stretch in a single day. But Carlos politely demurred: Carlos didn’t seem to care much for this well-intentioned suggestion.

It was a relief Carlos had left, M.R. thought. The driver had lingered in the lobby for a while as if uncertain whether to leave his distinguished passenger before she’d actually been summoned to her hotel room; he’d insisted upon carrying her suitcase into the hotel for her—this lightweight roller-suitcase M.R. could handle for herself and in fact preferred to handle herself, for she rested her heavy handbag on it as she rolled it along; but Carlos couldn’t bear the possibility of being observed—by other drivers?—in the mildest dereliction of his duty.

“Ma’am? Should I wait with you?”

“Carlos, thank you! But no. Of course not.”

“But if you need …”

“Carlos, really! The hotel has my reservation, obviously. It will be just another few minutes, I’m sure.”

Still he’d hesitated. M.R. couldn’t determine if it was professional courtesy or whether this dignified gentleman in his early sixties was truly concerned for her—perhaps it was both; he told her please call him on her cell phone if she needed anything, he would return to Ithaca as quickly as possible. But finally he’d left.

M.R. thought Of course. His life is elsewhere. His life is not driving a car for me.

Questioned afterward Carlos Lopes would say I asked her if I should stay—her room wasn’t ready yet in the hotel—she said no, I should leave—she was working in a room off the lobby—I said maybe she would need me like if they didn’t have a room for her and I could drive her to some other hotel and she laughed and said no Carlos! That is very kind of you but no—of course there will be a room.

As the desk clerk would say Her room was ready for her at about 1:15 P.M. She was gracious about waiting, she said it was no trouble. But then a few minutes later she called the front desk—I spoke with her—she asked about a car rental recommendation. Sometime after that she must have left the hotel. Nobody would’ve seen her, the lobby was so crowded. Her room was empty at 8:30 P.M. when some people from the conference asked us to open it. There was no DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. The lights were off. Her suitcase was on the bed opened but mostly unpacked and her laptop was on the bed, not opened. There weren’t any signs of anybody breaking into the room or anything disturbed and there was no note left behind.

By 2 P.M. she was in the rental car driving north of Ithaca.

Her lungs swelled with—relief? Exultation?

She’d told no one where she was going or even that she was going—somewhere.

Of course, M.R. was paying for the compact Toyota with her personal credit card.

Of course, M.R. knew that her behavior was impulsive but reasoned that since she’d arrived early at the conference, in fact hours before the conference officially began, this interlude—before 6 P.M., or 6:30 P.M.—was a sort of free fall, like gravity-less space.

Once she’d asked her (secret) lover how an astronomer can bear the silence and vastness of the sky which is unbroken/unending/unfathomable and which yields nothing remotely human in fact rather makes a mockery of human and he’d said—But darling! That is what draws the astronomer to his subject: silence, vastness.

Driving north to Beechum County she was driving into what felt like silence. For she’d left the radio off, and the wind whining and whistling at all the windows drained away all sound as in a vacuum leaving her brain blank.

Ancient time her lover called the sky without end predating every civilization on Earth that believed it was the be-all and end-all of Earth.

She’d resolved to drive for just an hour and a half in one direction. Three hours away would return her to the hotel by 5 P.M. and well in time to change and prepare for the reception.

Except the driving was wind-buffeted. She’d rented a small car.

Not so very practical for driving at a relatively high speed on the interstate flanked and overtaken by tractor-trailers.

In high school driver’s education class, M.R. had been an exemplary student. Aged sixteen she’d learned to parallel park with such skill, her teacher used her as a model for other students. Approvingly he’d said of her Meredith handles a car like a man.

Remembering how when she’d first begun driving she’d felt dizzy with excitement, happiness. That thrill of sheer power in the way the vehicle leaps when you press down on the gas pedal, turns when you turn the steering wheel, slows and stops when you brake.

Remembering how she’d thought This is something men know. A girl has to discover.

“‘Just to stretch my legs.’ No other reason.”

She laughed. Her laughter was hopeful. A thin dew of fever-dreams on her forehead, oily and prickling in her armpits. And some sort of snarl in her hair. As if in the night she’d been dreaming of—something like this.

She would have time to shower before the reception—wouldn’t she? Change into her chic presidential clothes.

As a girl—a big husky girl—a girl-athlete—M.R. had sweated like any boy, sweat-rivulets running down her sides, a torment at the nape of her neck beneath the bushy-springy hair. And in her crotch—a snaggle of even denser hair, exerting a sort of appalled fascination to the bearer—who was “Meredith”—in dread of this snaggle of hair being somehow known by others; as there were years—middle school, high school—of anxiety that her body would smell in such a way to be detected by others.

Of course, it had. Many times probably. For what could a husky girl do? Warm airless classroom-hours, sturdy thighs sticking/slapping together if you were not very careful.

As on certain days of the month, anxiety rose like the red column of mercury in a thermometer, in heat.

Having her period. Poor Meredith!

Everything shows in her face. Funny!

Early that morning before Carlos arrived—for M.R. had slept only intermittently through the night—she’d showered, of course, shampooed her hair. So long ago, seemed like another day.

And so another shower, back at the hotel. When she returned.

On the interstate M.R. was making good time in the compact little vehicle. Her speed held steady at just above sixty miles an hour which was a safe speed, even a cautious speed amid so many larger vehicles hurtling past her in the left lane as if with snorts of derision.

But—the beauty of this landscape! It required going away, and returning, to truly see it.

Farmland, hills. Wide swaths of farmland—cornfields, wheat—now harvested—rising in hills to the horizon. She caught her breath—those flame-flashes of sumac dark-red, fiery-orange by the roadside—amid darker evergreens, deciduous trees whose leaves hadn’t—yet—begun to die.

Already she was beyond Bone Plain Road, Frozen Ocean State Park. Passing signs for Boontown, Forestport, Poland and Cold Brook—names not yet familiar to her from her girlhood in Beechum County.

These precious hours! If her parents knew, they’d have wanted to see her—they’d have been willing to drive to Ithaca for the evening.

They’d have wanted to hear her keynote address. For they were so very proud of her. And they loved her. And saw so little of her since she’d left Carthage on that remarkable scholarship to Cornell, it must have perplexed them.

“I should have. Why didn’t I!”

It was as if M.R. had not thought of the possibility at all. As if a part of her brain had ceased functioning.

That peculiar sort of blindness/amnesia in which objects simply vanish as they pass into the area monitored by the damaged brain. Not that one forgets but that experience itself has been blocked.

Now that M.R. had assistants, it was no trouble to make such arrangements. At the hotel, for instance. Or, if the conference hotel was booked solid, at another local hotel. Audrey would have been delighted to book a room for M.R.’s parents.

M.R.’s lover had heard her speak in public several times. He’d been surprised—impressed—by her ease before a large audience, when M.R. was so frequently uneasy in his company.

Well, not uneasy—excited. M.R. was frequently so excited in his company.

She couldn’t bring herself to confess to her (secret) lover that intimacy with him was so precious to her, it was a strain to which she hadn’t yet become accustomed. She’d said with a smile No speaker makes eye contact with his audience. The larger the audience, the easier. That is the secret.

Her lover imagined her a far more composed and self-reliant individual than she was. It had long been a fiction of their relationship, that M.R. didn’t “need” a man in her life; she was of a newer, more liberated generation—for her lover was her senior by fourteen years, and often remarked upon this fact as if to absolve himself of any candidacy as the husband of a girl “so young.” Also, Andre was enmeshed in a painful marriage he liked to describe as resembling Laocoön and sons in the coils of the terrible sea-serpents.

M.R. laughed aloud. For Andre Litovik was so very funny, you might forget that his humor frequently masked a truth or a motive not-so-funny.

“Oh—God …”

Powerful air-suction from a passing/speeding trailer-truck made M.R.’s compact vehicle shudder. The trucker must have been driving at eighty miles an hour. M.R. braked her car, alarmed and frightened.

She’d been daydreaming, and not concentrating on her driving. She’d felt her mind drift.

Better to exit the interstate onto a state highway. This was safer, if slower. Through acres of steeply hilly farmland she drove into Cortland County, and she drove into Madison County, and she drove into Herkimer County and into the foothills of the Adirondacks and at last into Beechum County where mountain peaks covered in evergreens stretched hazy and sawtoothed to the horizon like receding and diminishing dreams.

She’d planned to drive north for only an hour and a half before turning around but decided now that a few minutes more—a few miles more—would do no harm.

Wherever she found herself at—4:30 P.M.?—she would stop at once, turn her car around and head back to Ithaca.

This was likely the first time in months that no one on M.R.’s staff knew where she was, at such an hour of a weekday. No friends knew, no colleagues. M.R. had passed into the blind side of the brain, she’d become invisible.

Was this a good thing, or—not so good? Both her parents had praised her as a girl for her maturity, her sense of “responsibility.” But this was something different, a mere interlude.

This was something different: no one would ever know.

She’d turned off her cell phone. More practical to take messages and answer them in sequence.

And what relief, to have left her laptop behind on the hotel bed! She was attached to the thing like a colostomy bag. Her senses reacted in panic if it appeared to be malfunctioning for just a few minutes. A flurry of e-mails buzzing in her wake like angry bees.

Belatedly M.R. remembered—she was supposed to meet with a prominent educator now chairing a national committee on bioethics who’d been asked to invite M.R. to join the committee. This was a committee M.R. wanted to join—nothing seemed to her more crucial than establishing guidelines on bioethics—yet somehow, she’d forgotten. In her haste to rent a car and drive up into Beechum County, she’d forgotten. And M.R. had scheduled their meeting-time herself—just before the reception, at 5 P.M.

She might have called the man to postpone their meeting to the next day but she didn’t have his cell phone number. Nor did she want to call her assistant Audrey to place the call for her for Audrey would naturally inquire where M.R. was and M.R. could not possibly tell her—“Just crossing the Black Snake River, up in Beechum County.”

Audrey would have been speechless. Audrey would have thought that M.R. must be joking.

Now in Beechum County M.R. switched on the car radio. She hoped to tune in to a Watertown station—WWTX. Once an NPR affiliate but now M.R. couldn’t locate it on the dial only just deafening patches of rock music and advertisements—the detritus of America.

On one FM station there appeared to be news—news from Washington—but static swept it away like ribald laughter.

News from Washington—but the U.S. Congress wouldn’t yet be voting on the war resolution, would it? This was too soon. There had to be days yet of debate.

M.R. couldn’t quite believe that legislators in Washington would authorize the bellicose Republican president to wage war against Iraq—this would be madness! The U.S. hadn’t entirely recovered from the debacle of the Vietnam War of which little ambiguity remained—the war had been a terrible mistake. Still, excited war rumors in the media—even the more liberal media like the New York Times—flared and rippled like wildfire in dried brush. There was a terrible thrillingness to the possibility of war.

It was astonishing how effectively the administration had lied to convince the majority of the American public that there was a direct link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of 9/11. For since that catastrophic episode a near-palpable toxic-cloud was accumulating over the country, a gradual darkening of logic—an impatience with logic.

Madness! M.R. could not think of it without beginning to tremble.

She was an ethicist: a professional. It was criminal, it was self-destructive, it was cruel, stupid, quixotic—unethical: waging war on such flimsy pretexts.

What was the appeal of war?—the appeal of a paroxysm of sustained and collective violence repeated endlessly, from the earliest prehistory until the present time? It was not enough to say Men are bred to war, men are warriors—men must perform their role as warriors. It was not enough to say Humankind is self-destructive, damned. Of all the species, damned.

As a liberal, as an educator, M.R. did not believe in such primitive determinism. She did not believe in genetic determinism at all.

Very likely she had young relatives scattered through Beechum County who were in the National Guard or in a branch of the armed services. Some might even now be stationed in the Middle East awaiting deployment to battle, as in the Gulf War of some years ago. Like the more southern Appalachian region Beechum County was the sort of economically depressed rural-America that provided fodder for the military machine.

M.R.’s immediate family—Agatha and Konrad—were Quakers, if not “active” in the nearest Friends’ congregation, which was some distance from Carthage. (“Too lazy to drive,” Konrad said. “You can ‘Quaker’ at any time and any place.”) None of the other Neukirchens were Quakers and certainly none were pacifists like Konrad who’d been granted the status of conscientious objector during the Korean War and instead of being incarcerated in a federal prison was allowed to work in a VA hospital in Baltimore.

Konrad was a kindly man, short and squat as a fireplug and fierce in declaring that if somehow he’d found himself in the army—in combat—he could never fire at any “enemy.” He could not even hold a gun, point a gun at anyone.

M.R. smiled, recalling her father. She was recalling Konrad not as he was at the present time—an aging ailing man—but as he’d been in her earliest memories, in the mid-and late 1960s.

The one thing they can’t make you do is kill another person. They can’t even make you hate another person.

There was a sign—CARTHAGE 78 MILES. But M.R. could not drive to Carthage today.

Uneasily she was thinking—is it time to turn back? Some instinct kept her from checking the time….

How strange she was feeling! This sensation she’d felt as a girl inching out—with other, older children—onto the frozen river; so darkly swift-flowing a river, like a black snake with glittering scales, that water froze only at shore and continued to rush along at the center of the stream.

Unmistakably, there was a thrill to this. Daring and reckless the older boys crept out onto the ice, toward the unfrozen center. Younger children stayed behind out of timidity.

You must not let them entice you, Meredith! If you are injured they will run away and abandon you for that is their kind—they are cruel, can’t help themselves for their God is a God of conquest and wrath and not a God of love.

There was a dislike, a resentment of Meredith’s parents—not to their faces but behind their backs—for Konrad’s unmanly pacifism. For Beechum County was a gun culture. Hunters, warriors.

M.R. felt a mild headache coming on. She hadn’t eaten since early that morning and then at her desk at home, answering e-mails.

Solitary mealtimes are not very pleasurable. Solitary mealtimes are best avoided.

The deficiency of philosophy is that it has no stomach, no guts. In all of classic philosophy not a single pulsebeat of feeling.

Oh why hadn’t she invited Agatha and Konrad to Ithaca for this evening! It would have been so easy to have done, and would have meant so much to them.

M.R. loved her parents but often seemed to forget them. Like clouds sailing overhead, they were—snowy-white clouds of surpassing and unearthly beauty at which no one thinks to look.

“I will do better. I will try harder. I hope they will forget me.”

She meant forgive of course. Not forget.

In fact she was—just now—crossing the Black Snake River. The wrought-iron truss bridge vibrated beneath the lightweight Toyota. The river was thirty or more feet below the bridge, rushing like something demented. Wheels—spirals—of light—like defects in the eye. You could imagine a giant serpent in that molten liquid—lifting its head, tawny eyes and fanged jaws.

Look again, the serpent has vanished beneath the water’s surface.

Farther to the west, at Carthage, in layers of crusted shale there were fossils M.R. had searched for, as a girl. Ancient crustaceans, long-extinct fish. Her biology teacher had sent her out: he’d identified the fossils for her. M.R. had drawn them in her notebook, with particular care.

A string of A-pluses attached to Meredith Neukirchen like a comet’s long tail.

Here the river’s shore was less rocky, more marshy. The river did not appear to be the river of her girlhood and yet—it was strangely familiar to her, like the serpent’s head.

Off the bridge ramp was a sign for RAPIDS—5 MILES. SLABTOWN—11 MILES. RIVIERE-DU-LOUP—18 MILES. In the near distance Mount Moriah—one of the highest peaks in the southern Adirondacks—and beyond, shadowy peaks whose names M.R. couldn’t recall with certainty: Mount Provenance, Mount Hammer? Mount Marcy? It was geology—nineteenth-century geology—that had first shaken the Christian creation-myth so deeply entrenched in Europe, and in the blood-steeped soil of Europe, you would never think it might be extirpated like rotted roots; eruptions of human certainty like eruptions of volcanic lava scouring everything in its path. For what was the earth but a mass of roiling lava—not a “created” thing at all.

Within a few decades, the old faith was shaken utterly. All was devastation.

Except, as Nietzsche so shrewdly observed, the devastation was ignored. Denied. Knowledge of Earth’s position in the universe had entered the blind-visual field of neglect.

She would not be a party to such denial, such blindness. She, empowered as the first woman president of a great university, would speak the truth as she saw it.

For in her vanity she wished to align herself with the great truth-tellers—not with those who spoke to placate.

In high school M.R. had been drawn to geology as to other sciences but in subsequent years her passion for the abstract—for philosophy—“ethics”—had driven out the hard concrete names like irreducible ores—igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic.

Science is another name for God-seeking, the Neukirchens had assured her. Their Quaker faith was so very wide, vast, all-encompassing—a Sargasso Sea without boundaries and without a Savior.

M.R. dared not glance at the dashboard clock. It was time for her to turn back, she knew.

She was passing trailer villages, small asphalt-sided houses, semi-abandoned farmhouses and barns. She was passing the Old Dutch Road—was this familiar?—and the Sandusky Road. The narrow Black River Road curved dangerously close to the river. On that side, the shoulder had been eaten away by erosion. On the farther shore was a curious steep step-ladder-like hill or small mountain near-bare of vegetation from which gigantic boulders seem to have loosed and fallen into the river. There was the look of an ancient landscape shaken, broken. Yet a powerful beauty in these broken shapes.

A sharp pain struck between her shoulder blades like a stinging insect for she’d been tensing up, driving. Leaning forward gripping the steering wheel in both hands as if fearing the wheel might get away from her.

He’d said to her—her (secret) lover—Eternity hasn’t a damn thing to do with time—but he’d been joking, he had not meant to be cruel or mocking and she had kissed his mouth, daring to kiss his mouth that was only just barely hers to kiss.

More mysteriously he’d said Earth-time is a way of preventing everything happening at once.

Did he mean—what? M.R. wasn’t sure.

Telling a story, you must lay out “events”—in a chronological sequence. Or rather, you must establish a chronological sequence, so that you know what your story is, and can “tell” it.

Only in time, calendar-time and clock-time, is there chronology. Otherwise—an entire life is but a nanosecond, as swiftly ended as it began, and everything has happened at once.

Possibly, this was what Andre meant. His field was galaxy evolution and star formation in galaxies—his boyhood obsession had been a hope of “mapping” the Universe.

M.R. had had few lovers—very few. For men were not naturally—she supposed, sexually—attracted to her. Her weakness was for men of exceptional intellect—at least, intelligence greater than her own. So that she would not be required to mask her own.

The sorrow was, such men seemed to have been, through her life, invariably older than she. And some of them cynical. And some worn like old gloves, scuffed boots. Most were married and some twice-or even thrice-married.

She did want to be married! One day.

She did want to marry Andre Litovik.

He’d tried to discourage her from accepting the presidency of the University. She’d had a sense that he was fearing his girl-Amazon might drift from him after all.

If truly he loved her—he’d have been hopeful for her, proud of her.

Or maybe: even an exceptional man has difficulty feeling pride in an exceptional woman.

M.R. tried to determine where she was. Ever more uneasily she was conscious of time passing.

Ready you must be readied. It is time.

A sign for SPRAGG 7 MILES. SLABTOWN 13 MILES. A sign for Star Lake, in the opposite direction—66 MILES.

Spragg—Slabtown—Star Lake. M.R. had heard of Star Lake, she thought—but not the others, so oddly named.

Abruptly then she came to a barrier in the road.

DETOUR

ROAD OUT NEXT 3 MILES

You could see how beyond the barrier a stretch of road had collapsed into the Black Snake River. Quickly M.R. braked the Toyota to a stop—the earth-slide was shocking to see, like a physical deformity.

“Oh! Damn.”

She was disappointed—this would slow her down.

She was thinking how swiftly it must have happened: the road caving in beneath a moving vehicle, a car, a truck—a school bus?—plunging into the river, trapped and terrified and no one to witness the horror. Not likely that the road had simply collapsed beneath its own weight.

Death by (sheer) accident. Surely this was the most merciful of deaths!

Death at the hands of another: the cruelest.

Death by the hands of another who is known to you, close as a heartbeat: the very cruelest.

By the look of the fallen-away road, vines and briars growing in cracks, a tangle of sumac and stunted trees, the river road had not collapsed recently. Beechum County had no money for the repair of so remote a road: the detour had become perpetual.

Like a curious child—for one is always drawn to DETOUR as to NO TRESPASSING: DANGER—M.R. turned her car onto a narrow side road: Mill Run. Though of course, the sensible thing would be to turn back.

Was Mill Run even paved? Or covered in gravel, that had long since worn away? The single-lane road led into the countryside that appeared to be low-lying, marshy; no farmland here but a sort of no-man’s-land, uninhabited.

At a careful speed M.R. drove along the rutted road. She was a good driver—intent upon avoiding potholes. She knew how a tire can be torn by a sudden sharp declivity; she could not risk a flat tire at this time.

M.R. was one who’d learned to change tires, as a girl. There was the sense that M.R. had better learn to fend for herself.

In fact there had been inhabitants along the Mill Run Road, and not too long ago—an abandoned house, set back in a field like a gaunt and etiolated elder; a Sunoco station amid a junked-car lot, that appeared to be closed; and an adjoining café where a faded sign rattled in the wind—BLACK RIVER CAFÉ.

Both the Sunoco station and the café were boarded up. Just outside the café was a pickup truck shorn of wheels. M.R. might have turned into the parking lot here but—so strangely—found herself continuing forward as if drawn by an irresistible momentum.

She was smiling—was she? Her brain, ordinarily so active, hyper-active as a hive of shaken hornets, was struck blank in anticipation.

In hilly countryside, foothills and densely wooded mountains, you can see the sky only in patches—M.R. had glimpses of a vague blurred blue and twists of cloud like soiled bandages. She was driving in odd rushes and jolts pressing her foot on the gas pedal and releasing it—she was hoping not to be surprised by whatever lay ahead and yet, she was surprised—shocked: “Oh God!”

For there was a child lying at the side of the road—a small figure lying at the side of the road broken, discarded. The Toyota veered, plunged off the road into a ditch.

Unthinking M.R. turned the wheel to avoid the child. There came a sickening thud, the jolt of the vehicle at a sharp angle in the ditch—the front left wheel and the rear left wheel.

So quickly it had happened! M.R.’s heart lurched in her chest. She fumbled to open the door, and to extract herself from the seat belt. The car engine was still on—a violent peeping had begun. She’d thought it had been a child at the roadside but of course—she saw now—it was a doll.

Mill Run Road. Once, there must have been a mill of some sort in this vicinity. Now, all was wilderness. Or had reverted to wilderness. The road was a sort of open landfill used for dumping—in the ditch was a mangled and filthy mattress, a refrigerator with a door agape like a mouth, broken plastic toys, a man’s boot.

Grunting with effort M.R. managed to climb—to crawl—out of the Toyota. Then she had to lean back inside, to turn off the ignition—a wild thought came to her, the car might explode. Her fingers fumbled the keys—the keys fell onto the car floor.

She saw—it wasn’t a doll either at the roadside, only just a child’s clothing stiff with filth. A faded-pink sweater and on its front tiny embroidered roses.

And a child’s sneaker. So small!

Tangled with the child’s sweater was something white, cotton—underpants?—stiff with mud, stained. And socks, white cotton socks. And in the underbrush nearby the remains of a kitchen table with a simulated-maple Formica top. Rural America, filling up with trash.

An entire household dumped out on the Mill Run Road! Not a happy story.

M.R. stooped to inspect the refrigerator. Of course it was empty—the shelves were rusted, badly battered. There was a smell. A sensation of such unease—oppression—came over her, she had to turn away.

“And now—what?”

She could call AAA—her cell phone was in the car. But probably she could maneuver the Toyota out of the ditch herself for the ditch wasn’t very deep.

Except—what time was it?

Staring at her watch. Trying to calculate. Was it already past 4:30 P.M.—nearly 5 P.M.? This was unexpectedly late! Mid-October and the sun slanting in the sky and dusk coming on.

This side of the Black Snake River were stretches of marshland, mudflats. She’d been smelling mud. You could see that the river often overran its banks here. There was a harsh brackish smell as of rancid water and rotted things.

Staring at her watch which was a small elegant gold watch inscribed with the name and heraldic insignia of a New England liberal arts college for women. It had been given to M.R. to commemorate her having received from the college an honorary doctorate in humane letters and shortly thereafter, an invitation to interview for its presidency. She’d been thirty-six at the time. She’d been dean of the faculty at the University at the time. Graciously she’d declined. She did not say I am so grateful but no—it isn’t likely that I would accept a position at a women’s college.

Or—It isn’t likely that I would accept a position at any university other than a major research university. That is not M. R. Neukirchen’s plan.

Amid the cast-off household litter was a strip of rotted tarpaulin.

M.R. pulled it loose, dragged it to the Toyota to place beneath the wheels on the driver’s side, that were mired in mud. This was good! This was good luck! Awkwardly then she crawled back into the badly tilted car, located the keys on the floor mat, and managed to start the engine—eased the car forward a few inches, let it rock back; eased it again forward, and let it rock back; at first the wheels spun, then began to take hold. The car moved, jerked spasmodically; in another minute or two she would have eased the Toyota back up onto the road except—the rotted tarpaulin must have given way, the wheels spun frantically.

“God damn.”

M.R. reached for the cell phone, that had fallen to the floor. Tried to call AAA but the phone was unreceptive.

If only she’d thought to call her assistant a half hour ago—the cell phone might have worked then. Just to allow the (anxious?) young woman to know I may be late for the reception. A few minutes late. But I will not be late for the dinner. I will not be late for my talk of course.

She would have spoken to Audrey in her usual bright brisk manner that did not invite interruptions. It was a bright brisk manner that did not invite murmurs of commiseration. She would have said, if Audrey had expressed concern for her, Of course, I’m fine! Good-bye for now.

She was hiking along the road with the cell phone in her hand. Repeatedly she tried to activate it but the damned thing remained dead.

Useless plastic, dead!

If she ascended to higher ground? Would the phone be more likely to work? Or—was this a ridiculous notion, desperate?

“I am not desperate. Not yet.”

Amid the mudflats was a sort of peninsula, a spit of land raised about three feet, very likely man-made, like a dam; M.R. climbed up onto it. She was a strong woman, her legs and thighs were hard with muscle beneath the soft, just slightly flabby female flesh; she made an effort to swim, hike, run, walk—she “worked out” in the University gym; still, she quickly became breathless, panting. For there was something very oppressive about this place—the acres of mudflats, the smell. Even on raised ground she was walking in mud—her nice shoes, mud-splattered. Her feet were wet.

She thought I must turn back. As soon as I can.

She thought I will know what to do—this can be made right.

Staring at her watch trying to calculate but her mind wasn’t working with its usual efficiency. And her eyes—was something wrong with her eyes?

The reception would begin at—was it 6 P.M.? But M.R. wouldn’t need to arrive promptly at 6 P.M. M.R. wouldn’t have to attend the reception at all. Such events were hardly crucial. And the dinner—was the dinner at 7:30 P.M.? She would hurry to the table which would be the head table in the enormous banquet room—she would murmur an apology—she could explain that she’d had to drive somewhere, unavoidably—her car had broken down returning.

Stress, overwork the doctor had told her. Hours at the computer and when she glanced up her vision was distorted and she had to blink, squint to bring the world into some sort of focus.

How faraway that world—there could be no direct route to that world, from the Mill Run Road.

A crouched figure. Bearded face, astonished eyes. Slung over his shoulder a half-dozen animal traps. With a gloved hand prodding at—whatever it was in the mud.

“Hello? Is someone …?”

She was making her way along the edge of a makeshift dam. It was a dam comprised of boulders and rocks and it had acquired over the years a sort of mortar of broken and rotted tree limbs and even animal carcasses and skeletons. Everywhere the mudflats stretched, everywhere cattails and rushes grew in profusion. There were trees choked with vines. Dead trees, hollow tree-trunks. The pond was covered in algae bright-green as neon that looked as if it were quivering with microscopic life and where the water was clear the pebble-sky was reflected like darting eyes. She was staring at the farther shore where she’d seen something move—she thought she’d seen something move. A flurry of dragonflies, flash of birds’ wings. Bursts of autumn foliage like strokes of paint and deciduous trees looking flat as cutouts. She waited and saw nothing. And in the mudflats stretching on all sides nothing except cattails, rushes stirred by the wind.

She was thinking of something her (secret) lover had once said—There is no truth except perspective. There are no truths except relations. She had seemed to know what he’d meant at the time—he’d meant something matter-of-fact yet intimate, even sexual; she was quick to agree with whatever her lover said in the hope that someday, sometime she would see how self-evident it was and how crucial for her to have agreed at the time.

Thinking There is a position, a perspective here. This spit of land upon which I can walk, stand; from which I can see that I am already returned to my other life, I have not been harmed and will have begun to forget.

Thinking This is all past, in some future time. I will look back, I will have walked right out of it. I will have begun to forget.

The spit of land—a kind of raised peninsula—the ruin of an old mill. In the tall spiky weeds remnants of lumber. Shattered concrete blocks. She was limping—she’d turned her ankle. She was very tired. She had not slept for a very long time. In the president’s house she was so lonely! Her (secret) lover had not come to visit her. Her (secret) lover had not come to visit her since she’d moved into the president’s house and there was no plan for him to visit—yet.

In the president’s house which was an historic landmark dating to Colonial times M.R. had her own private quarters on the second floor. Still, the bed in which she slept in the president’s house was an antique four-poster bed of the 1870s and it was not a bed M.R. would have chosen for herself though it was not so uncomfortable a bed that M.R. wished to have it moved out and another bed moved in.

For his back, Andre required a hard mattress. At least, the mattress in M.R.’s bed was that.

At the end of the peninsula there was—nothing. Mudflats, desiccated trees. In the Adirondacks, acid rain had been falling for years—parts of the vast forest were dying.

“Hello?”

Strange to be calling out when clearly no one was there to hear. M.R.’s uplifted hand in a ghost-greeting.

He’d been a trapper—the bearded man. Hauling cruel-jawed iron traps over his shoulder. Muskrats, rabbits. Squirrels. His prey was small furry creatures. Hideous deaths in the iron traps, you did not want to think about it.

Hey! Little girl—?

She turned back. Nothing lay ahead.

Retracing her steps. Her footprints in the mud. Like a drunken person, unsteady on her feet. She was feeling oddly excited. Despite her tiredness, excited.

She returned to the littered roadway—there, the child’s clothing she’d mistaken so foolishly for a doll, or a child. There, the Toyota at its sharp tilt in the ditch. Within minutes a tow truck could haul it out, if she could contact a garage—so far as she could see the vehicle hadn’t been seriously damaged.

Possibly, M.R. wouldn’t need to report the accident to the rental company. For it had not been an “accident” really—no other vehicle had been involved.

She walked on, not certain where she was headed. The sky was darkening to dusk. Shadows lifted from the earth. She saw lights ahead—lights?—the gas station, the café—to her surprise and relief, these appeared to be open.

There was a crunch of gravel. A vehicle was just departing, in the other direction. Other vehicles were parked in the lot. In the café were lights, voices.

M.R. couldn’t believe her good luck! She would have liked to cry with sheer relief. Yet a part of her brain thinking calmly Of course. This has happened before. You will know what to do.

At a gas pump stood an attendant in soiled bib overalls, shirtless, watching her approach. He was a fattish man with snarled hair, a sly fox-face, watching her approach. Uneasily M.R. wondered—would the attendant speak to her, or would she speak to him, first? She was trying not to limp. Her leather shoes were hurting her feet. She didn’t want a stranger’s sympathy, still less a stranger’s curiosity.

“Ma’am! Somethin’ happen to ya car?”

There was a smirking sort of sympathy here. M.R. felt her face heat with blood.

She explained that her car had broken down about a mile away. That is—her car was partway in a ditch. Apologetically she said: “I could almost get it out by myself—the ditch isn’t deep. But …”

How pathetic this sounded! No wonder the attendant stared at her rudely.

“Ma’am—you look familiar. You’re from around here?”

“No. I’m not.”

“Yes, I know you, ma’am. Your face.”

M.R. laughed, annoyed. “I don’t think so. No.”

Now came the sly fox-smile. “You’re from right around here, ma’am, eh? Hey sure—I know you.”

“What do you mean? You know—me? My name?”

“Kraeck. That your name?”

“‘Kraeck.’ I don’t think so.”

“You look like her.”

M.R. didn’t care for this exchange. The attendant was a large burly man of late middle age. His manner was both familiar and threatening. He was approaching M.R. as if to get a better look at her and M.R. instinctively stepped back and there came to her a sensation of alarm, arousal—she steeled herself for the man’s touch—he would grip her face in his roughened hands, to peer at her.

“You sure do look like someone I know. I mean—used to know.”

M.R. smiled. M.R. was annoyed but M.R. knew to smile. Reasonably she said: “I don’t think so, really. I live hundreds of miles away.”

“Kraeck was her name. You look like her—them.”

“Yes—you said. But …”

Kraeck. She had never heard it before. What a singularly ugly name!

M.R. might have told the man that she’d been born in Carthage, in fact—maybe somehow he’d known her, he’d seen her, in Carthage. Maybe that was an explanation. There was a considerable difference between the small city of Carthage and this desolate part of the Adirondacks. But M.R. was reluctant to speak with this disagreeable individual any more than she had to speak with him for she could see that he was listening keenly to her voice, he’d detected her upstate New York accent M.R. had hoped she’d overcome, that so resembled his own.

“Excuse me …”

Badly M.R. had to use a restroom. She left the fox-faced attendant staring rudely at her and climbed the steps to the café.

It was wonderful how the sign that had appeared so faded, derelict, was now lighted: BLACK RIVER CAFÉ.

Inside was a long counter, or a bar—several men standing at the bar—a number of tables of which less than half were occupied—winking lights: neon advertisements for beer, ale. The air was hazy with smoke. A TV above the bar, quick-darting images like fish. M.R. wiped at her eyes for there was a blurred look to the interior of the Black River Café as if it had been hastily assembled. Windows with glass that appeared to be opaque. Pictures, glossy magazine cutouts on the walls that were in fact blank. From the TV came a high-pitched percussive sort of music like wind chimes, amplified. M.R. was smelling something rich, yeasty, wonderful—baking bread? Pie? Homemade pie? Her mouth flooded with saliva, she was weak with hunger.

“Ma’am! Come in here. You look cold. Hungry.”

Out of the kitchen came a heavyset woman with a large round muffin-face creased in a smile. She wore a man’s red-plaid flannel shirt and brown corduroy slacks and over this a stained gingham apron. She was holding the kitchen door open, for M.R. to join her.

“Ma’am—mind if I say—you lookin’ like you had some kind a shock. You better come here.”

M.R. smiled, uncertainly. With a touch of her warm hand the heavyset woman drew M.R. forward as the men at the bar stared frankly.

Maybe—they liked what they saw. They approved of the girl-Amazon in city clothes, disheveled.

The woman was as tall as M.R.—in fact taller. Her hair was knotted and coiled about her head—a wan, faded gold like retreating sunshine. Her wide-set eyes were lighted like coins. And that wide, wet smile.

“Good you got here, ma’am. Out on that road after dark—you’d get lost fast.”

“Oh yes! Thank you.”

M.R. was dazed with gratitude. She felt like a drowning swimmer who has been hauled ashore.

In the kitchen, M.R. was given a chair to sit in. It was a familiar chair, this was comforting. The paint worn in a certain pattern on the back—the wicker seat beginning to buckle. And just in time for her knees had become weak.

Another comfort, the smell of baked goods. Simmering food, some kind of stew, on the stove. Like a sudden flame a frantic hunger was released in M.R.

“Hel-lo! Wel-come!”

“Ma’am! Wel-come.”

There were others in the kitchen, warmly greeting M.R. She could not see their faces clearly but believed that they were relatives of the older woman.

There came a bowl of dark glistening soup, placed steaming before M.R. She supposed it was some kind of beef soup, or lamb—mutton?—globules of grease on the surface but M.R. was too hungry to be repelled. Her lips were soon coated with grease, there was no napkin with which she might wipe her face. She’d become so civilized, it was awkward for her to eat without a napkin in her lap—but there were no napkins here.

“Good, eh? More?”

Yes, it was good. Yes, M.R. would have more.

She was seated at a familiar table—Formica-topped, simulated maple, with battered legs. The air in the kitchen was warm, close, humid. On the gas-burner stove were many pots and pans. On another table were fresh-baked muffins, whole grain bread, pies. These were pies with thick crusts and sugary-gluey insides. Apple pies, cherry pies.

A bottle of beer. Bottles of beer. A hand lifted the bottle, poured the foaming dark liquid into a glass. M.R. drank.

So thirsty! So hungry! Her eyes welled with tears of childish gratitude.

The heavyset woman served her. The heavyset woman had enormous breasts to her waist. The heavyset woman had a coarse flushed skin and sympathetic eyes. Her crown of braids made her appear regal yet you knew—you could not coerce this woman.

When others—men, boys—tried to push into the kitchen to peer at M.R. in her rumpled and mud-stained clothes, the heavyset woman shooed them away. Laughing saying, Yall go away get the hell out noner your business here.

M.R. was eating so greedily, soup spilled onto the front of her jacket.

Her hands shook. Beer in her nostrils making her cough, choke.

She’d had too much to drink, and to eat. Too quickly. Laughing became coughing and coughing became choking and the heavyset woman thumped her between the shoulder blades with a fist.

It was the TV—or, a jukebox—loud percussive music. She could not hear the music, so loud. Something was entering her—lights?—like glinting blades. She wasn’t drunk but a wild drunken elation swept over her, she was so very grateful trying to explain to the heavyset woman that she had never tasted food so wonderful.

Thinking I have never been so happy.

For it was revealed to M.R. that there were such places—(secret) places—to which she could retreat. (Secret) places not known even to her that would comfort her in times of danger. A sudden expansion of being as if something had gotten inside her tight-braided brain and pumped air and light into it—fire, wind—laughter—music.

Hel-lo. Hel-lo. Hel-lo!

Don’t I know you?

Hey sure—sure I do. And you know me.

Feeling so very relieved. So very happy. A warmth spread in her heart. Clumsily M.R. tried to stand, to step into the embrace of the heavyset woman—press her face against the woman’s large warm spongy breasts and hide inside the warm spongy fleshy arms.

You know—you are safe here.

Waiting for you—here.

Jewell!—Jedina. We are waiting for you—here.

Yet there was something wrong for the heavyset woman hadn’t embraced her as M.R. had expected—instead the heavyset woman pushed M.R. away as you might push away an importunate child not in anger or annoyance or even impatience but simply because at that moment the importunate child isn’t wanted. There was a rebuke here, M.R. did not want to consider. She was thinking I must pay. I must leave a tip. None of this can be free. She was fumbling with her wallet—she’d misplaced her leather handbag but somehow, she had her wallet. And she was trying to see her watch. The numerals were blurred. In fact there were no hands on the watch-face to indicate the time. Let me see that, ma’am. Deftly the watch was removed from her wrist—she wanted to protest but could not. And her wallet—her wallet was taken from her. In its place she was given something to drink that was burning-hot. Was it whiskey? Not beer but whiskey? Her throat burned, her eyes smarted with tears. That’ll speak to you, ma’am, eh?—a man’s voice, bemused. There was laughter in the café—the laughter of men, boys—not mocking laughter—(she wanted to think)—but genial laughter—for they’d pushed into the kitchen after all.

Ma’am where’re you from?—for her voice so resembles theirs. Ma’am where’re you going?—for despite her clothes she’s one of them, their staring eyes can see.

Her heavy head is resting on her crossed arms. And the side of her face against the sticky tabletop. So strange that her breasts hang loose to be crushed against the tabletop. The rude laughter has faded. So tired! Her eyes are shut, she is sinking, falling. There’s a scraping of chair legs against the floor that sound unfriendly. A hand, or a fist, lightly taps her shoulder.

“Ma’am. We’re closing now.”