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Wish for Amnesia A Tale About A Family, and Time and Art and Science, Religion, Philosophy and Current Events

Wish for Amnesia

ABOUT other WORKS by BARBARA ROSENTHAL

“...unbearable realities...” —John Russell, The NY Times // “...incessantly personal, even naked, with an emphasis on language...” —Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice // “... profound work...pithy, poignant, prophetic... high content...” — Clare Carswell, Flash Art International // “...dreamlike, associative...” —Shelley Rice, Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology // “...hyper-real...” —Ngan Le, Berlin Art Link // “...effective directness...” —Laura C. Lieberman, Afterimage // “...Platonic ideal...large and public scale...transgresses conventional limits...” —Ellen Handy, Photography Quarterly “...a very funny take on life...sardonic...”—Bill Creston // “...truly original...”—Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes // “...questioning the modern milieu...” —Pam Kray, Book Arts, London // “... introspection, reflection, and the texture of the material world...” —Philippa Hawker, Sydney Morning Hearald // “...A one-to-one experience...” — Shelley Rice, The Franklin Furnace Flue // “...A well-spring for the intellect and the emotions...” —Don Russell, WPA // “...to share the ultimately private...” —George Myers, Jr., Introduction to Modern Times // “...a thinking artist...” — Judith Hoffberg, Umbrella // “...Freudian concept of the uncanny, where familiar things are imbued with strangeness...” Natalie Zayne, Belgo Report, Montreal // “...charged with psychic energy...” — Laurie Schneider, Score // “...combines mass culture and interior monologue...” —Ellen Handy, Arts Magazine

Wish for Amnesia

other BOOKS by BARBARA ROSENTHAL BOOKS, sole author Soul & Psyche

ISBN 0-89822-121-8 Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1998

Homo Futurus

ISBN 0-89822-046-7 Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986

Sensations

ISBN 0-89822-022-x Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1984

Clues to Myself

ISBN 0-89822-015-7 Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1981

PAMPHLETS, soul author Existential Cartoons

eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 2001

Names / Lives

eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 2001

Childrens’ Shoes

eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1992

Introduction to the 1976-1986 Trilogy eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1985

Old Address Book

eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1984

Structure and Meaning

eMediaLoft.org, NYC, 1981

BOOKS and PAMPHLETS in COLLABORATION Weeks

photographer with poet Hannah Weiner ISBN 0-9770049-7-x Xeoxial Endarchy, La Farge, WI, 1989

Party Everywhere

technical director for poet Jeffrey Cyphers Wright ISBN 0-97607893-9-9 Xanadu Press, NYC, 2014

Roger’s Reference: Dictionary of Homonyms & Homophones American-spellings editor for author Roger Burke ISBN 0-9579618-2-0 Chiasmus Press, Morayfield, AU, 2005

Wish for Amnesia

None of the characters or references are meant to represent any person living or dead, unless they’re named correctly and are so famous they’re fair game. None of the places refer to anyone there. None of the scenes ever took place. But every quotation is transcribed accurately from the author’s contemporaneous readings copied longhand into her Journals, and all general history and every specific date is real. On Dec. 27, 1985, terrorists attacked two airports, and Halley’s Comet neared the Earth. “All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television [or internet] review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, [scanning] and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.” —Ed. New Directions, A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud

ISBN: 978-1-937739-66-9 Published by: Dr. Faustus & Co / Deadly Chaps Press New York, NY, USA http: //www.deadlychaps.com 2014

Wish for Amnesia A Tale About A Family, and Time and Art and Science, Religion, Philosophy and Current Events

Wish for Amnesia

FOREWORD by Joseph A.W. Quintela, publisher At a sun-soaked gathering of poets, in a grassy Queens park overlooking Manhattan, I first encounter Barbara Rosenthal, barefoot, face shaded by a widebrimmed black hat, perched on a stone wall and looking every bit the part: an oracle. If words could perfectly conjure a moment to the page, I might dispense with the remainder of this forward, as it would be the ideal introduction to Wish for Amnesia. However, potent as they are, words are not imbued with such powers and so we must go on. I recognize the artist immediately, but it takes me a while to work up the courage to say hello. At the gathering, we are both performing poetry interventions

Foreword

that use cards to initiate interaction. At one point we spontaneously say words aloud which combine two of our cards in a moment of cosmic collaboration. By this entree I find myself joining her for a Long Island Iced Tea and a rambling conversation that returns invariably to one of the many preoccupations of the ensuing pages: the multiplicity of variations that exists in the individual perceptions of time. “…time plays tricks,” reflects Jack, one of the main characters in Wish For Amnesia and, for me, this has never been as true as it is in this hours-long conversation which has never left my mind. By the time we part on the subway back to Manhattan my mind is pleasantly reeling. So begins our acquaintance. The agreement to finally release Wish for Amnesia with Deadly Chaps Press comes a year later. At this point, Barbara and I have planned to release a trilogy of her Journal-text artist books, assimilating materials from 1990-2005. However, as that project expands it becomes clear that it must be prefaced by the very thing that prefaces the decade: the construction of her first of two novels, and publication of this first. So work on the trilogy is suspended as Barbara throws open one of the six trunks of Journals, Drafts and Mock-ups that occupy her Hudson River-facing studio loft. From the treasure trove of process notes, whole files and loose-leaf binders devoted to characters, scenes, philosophic compilations, chronologies, etc, she pulls a comb-bound copy of the Wish for Amnesia 1991 draft-manuscript. A week later, finished reading it, I am without a doubt smitten. All too prophetic at the time of its writing, the novels immediacy right now is striking. Now is its time.

Wish for Amnesia

In life, Barbara Rosenthal is a performance and media artist who has inhabited many personas, directing them variously throughout the world. But here, in her first novel, her many personas fall back toward one another on the page. I cannot help but notice that the novel opens with a striking image of two characters falling towards one another. This image sticks in my mind as I continue reading and I begin to realize the performance being played out in the text. But what are they falling into? If Clues to Myself, 1981, draws a map of her territory, then Sensations, 1984, invites readers in. Homo Futurus, 1986, reviewed as being a kind of “Clues to Ourselves” by Judith Hoffberg, that book continues the existential examinations of human identity from the vantage of information overload that she correctly predicted would begin to change the human mind. Her fourth book Soul & Psyche, 1998) was a relentless compendium of insights based on mundane stimuli. Now, this novel, Wish for Amnesia, which was written concurrently with the creation and publication of those first four can be understood on its own as a work of pure, rollicking philosophical fiction, as well as a defined universe in which the motifs of the other four are the elements. Rosenthal’s concept of the “Trans-Millennial Century”, an era whose beginning might be marked by Rosenthal’s own birth, might best be seen as the era of reckoning for the excesses of Modernism. It is on this stage, woven with pivotal events plucked from history that Wish for Amnesia unfolds: a tale about a family, and time and art and science, religion, philosophy and current events. In short, a book almost as exhaustive in purview

as its author. In this wackiest of deadly serious pieces of literature, Rosenthal creates the universe, re-conceives God, rapes, murders, gives birth, sustains several transformations, nearly drowns, commits child-abuse, sustains child-abuse, crashes a car, creates artworks, throws a party, contacts extra-terrestrials and lets you know everything there is to know about being a contemporary secular Jew, or any cosmopolitan of any ethnicity, or any kind of human being at all. Joseph A. W. Quintela, New York, 2014

This book is dedicated to my children, Ola Creston and Sena Clara Creston, and to my grandchildren, Zeia Maize Brittenburg and Castenea Quinn Brittenburg.

When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me. — King James Bible. Psalm 73:16

If there is merely inward-looking and never outwardlooking, there can be no distinction between what has value and what has not, between what is precious and what is vile, between what is noble and what is vulgar. — Hsun Tzu, Confucian scholar’s criticism of Tao. 3rd c. BC

Wish for Amnesia

CHAPTERS SECTION ONE Poland and New York 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Chaim and Chava ...................................................... Jack Walks up Broadway to his Office …………..…..... Chaim’s Letter to Jack ……………………….………….… Six Quick Letters, Jack and Beatrice ………….…...…. Beatrice, Effluvia ....................................................... Jack Meets Beatrice at Kennedy Airport ................... Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground ................... Letty’s Mother Dying ................................................ Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool ..................

16 11 19 13 30 24 32 26 38 32 40 34 46 40 55 49 57 52

1. Chaim and Chava ................................................. 2. Jack Walks up Broadway to his Office ………………... 3. Chaim’s Letter to Jack …………………………………… 4. Six Quick Letters, Jack and Beatrice …………………. 11 Chapters 13 5. Beatrice, Effluvia ................................................. 6. Jack Meets Beatrice at Kennedy Airport ................. 24 26 7. Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground ................. SECTION TWO 8. Letty’s Mother Dying ........................................... 32 New Jersey 1. 9. BirthCaroline of Jeweland ............................................................... Letty, Carmine Street Pool ................ 34 1. TheThe BirthBirth of Jewel ....................................................... 10. 10. 67 2. Caroline’s Sketch Pad I ............................................... of Jewel .......................................................40 2. I ............................................... 11. 11. 3. Caroline’s Sketch Pad II .............................................. 49 Caroline’s Sketch Pad I ...............................................79 3. Caroline’s Sketch Pad Pad II.............................................. 12. 12. 87 4. Jewel............................................................................. Caroline’s Sketch II ..............................................52 4. Jewel ........................................................................... 13. 13. 92 5. Caroline and Jewel Drive to the Country .................... Jewel ........................................................................... 61 5. Caroline Jewel Drive toFarmhouse the ................... 14. 14. 6. Incident atand theand Abandoned ....................... 73 Caroline Jewel Drive to Country the Country ....................94 6. Incident at the Abandoned Farmhouse ...................... 15. 15. 105 7. Jewel’s Notebook ........................................................ Incident at the Abandoned Farmhouse .......................81 7. Jewel’s Notebook ........................................................ 16. 16. 8. The New York Times Article about Jack ..................... 1115 86 Jewel’s Notebook ........................................................ 8. TheThe NewNew YorkYork Times Article about Jack..................... 17. 17. 122 9. Caroline and Jewel Drive to the City .......................... Times Article about Jack .....................88 9. Caroline and and Jewel Drive to the CityCity .......................... 18. 18. 10. Parks Car andDrive Walks Alone ................. 1124 99 Caroline Jewel toBack the ........................... 10. Parks Car and Walks Back Alone ................ 19. 19. 134 11. Caroline in the Drug Store ......................................... 109 Caroline Parks Car and Walks Back Alone ................. 11. Caroline in the Store ......................................... 20. 20. 12. Jewel Enters Beatrice’s Party Alone ............................ 146 118 Caroline in Drug the Drug Store ......................................... 12. Jewel Enters Beatrice’s Party Alone ........................... 21. 21. 154 13. Jack and Caroline Enter the Garden ........................... 120 Jewel Enters Beatrice’s Party Alone ............................ 13. JackJack and Caroline Enter the Garden .......................... 22. 22. 14. Jack’s Speech: Homo Futurus in the Century. 169 131 and Caroline Enter theTrans-Millennial Garden ........................... 14. Jack’sJack’s Speech: Homo Futurus in the Trans-Millennial Century. 23. 23. 174 15. Jewel Dreams the Physics Dream 141 Speech: Homo Futurus in the Trans-Millennial Century.. 15. Jewel Dreams the Physics Dream ............................... 182 24. 24. 16. 153 Jewel Dreams the Physics Dream 17. 172 SECTION THREE 18. 176 Rome 19. 188 25. Beatrice and Jewel Walk Along the Tiber ................... 194 20. 26. A Taxi Driver, Toto ..................................................... 196 21. 27. Toto, Beatrice and Jewel on the Gianicolo at Sunset .... 209 22. 28. Toto, Beatrice and Jewel Drive to Ostia ...................... 220 23. 29. In Ostia ....................................................................... 224 24. 30. Jewel Swims Out ......................................................... 234 25. 31. Exhausted and Exposed ............................................. 244 26. 32. Incident at the Northern Cove .................................... 246 27. 33. Toto and Jewel Return to the Shack ............................ 249 28. 34. Telephone Call to Princeton ....................................... 259 29. 35. Caroline at Computer I ............................................... 270 30. 36. DaVinci Airport .......................................................... 273 31. 37. Jack Lands ................................................................... 277 32. 38. Toto Locates Jack ........................................................ 282 33. 39. In the Air ..................................................................... 288 34. 40. Caroline at Computer II .............................................. 290 35. 41. From the Skies over Italy ............................................. 292 36.

Wish for Amnesia

SECTION ONE Poland and New York

Section 1 Chapter 1: Chaim and Chava

Chapter 1 Chaim and Chava Chaim and Chava met in a boxcar with a thousand other Jews, two of ten thousand on a transport to Auschwitz. They fell toward one another, contorted, swollen figures wrenching and lurching into areas of the car with less resistant human tissue. They dangled with the others, dead and living, tight like upright worms, desiccating in their thirst and filth, pressed and introduced in private scandal. Chaim was sixteen, blond; Chava, fifteen, alabaster skin, black hair, like Snow White. Their parents were not present. After three days the transport was halted in abandoned countryside outside the gates to allow for removal of the dead. No water was given to the prisoners barely living. A wasp stung one of the guards. Chaim saw 17

Wish for Amnesia

his chance to escape, and escaped with Chava. Within time they met partisans in the forest and soon joined a band of brigand-Jews in a fragile supply chain toward the Warsaw Ghetto, ultimately broken and defeated due to refusal of assistance, well-known. When they could, they escaped, finally, to America, and bore a child here: Jack Rubin.

Section 1 Chapter 2: Jack Walks Up Broadway to His Office

Chapter 2 Jack Walks Up Broadway to his Office On Broadway at 110th Street facing north, the sun from straight behind cast a long shadow fast advancing. Jack was walking up to Columbia to pick up his mail, then home to 103rd. He was smiling to himself, six feet tall, tangled black hair to his waist, beads, feathers, the gaunt and bearded leader of a great counterculture. His thoughts were on — Heaven. “Heaven,” he said out loud, and imagined a state wherein all ecologies harmonize in beneficent bliss. Jack saw it as his duty to act on his ideals, to be righteous and worthy, to give to the world all that he could make best in himself, and to inspire in others love and humanity. He felt that his life was a gift to the Earth and that through his person the fate of the universe could 19

Wish for Amnesia

advance more near to Heaven. He was born, he thought, from the womb of the Twentieth Century: his genes alone were salvaged from the wreck. “Are we tightening our boundaries again?” he asked, and people heard him. Passersby turned as they recognized him, but he paid them no attention. He saw in his imagination elaborate geodesic figures that he’d made as a child from paper straws. Each figure had taken months to complete. To this day they still hung like fat stars from the ceilings of his parents’ apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, an airless three rooms rarely visited. They had lived a quiet existence since coming to America. They never talked much about the past. Jack didn’t see his family often. Many grown children didn’t, anymore. People were coming into prominence about this time with names very similar to his own: Jerry Rubin, Jack Ruby —. “Jewery,” he thought, or heard. Take Only What’s Offered. Morality clichés clanged admonition. Just Where Do You Come Off. Jack was 29, a little old for his radical leadership and not altogether suited to it. He was better fit, personalitywise, for the role of theoretician than of guru. “I want a letter from Beatrice today, I want a letter from Rome today,” he chanted, striding, concentrating, swinging his old cowhide briefcase from hand to hand, smiling his constant smile, which masked these inner shouts. Speak Only When Spoken To, another old saw cut into him. Ask For Nothing. You’re A Fraud. You’re Only In It For Yourself. 20

Section 1 Chapter 2: Jack Walks Up Broadway to His Office

The voices challenged his sunny face. They were familiar voices, commands by one in particular which Jack had come to think of as The Voice of the Petty Accuser. Onslaughts of auditory hallucinations were pursuing Jack Rubin with increasing frequency as he rose and emerged as a speaker for his peers. “Who, who,” Jack called out, hooting as people who recognized him began to gather, following after him as he walked. Cross-examination of the voices, challenge, was permitted but Jack never won. At each imaginary trial he felt he must convince not only of his innocence, but of his nobility beyond innocence, and, thus, he was inevitably defeated. He knew that his hallucinatory judges were barbaric hypocrites, that there were no common values or vocabulary; he was certain of the inferior mentalities of the yahoos, yet was hounded by his inability to clearly state his point within their limits. He was tormented. As he got closer to the exact language with which to state his position and win the philistines, the meaning of his statements evaporated on the witness stand, and he was, each time left helpless and speechless, often even voiceless. Every night he’d awaken to find himself standing across the room from his bed, screaming a silent scream. Crowds were growing behind him on the street. People pressed closer in on him, trying to keep pace with his long, fast stride, turning their faces to bask in the smile he hardly knew he wore. Jack pushed his black hair out of his eyes, startled to see real people in front of him. He knew he could never purge himself of these fantasies until he won his case.

Wish for Amnesia

An unsavory young man visiting from Europe requested his autograph, a sailor holding out to him a leather volume and a meticulously crafted fountain pen. It was mother-of-pearl and gold inlaid, but the ink smelled like blood, and ran red. Jack uneasily obliged, still walking. His mind was tortured. Was it karma? neurosis? metaphor? collective unconscious? hereditary psychosis, imbalance of nutrients, effect of poor posture? Should he seek analysis or hypnosis or wait it out, smoke more dope or less —. Someone handed him a lit joint rolled in licorice paper, and met his eyes. Jack toked on the gift, holding it cupped in his hand as he walked, then paused to look at his followers. He selected a pretty young woman and passed the marijuana to her before raising his arms dramatically above their heads. “Conscience has advanced to this point from the moment of our dawn on the beach,” Jack said, projecting his calm facade out over the crowd. “But time plays tricks. Do not be fooled.” That was all. He opened the face of his palms to stop his people from massing, and turned into the gate of Columbia University between its guardian stone statues, the male, Scientia, on the left, and his female companion with book — unnamed? Must be Ars, he thought. “We are nearing the end of the Ages of Culture,” he said, smiling to the group who continued to dog his steps, and stopped for a minute to list as they occurred to him: “Age of Earth, Age of Order, Age of Esthetics, Age of Mechanics, Age of Biophysics.” He laughed out loud. For each age a geodesic figure was imagined. He couldn’t get this walk done fast enough.

Section 1 Chapter 2: Jack Walks Up Broadway to His Office

Before he reached the McPherney Building, he’d outpaced most of the youthful band still pursuing him. A few remaining breathless Barnard co-eds and dedicated joggers gaited him to his office door. Today he would not pause with them, although sometimes he did. One boy, Arnold Saperstein, found waiting when he arrived, was his lieutenant, but today Jack had things on his mind besides the Movement and dismissed him with the others. “Do whatever’s right,” he said when Arnold tried to urge urgent messages and events. “This isn’t something I can handle myself,” the boy said weakly as Jack jangled his keys. “Then don’t,” answered Jack, and closed the door. He was sweating when he finally could enter. Panting, he leaned on the door for support, still holding the knob in his hand behind his back. It was an old wooden public school-type door with four star-textured, translucent glass panes. The group outside could see him through it! Jack jumped out of the way and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights, knocking into a partition put up recently by one of his officemates. “Damn,” he grunted, stumbling through the jumbled room toward his own place near the window. He pushed some papers back and sat on the edge of his desk. Although Jack was alone at the moment, four teaching assistants shared this room: Jack Rubin himself, in Political Science with crossovers in Anthropology and Genetics; Rabinowitz, in Astrophysics; Reilly, in Sociology; and Ross, the linguist. It was an office built for one, so each had jury-rigged partial enclosures and taken them first-come; Jack was lucky to get a window spot, which he had not partitioned off. Ross had the other

Wish for Amnesia

window, and Reilly and Rabinowitz, who also used the University’s computer center, preferred seats near the door so they could sometimes beat Jack to it. Their two cubicles were clean and tidy. Jack’s and the linguist’s were a heap of papers and objects and old correspondence. Today’s mail wouldn’t be in yet; it was still before noon. The faculty boxes were located near the coffee machine; he’d go there in a while and then settle in for the rest of the day. Jack didn’t like receiving mail this way, but the old brass boxes in the doorway of his shabby apartment building were so destroyed by junkies he had no choice. He stood and stretched and paced the room. He made his way past Ross’s bulletin board: postcards, notes, memos, photos, a few stray words on scraps of paper, a calendar with each day of the month through yesterday x’d out, and a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, all tacked with identically angled steelhead thumbtacks in all four corners and evenly spaced on the board. Jack’s spot wasn’t neat, or even clean. His girlfriend, Beatrice, though, was immaculate. And she wouldn’t have given her autograph, like I just did, either, he thought, recognizing another of their dissimilarities as he remembered signing a sailor’s out on the street, the bloody pen. The autograph book itself had given him the creeps too, felt like infant skin. He looked at his watch, a high school graduation present from his father. Still too early for the mail. He ringed one sinewy wrist with his other hand, dirt around the cuticles and under the nails, lifeline and fateline etched in grime. He wiped them on his sleeves, jangling the beads and chains that filled his shirtfront. He didn’t want to read the cartoon. Academic humor depressed

Section 1 Chapter 2: Jack Walks Up Broadway to His Office

him. The only humor Jack Rubin appreciated was crass sexual innuendo. He recognized that this was low but was secretly proud of his own depravity. Just like everyone, he liked to think. Jack moved to the sociologist’s desk and crashed down in his seat. Reilly had bought himself an executive armchair from an office furniture showroom in The Bronx. It had a cross-base on wheels and leaned in all directions. But he’d retained the old desk he had been issued, polishing it daily with lemon Pledge. Upright on the desk stood a set of marbleized cardboard cutaway boxes of sociology publications, and a formidable bronze pipe-suzy. Jack pulled out one of Reilly’s pipes and a periodical. He stuck the pipe in his mouth without filling or lighting it and bobbed back in the chair with the journal. It absorbed him more than he’d expected, and not before an hour passed did he stop chewing his officemate’s pipe, return it to the caddy without wiping it dry, slide the journal into a random place in the otherwise date-ordered file, and roll backward to go check the mail. It was his charming public self that sauntered down the corridor, but his face was lying; the dreaded words came back. Fuck You, Asshole. Everyone brightened attentively when they saw him, but for Jack, charisma had this awful flipside. How could he make it stop? He faced a wall of alphabetized pigeonhole boxes stuffed with rolled mimeographed notices, half-sheet pink memos, manila envelopes and a few real letters. He knew the location of his own box but stooped to verify his name: the tags repeatedly came off; Jack had retaped his

Wish for Amnesia

a dozen times. He pulled out the roll of papers and threw away all the ads without reading them. The pink memos he glanced at casually, tossing out any from students, newspaper reporters, the Dean, the Chair, the charity and blood campaigns, etc. Today there was one he kept, notifying him to pick up a package at the office window, too large for the pigeonhole. There was also the airmailstamped letter from Beatrice he’d been hoping for. His father had sent the package: a 4-foot-long, 3-inch-square tube-box. Jack didn’t know what was in it. He hadn’t seen his parents in a long time. He used to see them reasonably frequently, but they’d had some words about his girlfriend. Actually, Chaim and Chava had easily welcomed Beatrice, but she quickly weaned him from them. He cleared a space on his desk by stacking three unrelated piles of papers on top of each other and moving them to the window ledge. A plant that had dried up and died there he placed on the floor behind his own ratty college-issue chair and sat down. He couldn’t decide which to open first, or whether to take them both home. What to do home and what to do in the office and which materials he’d need in either place was a continual dilemma. His tendency was to work at home and keep his college office as a token. Papers for the Movement all stayed with him in his briefcase. Instead of opening either, he picked up two clear glass objects he used as paperweights, and played with them. They were both five inches high: an open-based pyramid and a partially hollowed interior-faceted, flat-bottomed sphere that fit over it. They were scale models for the double-walled structure called Science & Art Double

Section 1 Chapter 2: Jack Walks Up Broadway to His Office

Pavilion that Beatrice had designed for construction at last year’s Sao Paolo Bienal. The pyramid was Science and the internally faceted sphere was Art. Spectators entered the interior pyramid and looked upward through it and through the sphere. Some of its internal facets were one-way mirrored, some double mirrored, some clear prismatic glass. Inside the actual construction was her You & I Transmission. Light patches and slivers of visitors’ reflections bounced to format recomposited faces in the mirrors. Full-body floating holograms of the spectators morphed their ages, races and sexes. The Sao Paolo Bienal was one of the world’s two great international biennial art exhibitions, vying with another in Venice, and Beatrice represented the United States that year in both extravaganzas. Jack fooled with her prototypes, placing them over his breasts and then his eyes. No American artist rivaled her in clarity and simplicity of production or in originality and profundity of idea. No viewer could remain untouched by the cosmic interaction she played agent for. Her work was an AvantConceptualism that found expression in large-scale public projects and theatrical events. As a performer Beatrice made magic on the stage, impossibilities of instantaneous change in character and appearance, reversals and restructurings of time and space. Her pieces dealt with good and evil, black and white, natural and supernatural, imagination and perception. In a piece called Ici/Voici, she effected pyrotechnic explosions along the River Seine, appearing and vanishing on different bridges before each discharge was perceived.

Wish for Amnesia

She cultivated many myths about herself and was as surrounded by acolytes as Jack. Although publicly they were not linked as a couple, Jack’s love for this dramatic woman was catalytic to his charisma and political leadership. He lifted her letter to his forehead. He stroked the Italian airmail stamps she’d recently licked. Some people believed she was prophetic. She spoke extemporaneously with little frequency, and conversationally almost never, but her pronouncements were portentous. Her followers transcribed her words and dutifully convocated to divine her hidden messages. Twoedged words were essential to her pieces, particularly in the titles, and her magazine articles on the nature and theory of art and the mentality of its production set standards for evaluating past and present thought. Her opaque creative art and poetic musings seesawed with her clarity of exposition. Jack would save her words for last, and open first the package from his father. Rolled up and taped to the outside of the long box, with extra postage, was a letter in a square white envelope, like a greeting card. Jack removed the tape and tore the flap up. The paper inside didn’t fit and was folded badly. The letter was written with blue ballpoint pen, in his father’s large, curled, deep-pressed, well-cornered European hand, on his letterhead, cheap bond half-size sheets, contracongruously offset-printed at the top in elaborate 18-pt Edwardian Script. Hoo Ha Fancy Schmantzy, Jack couldn’t help hearing. The printed memo pad dismayed him. His parents were proud of the business they’d built, but Jack was not

Section 1 Chapter 2: Jack Walks Up Broadway to His Office

proud of them for this; only for their long-past heroism. The night he had brought Beatrice to meet them he’d felt ashamed their lives were now so inconsequential. “It’s up to me to fulfill their potential,” he had told her then. “To carry on, to make the world, and myself, always better.” She’d known that was a Jewish mandate, but as he hadn’t seemed to, she didn’t mentioned it. He steadied himself and read his father’s letter.

Wish for Amnesia

From the Desk of Chaim T. Rubin Wholesale Transactions Ladies’ Fine Merchandise Chapter 3 Chaim’s Letter to Jack

September 14, 1968 Dear Son: Your mother and I found your old telescope when we did the Passover cleaning in April, and held it for you. As you did not come to the Seders, we held on to it longer until we should see you in the summer but as you were so busy again we held on to it longer until we should see you for the High Holy Days which you again didn’t come, so and now as you must be busy again with the school I am taking the liberties with mailing to you.

Section 1 Chapter 3: Chaim’s Letter to Jack

Please you shouldn’t think I am pushing to you for a visit you don’t welcome to make, but I see you sometimes in the newspaper and also your dear Mother thinks you need a home-cook meal. Also about politics maybe we should have a talk. You have responsibilities to your own people but I see you go far away outside your own. What’s next? I say this what’s next to make a joke because what’s inside the package. Do you remember your very much interest in this object when you were a boy? And do you remember how it got the dent on the side which is still there and the broken lens inside which we paid money to repair but you never played with it again? I will remind you it was the evening of the summer when you were ten and we stayed for a week in the home of our friends in the country, the Schulmans. Every evening you took this out to the fields alone. One night, boys from the area came at you with what are called now “racial epithets” and also sticks and stones and you hit one of them with this object in defense of yourself. Sooner or later, once again you will have to name yourself a Jew. It will be so called for you anyway. Your Father, Papa

Wish for Amnesia

Chapter 4 Six Quick Letters, Jack and Beatrice Jack got up from his desk and checked the hall. No one was out there. He locked the door and quickly lit a joint, opening the window to dispel the smoke, and grabbed one of Beatrice’s paperweights to keep the papers on the sill from blowing off. He gulped in about a third of the pot, saving the rest in a throat lozenge box in his desk drawer. He sat for a moment and stared out the window, waiting for the marijuana to take effect and release the tension in his chest. He opened the package. It was what the letter hinted at: a low-quality, amateur telescope. He held it with amusement, twirled it like a baton, and batted it around like a weapon. “Neat,” Jack said out loud, “if I turned it up to the

Section 1 Chapter 4: Six Quick Letters, Jack and Beatrice

sky and saw God.” What had his father hoped to see? Chava, his mother, had been disgusted with God. “On the seventh day,” Chava once said, “God rested and the Devil took over.” He aimed it out the window but saw only sky-blue, then pointed it down and focused on some girls on the quad. The angle wouldn’t let him see under their miniskirts. Bored, he replaced it in the wrappings of the box and stashed the box in the corner behind the desk. If he remembered, he’d take it back to the apartment. He was a man of his own time and country, a man of the uniting, peacemaking type. Such things as happened to his father could never happen anymore, he thought. He did recall the boyhood incident. His voices reminded him of it, too, from time to time. He slid his father’s letter under one of his lover’s paperweights. The telescope had been more than an effective lance. It awakened a sense of power. Odd that Chaim should send it now, just when Jack had added space exploration to his interests. He glanced at the locked door and finished the joint, weighing Beatrice’s unopened letter in his hand. A blackand-white picture of her was on his desk, but it wasn’t too good. One of her students had underexposed the film by not compensating for backlight. Beatrice stood in silhouette against the Tiber River. You could see her narrow waist and long, straight hair and the shape of her dark, flowing clothes, but not her features. He sniffed the heavy musk of her stationery and hastily split her envelope with a pencil.

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Dear Jack: Breeze comes from the west tonight, salty, close, from the beaches of Ostia. I feel the season hot by day and cool between my toes in evening sandals. I would like you to be with me. It would calm you here, in the dark. I dream of gestures chorused in the night, port de bras, port de bras, or sweeps and leaps extended across space as if the dancer sails or floats. I dream of hot sunsets, spiral galaxies, halls of broken mirrors. I see a fire-maker, a magician of the burning match. By day I see permuting forms. I drink, smoke, wear them, form after form awaiting conflagration. Today I consolidated two pieces under one title. Each alone has meaning but my meaning is incomplete without their polarity. Art reformulates itself continually. I can re-conceive my visions until perfect. Past and Future exist only as constructs within the Present. The Present is a boundless continuum. The Present is a bridge that does not span a gap. Love, Beatrice Dear Beatrice, No, Beatrice, the present is a pretty fast thing. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a brief self-bounded period. Maybe art recycles, but science evolves, and pretty quick. Every moment is discrete, yet immediately replaced by another. And every new physicality calls for immediate behavior. I heard this today at a Yippie speech: â&#x20AC;&#x153;History

Section 1 Chapter 4: Six Quick Letters, Jack and Beatrice

could be changed in a day. An hour. By the right action at the right time.” The past only determines the future if the present doesn’t intercede. The tiniest prick can change the world. Love, Jack Dear Jack, Well, good luck. Art is an artist’s closed system. You scientists wish containment but you’re constrained by persistent delusions. Science is immutable. Art malleable, though capricious. You’ d say even my soul is chemical, but it’s of the finest chemistry, passed carefully mother to daughter, from Eve. Watch me make it last forever. Reality can’t be revised to match Ideal, though I will watch you try, and root for you. Art, on the other hand, can match it; that’s what I do all day long. Love, Beatrice Dear Beatrice, We’re arrested constantly: public nuisance, loitering, disorderly conduct, trespassing, malicious mischief, disturbing the peace.... I know I’m in the right. But accusatory voices stalk me worse than cops. “Do Not Do, Think.” Sometimes I wish I could stop, Beatrice. But The Movement is infused with radicals who’ d quickly step in, only to disrupt, not accomplish. I’m receiving violent personal warnings.

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But if I’ d admit doubt, I’ d have to yield to Yippies, who forswear sensible thought for non-sensical action, and equate them. And yet, does morality really help our species develop in a positive evolutionary way? Wouldn’t morality retard it? What is right and wrong: if biologically the only right is procreation, then so base a thing as rape must be the greatest moral act. As a political activist, I serve harmony, but the bioanthropologist in me is waging his own war, besides the raging of my own doubts regarding personal worth. Well, I was molded by a past which brought me here. For me as a person, there’s no going back. But as a species the natural evolutionary process is too slow. No world may be here when our creature is complete, impossible anyway: we are evolving beings. All parts evolve variously toward different ideals, some parts are still left from more ancient systems. Homo futurus might not be human. There’s no way to know what’s next for all the good we will ourselves to do. And it goes without saying: the universe is vast. Surely we’re not the best of its creatures. I’ d like to find some good ones out there. Love, Jack Dear Jack, Warm Christmas here. Bad traffic. Must take taxis everywhere. Street paparazzi bug me for pictures and autographs. My students accompany me to fend off.

Section 1 Chapter 4: Six Quick Letters, Jack and Beatrice

Some day I will lure you to Rome. Forget about other solar systems. Rome will be far enough for both of us. Love, Beatrice Dear Beatrice, This is my New Year! I’ve stopped eating almost completely. I’ve given away everything I can. I’m in a fast of sympathy for vegetarian apes, who would have kept this Eden-garden Earth alive if it were theirs. People amassed behind me block regress. They expect me to lead them, so I comply. But I understand the voices now: They say I have no right to lead until I have the perfect plan. I’ve begun a study collating anthropological statistics with the human genetic code as it’s begun to be cracked. What is the atomic Homo sapien? How does culture define itself in genes? I have shaved. I have completely shaved my head and beard. I’m glad the term is over and I’ ll see you. Love, Jack

Wish for Amnesia

Chapter 5 Beatrice, Effluvia Beatrice selected a cool, cotton dress with two pockets, black. Into the right she put a Peruvian leather pouch containing an ancient clay hash pipe and matches; into the left went an old family housekey she carried as an amulet. Tomorrow she would pack and return to New York for the summer. Jack would meet her plane at Kennedy Airport. Alone now, she reclined on the balcony of her apartment, staring into the night and breathing the Roman spring. She sat in blackness, still and calm, inhaling the mix of vapors flowing to her on currents warm from her perfumed doorway, hot from the courtyard garden, and cool from the nighttime sky.

Section 1 Chapter 5: Beatrice, Effluvia

Her room whiffed Oriental spices and hashish, Egyptian perfumes and dried flowers. On her dresser stood fine soaps and body lotions. Sachets and potpourri were tucked into the corners of shelves and drawers: each trace a perfect memory, a place, a person, circumstance. No mirrors, though, were in the room. Beatrice kept herself beautiful; she believed her life would have been difficult otherwise. Her grandmother had raised her in a hall of mirrors, but as time went along, few people would remember this detail of the artist’s past, and no biographer would connect it to any event of significance in her future. Beatrice’s room was, as usual, dark. Her closets would be emptied tomorrow. Most of her clothing was black, India-cotton, Egyptian cotton, or crêpe, soft and long and loose, natural black flax, rayon, flannel, cashmere, Canton silk, velour and velvet, chamois and cambric and wool. Each piece could be identified by texture, and several costumes and disguises, black and also white, were in the wardrobe.

Wish for Amnesia

Section 1 Chapter 6: Jack Meets Beatrice at Kennedy Airport

Chapter 6 Jack Meets Beatrice at Kennedy Airport Her plane arrived at Kennedy as scheduled, late on a hot, sunny day. Beatrice waited calmly in the airconditioned terminal of TWA in an area raised above the flux of people crisscrossing near the counters. A huge bow window backlighted her in dazzling southern rays glowing pinkly in the air, drawing color from the plush red carpet and white concrete dome walls. She stood with tranquility in that vaulted space, a Black Madonna in the Saarinen apse, the architecturally praised waiting area slightly elevated from the flow. Black from head to foot, she formed a silhouette of maximum absorbency, reflecting nothing but her race and sex. Her Bantu parentage was evident beneath her clothing.

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Today she was in purdah, wore a burka, the black, concealing womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s garment of the East. This clothing hid her long, jet-black straight hair but not her spirit force, which stood unmistakable against the light. Nor did her costume hide her blindness. She held a thin white stick, more like a wand than a probe, and almost unneeded; her other senses guided her through space. Immediately upon entering the terminal, Jack spotted her. He had only half-remembered her physical beauty. She was delicate and throbbing like an exquisite bird. He started for her through the crowd. Beatrice felt Jack streaming toward her on the floor below. She could hear the turmoil his presence caused. The mass was rapidly parting for his wild, emaciated figure. His head and face were completely shaved and he towered very tall. He was bare-chested. He wore cheap black plastic sunglasses, taped-together leather sandals, and a pair of grotesquely ripped and oversized dungarees held up at his waist by a rope. Everyone rushed to make way for him as the power of his intense concentration cleaved the enormous room. But before Jack reached the waiting platform, a piercing siren blasted. Two men grabbed hold of the blind, black artist, Beatrice, just as the maniacal figure bounded within reach of her. Beatrice sensed this must be Jack but could not be sure until she touched him or he spoke to her. She flailed out her arms for an instant of connection, and at that instant, security guards restrained them both. There was memory in her fingertips, and she heard his name surge through the crowd, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Jack Rubin!â&#x20AC;? But she was stunned by his physical changes; she still could not be certain this was her Jack: a skull, a skeleton, a rope?

Section 1 Chapter 6: Jack Meets Beatrice at Kennedy Airport

Her fingers did not receive the feeling they’d expected. She was held as Jack was arrested; both were questioned several hours, searched; Jack’s lawyers came, Peace Movement lawyers, and finally, the couple was released, exhausted. “Constant police harassment,” Jack said later, in bed in his stifling glaucous-green apartment. The sheets had not been washed in months. Roaches ran the cupboards. Dust balls swam the floors. This was how the world should end its differences, Jack thought, in bed together, races mixing; it saddened him that Beatrice took precautions against pregnancy, or possibly was unable to bear: he would have liked a love child; she refused to discuss conception. He loosened her long, heavy hair and spread it over their skins, dark and light. His hair had been as black as hers before he’d shaved it. His mother Chava’s hair was just like this, though starting to gray. Beatrice felt how especially huge and hot his penis seemed, attached to what had become such a bony frame. She could not sense any resemblance now between “then” (which was something in her memory as “now”, that is a “memory of then”, not really “then”) and “now”, the “now” itself. Jack’s sense of time had finally been understood by her, although she did not share it. She listened to him say words about his political life, each syllable filled with weariness and irony. He said depressing things about his struggle, in a voice so mellifluous there could be no doubt he’d overcome all odds, unless, she thought sadly, he were stopped violently, like other leaders of the decade. Jack’s touch didn’t match her touch’s memory. She stroked his

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head and body with her hair, draping it over the palm of her hand like gauzy silk, imagining herself belonging to him again, trying to revive the twinship they had felt. His eyes were swollen and enlarged. His face muscles twitched and ticked, his mouth was locked in an artificial grin. And he was dirty. He had sticky lines of filth in all his creases; she could roll balls of his clay in her fingers. His face was patinaed in a grime of oily sweat. His groin and armpits stank. She had to admit this to herself. They lay in the heat of this late spring afternoon, in those charged moments of conversation before the frenzied intercourse of lovers who’ve been parted long. The now, the now of the fuck, the now of the fuck bringing everything into the present. “I would not have thought this from a Jew,” she said. What did she mean: the mayor? Beatrice was so cryptic, Jack recoiled. She was never direct. He had said “constant police harassment,” and she said “from a Jew.” Was she trying to say that Jews weren’t currently the object of harassment by American police? What did she mean “ from” a Jew? Why was she holding her nose? It wouldn’t do to ask her what she was getting at. Everyone knew Beatrice’s famous line: “There is as much effort and epiphany in the comprehension of a work of art as in its creation. Art is sanctified by its beholder.” She believed that once the effort of communication is made, and words are carefully laid down, the rest is up to the perceiver. She believed this about conversation too. She was right, up to a point, but he found her idea arrogant and annoying. She didn’t make it easy. Everything she said had to be considered two and three times. Every statement had to be referred back to the

Section 1 Chapter 6: Jack Meets Beatrice at Kennedy Airport

prior quote. And she took so long in her replies. What was it she’d told him about her new performance piece? The title: Oracle; Jack scoffed to himself, recalling that her sibylitic phrasing sometimes grated. Her letters at least you could read over a few times and figure out, but her laconic speech annoyed Jack, who every moment faced the question of whether anything said by himself was less than completely clear and unambiguous and absolutely true, and that whenever need be, he could go on developing, refining, explicating even his most complex ideas to perfectly pin down their exact meaning forever, for any reasonable mind. It amused him that his listeners concurred with what he hadn’t yet clarified, though. He said something, he smiled, the listener smiled back and understood. The voices were another story, particularly The Voice of the Petty Accuser, but no human being ever challenged him to that degree. Jack looked over to his girlfriend, small and naked, completely fast asleep, this woman he’d waited months to make love to again no matter easy loves passed between. He drifted off to sleep, unable to arouse her. But then, while lying next to him awake an hour later, it occurred to Beatrice to introduce Jack Rubin to one of her students now home from college, by the name of Caroline Klein.

Wish for Amnesia

Chapter 7 Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground When Caroline was four years old, she stood with her mother one late, gray, autumn afternoon on a chilly, dreary earthen suburban playground in Ellenville, New York, north of the city by an hourâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bus ride few of Ellenvilleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s townspeople ever cared to make. Caroline was cautious, non-committal, even-tempered at this early age. She stood in a reluctant stance, a child of average build, dull honey-colored braids plaited as tight as possible into wet hair every morning by her exacting mother and fastened with mismatched rubber bands, no bangs. She wore a faded red and tan plaid cotton dress with white Peter Pan collar, a hand-knit brown and green sweater with front zipper and cowl, new thick red woolen

Section 1 Chapter 7: Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground

knee sox, and old oxblood oxford shoes, Buster Browns repolished many times, passed down from older cousins. New shoes were a luxury Caroline experienced only twice before her teens, and it had been white sneakers both occasions. Her face was pale and unfreckled, unpuckered, unmarked. A few items were held cradled in her arms: a small brown paper bag (soft and wrinkled from re-use and rolled at the opening), a worn Raggedy Ann doll (no dress, all joint seams resewn), a large yellow Golden Dictionary, a natural sponge trimmed to an artificial ovoid, and a tiny porcelain cup from a child’s tea set. In the brown bag were an unbroken royal blue wax crayon she had found the day before, and a Rome Beauty apple from the overhanging bough of a neighbor’s tree. The playground was dismal, almost deserted. Caroline’s mother sat on a bench with the Woman’s Page of the Ellenville Press and an embroidery scissors to cut coupons and advertisements. Her fingers were darkly cracked at the tips and knuckles, the nails unpolished and broken, yellowish and translucent from detergents and harsh cleansers. The woman was thick, peasant-like, ruddy. She evaluated her daughter, Caroline, standing next to her: a healthy child but a pest, a drain. In a few years she can get a job after school. I’ve started her on housework, but not without supervision, scolding, reminding and punishment. “Go play,” the mother pantomimed, pushing her daughter slightly. She didn’t like Caroline’s leaning against her, to her mind one of the girl’s many bad habits. “Go play,” she repeated. “There’s another child your age here.”

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Cary was already aware of this: she’d been watching her. A plump little girl was playing recklessly on the big slide, repeatedly skidding and falling into the dirt. The girl slid squatting, the slippery soles of her shoes skiing down the metal ramp to slam her knees against the gritty dirt and skin her hands, her face painfully grazing the hard ground every time. Caroline saw her spit soil but get up quickly and run back to the ladder to do it again. Cary looked toward her mother for reaction. What did she think of this behavior? Didn’t she think the girl might be crazed or dangerous? No, her mother didn’t seem to think so: she was expressionless. “Go make friends,” she insisted, gesturing Caroline away in shoo-fly motions. “You don’t have any nice friends. You don’t know how to make friends.” “Will you go with me, Mommy?” Cary asked. “Go yourself,” her mother pushed. But Caroline would not. She moved closer to her mother, pressing into her broad thighs. Her mother shoved her again, not hard, but firmly. The strange girl fell once more and rubbed her hands, calling to the adult who’d brought her, a teen-age boy, most likely her much older brother. The boy sat on a bench near the slide with his hands in his field-jacket pockets, laughing at his sister. “Funny Letty,” he called to her, “Funny Letty.” He gave her jelly beans from a cellophane package. The child’s painful practice was clearly meant for his appreciation. This was a novel idea to Cary; she eyed the sweets and wondered for a giddy moment if she hurt herself or did a dangerous trick, would he give her some candy, too? Lying on the bench next to him was a doll

Section 1 Chapter 7: Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground

similar to her own, a Raggedy Ann one size larger and brighter and newer, and wearing a starched dress with bright hearts on the belt, and a satin grosgrain ribbon still crisp in its clean, red, thick, yarn hair. It belonged to the girl on the slide, Cary knew. She turned away from her mother to squarely face the strangers across the yard. The doll and the candy were strong inducements for Caroline to cross the playground. She placed her own things under the ladder with exaggerated care and climbed behind the fat girl, Letty. It was a tall slide and Letty turned around from the top to watch her. The brother increased his alertness, aware of his responsibilities, duties, his rights and the rights of others. Was his sister taking too long, maybe more than her turn, or blocking the other child? He was worried that the new girl would yell at his sister or boss her, which he didn’t like to give anyone a chance to do. He made sure he was never in anyone’s way. “Letty!” he called firmly. “Move over or slide down. Give the girl her turn. There are other children waiting.” Caroline and Letty both looked around, but Cary was the only other child. The boy stood up. He was tall, even when viewed from the height of the ladder. Cary turned toward his sister a few steps above herself and was surprised to see that at close range Letty looked awful: her face was flushed, arms bruised black and blue, her chubby legs badly scraped and scratched. She was wearing beautiful new white patent leather strap shoes, but look at how soiled they were! Letty wouldn’t slide. She stood intractably as Cary waited eye level to her feet, hatching a dangerous trick she could do for the big boy herself, maybe for some

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candy reward. She’d stand at the top, let go of the rail, lift her dress over her head and slide fast. She tried to pass Letty as politely as possible, nudging her gently to the side with her feet. “You’ve been sliding all day, Leticia,” the boy called again, cued to alarm by Caroline’s little kicks of his sister, but the effect of his words was only to rivet the child more staunchly. As is characteristic of many children her age, she responded to her brother with the behavior his words cued, no matter how far off the mark they were. Letty hadn’t been deliberately blocking Caroline until he said he thought she was: she had merely been intently watching her; but she got the fine idea to thwart the other child, whip things up. The boy yelled again, his hands on his hips, annoyed. He wasn’t talented at making Letty mind; any second he’d have to get physical. Caroline could read his gestures well; she had to do her trick quickly before the situation changed and the opportunity was lost. She inched her feet against the stubborn girl again, and thought of another stunt even more daring. She would stand on one leg without holding, and jump to a sitting position. Turning her head to check, she saw her mother absorbed in the paper. Tricks were not something her mother approved of. But turning back, she felt the teenager stomping up the ladder behind her. There wouldn’t be any time to show off for him. She whined with disappointment. “Watch me?” she wheedled. Their eyes met and he smiled. It was a genuine smile and surprised her. “Just a sec.”

Section 1 Chapter 7: Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground

He climbed up the rest of the way, his feet clanging and scraping on the metal rungs, the flimsy structure shaking under his added weight. As he passed to grab his sister, he reached around Caroline, like a hug. She liked the feeling. “Excuse me, honey.” Letty howled, jealous of her brother’s courtesy toward the intruder. The boy took no particular interest in Caroline, his was just a common endearment; he was no pedophile; but spurred by Letty’s yell, Caroline released herself into his arms in a fit of giggles. Unprepared, he almost lost his balance. When Letty screamed, he fueled her rage by teasing, mistakenly thinking it would teach her a lesson, that is, teach her the lesson he meant to teach her, not the sadder, meaner lessons a person learns by being teased. He played along with Caroline, cuddling her and sticking out his tongue. Letty vengefully stepped down one rung and pushed into them both. They were in a dangerous spot, all three at the top of the slide, and the boy recalled his responsibilities and sobered himself. Not wanting to have to call the mother over, he sat Caroline down carefully in front of his sister and folded her fingers around the hand-bars. “Please slide,” he said to her. He had no way of knowing she’d planned to do tricks for him. Letty was raging. Cary still hoped the boy would go sit and watch. She waited another minute while he held his screaming charge, as he looked at her nicely with a frank and casual patience she wasn’t used to. She saw a Jewish star around his neck. She had one too, but her mother insisted she wear it hidden; Caroline thought they were supposed to

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be worn hidden. Her boldness shrank fast: there were few Jewish families besides her own living in this town and she had been well instructed early on not to advertise her Jewishness. She was astonished to see the star worn openly, especially by a teenage boy. Didn’t the other boys fight him? Once she had seen garbage flung at a man who’d forgotten to remove his skullcap yarmulke after a holiday service, and periodic incidents were not uncommon. Her family involved themselves in religion as little as possible, maybe an odd word here and there, a service once or twice a year, maybe. Frightened and confused, she slid away. Landing easily upright, she gathered her sponge and her toys and ran quickly to her mother, not looking at the boy and girl staring after her, and not knowing why she felt ashamed. “What happened?” her mother asked, and then answered herself with an erroneous assumption. “The girl was afraid to slide down? Not you. You are a big brave child.” How could her mother think Letty had been afraid: hadn’t she seen her? She had looked straight at Letty’s daring-do’s. Her mother’s inconsistent reactions were often a puzzle. “Are Raggedy Ann dolls Jewish?” Cary asked. Her mother heaved an exasperated sigh. “Sit down,” she said. Caroline knelt on the barren earth and rested her head in her mother’s lap, which sometimes this stern woman permitted her to do. Cary loved to feel close and warm and safe and soft. She thought of the big boy smiling at her, touching her, and calling her “honey.” She watched the weak sun lift off the ground and slice patches

Section 1 Chapter 7: Caroline Meets Letty on the Playground

across the playground’s thin tree trunks. She burrowed her head into the nest of her mother’s warm lap, smelling the mysterious odors. “Please,” her mother hissed sharply, twisting the child’s arm to make her stand. “You’re embarrassing me.” Caroline sat down on the bench fast and hard. “Eat your apple,” said her mother, opening another section of the newspaper, licking her fingers to turn the page. She would not look at Caroline, angry that the child had to be reminded of all the same things so often. “Color with your crayons,” the woman went on. “Keep yourself occupied.” Caroline saw Letty and her brother gather their toys and go home, but they left the empty candy bag on the bench. Cary would never do that: it had been drummed into her that leaving trash was an insolent, spoiled act. Her mother almost delighted in pointing out littering by transgressors from all classes and professions. When they reached the gate, Letty turned abruptly and jerked her new doll up and down. Caroline tried to read the gesture but could not. Was it a wave or a taunt? She raised her arm slightly in return but Letty did not signal again, grabbing and slamming the gate instead, causing it to crash and rebound open. The chill in the air was insistent this late in the afternoon. Caroline hugged her raggedy Raggedy as the curious playmate and kind brother receded along the path. When they were out of sight she finished her apple, including the core as she’d been taught, and tossed the pits over the fence to grow apple trees if they would. Then she crossed the playground to get the empty candy bag,

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and inhaled its sticky aromas before dropping it into a dented, galvanized barrel near the gate. She colored carefully within the lines of her coloring book, but only blue and yellow. Her mother folded the paper, putting a few of the clippings into her old fabric purse, but changed her mind about some of the others and threw them out. Playgrounds made her uneasy when the sun went down: to get her home early, her own mother once told her that ghosts of dead children came to play at dusk. She didn’t remember being told this, but when the afternoons drew in she felt their presence, with dread but without pity. “That girl had a new Raggedy Ann,” Caroline said as they left. “Be grateful you have one at all.” “They’re Jewish,” Caroline continued, referring to the boy and girl, still not sure about the dolls, as she followed her mother toward the street. “Let’s stop at Corso’s Market on the way home,” the woman said, not paying her any attention. “Canned peas nineteen cents on special.” They walked out of the playground towards home as the lamplights began to come on, splatting harsh, white triangles far apart. Along the streets of Ellenville were crooked rows of mismatched houses set among vacant lots, and wild trees, and patchy yards, and jumbled gates enclosing barking dogs, and broken crates, and chipped white plaster saints in delft blue niches. Her mother pointed toward a particularly derelict property containing a rotting house and outbuildings connected as a series, constructed by a prospering farm family a century before. In the sing-song custom of the neighborhood, they ticked off the sections together, “Big house, little house, back house, barn.” 54

Section 1 Chapter 8: Letty’s Mother Dying

Chapter 8 Letty’s Mother Dying When the girls were ten, Caroline watched her friend’s mother from the doorway of the woman’s sickroom. Letty’s mom was too weak to get out of bed. She breathed in tiny pants and could not speak. Her skin was already dead white, yellow-gray waxen white, hideously made up with rouge circles and lipstick applied in a cupid’s bow. Her ear lobes were bloodless, dry callous. Her hands were transparent claws with red nail polish badly painted over horny, flaking, knobby cuticles and cracking fingertips. Her hair had fallen out too, but she tried, every day, to tie on a kerchief when Letty brought Caroline home to play and do homework after school. She could hardly lift her own eyeglasses off the night table to put them on. A living corpse, age thirty-eight. 55

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Letty stomped through into the bathroom to wash her hands and face before she came near her mother, so Caroline visited first, from the doorway of the bedroom to keep her own germs away. Caroline’s eyes darted to the dresser, bull’s eyeing the photograph of Letty’s older brother, by this date in 1957 an early casualty of American skirmishes in Southeast Asia, what was the country — Laos. Caroline stared at that picture of him in a khaki uniform. Bitterness rose in her every day. She’d never been able to make him notice her, hadn’t grown up enough; none of her juvenile advances clued him in. She was too young to know of course he knew, but had chosen prudently to ignore her flirtations. “How you feeling today, Mrs. S.?” Cary asked. “Regards to Mother,” croaked the cancerous woman, bending her wrist open-close one-two, weaker and looser than the day before, short flags of flesh hanging from the bones of her arm. Letty returned from washing up and tossed her mother’s cigarettes on the foot of the bed, Lucky Strike. They bounced to the dusty floor and spilled. Letty blew one clean enough, placed the end into her mother’s mouth, and lit it for her, coordinating the flash of the lighter with the dying woman’s efforts to inhale. Then she pulled the cigarette back out, flicked it once into a leaf-shaped, green ceramic ash tray, and replaced it between the reaching lips. Letty was polite with her mother but Caroline noticed that almost spitefully, vindictively, she made her smoke too fast, each puff a gasp. An oxygen tank and apparatus stood near the bed. Letty had been taught to be careful about fire. It was the doctor’s policy to let his patients smoke until the end if they wanted. Caroline sat herself gingerly down on a 56

Section 1 Chapter 8: Letty’s Mother Dying

beautifully designed and crafted comfortable Charles Eames wooden chair. The bedroom set in this house was an expensive, lacquered, sweet blond wood, with chips in the footboard from Letty’s baby teeth, tender gouges pointed out to Cary many times, “It’s Herman Miller furniture I chewed up,” Letty liked to taunt, “moolah, moolah.” The house was brick; Caroline’s was old woodframe, with iron bedsteads. This was one of the best houses on one of the best streets in town. Letty’s family had more money than hers; the father was a banker. Letty was given piano lessons and skating lessons and went to arty summer camps, advantages Caroline thought were wasted on her plump, untalented and inappreciative friend. Letty helped her mother smoke. There was no conversation once the cigarette was lit. And when the woman recovered from her fit of coughing, Letty brought her mother’s pocketbook to the bed and opened a leather snaptop change purse. The mother took the change purse in her own hands and with tweezer fingers lifted out some coins for Letty and for Caroline. And Caroline and Letty went for ice cream, and Letty bought Bazooka and more candy; she got fatter every week. Caroline had never really liked her; they regularly bickered. Letty started fights with everyone. Other children heckled Cary for being friends with her and wouldn’t play with either. Caroline bought crayons or paper or scissors, never sweets, as if in reproach. Cary was as fond of sugar as any child, but in this circumstance she spited and denied herself as an example, and Letty ate more than she might have had she not had her friend’s behavior to resent. Thus, the twisted patterns of their friendship were laid down and elements of their personalities first set. 57

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Chapter 9 Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool When Caroline came home from college after doing well on an art school scholarship complete with year abroad, she looked up Leticia Smith, neé Schwartzweiss, in the Manhattan telephone book. Letty had married someone, a non-Jewish man in the trades, well beneath her family’s taste, income and education, and was living in New York. The girls arranged, after many postponements and phone calls because Caroline was trying to make all her city visits in one day, to meet for a swim at the Carmine Street Pool: the perfect thing. In high school they’d enjoyed themselves as rival swimmers, Letty despite her weight, although neither had been the best, or even among the best, in their class.

Section 1 Chapter 9: Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool

Letty was already swimming when Caroline jumped in. They splashed toward one another and briefly met at the end of the lane. Letty darted off immediately. “Hi.” “Hi.” Caroline swam slowly and evenly in good form. They would not race, but were having a “grace race”, as over the years they’d come to think of them. Caroline had invented the term, and she inevitably won. Letty solicited Caroline’s competition and Cary irresistibly succumbed. Her secret lament was only that Letty weren’t harder to beat: Unconsciously Letty engaged to compete only in areas of weakness; what her strengths were, Cary never knew. At their separate colleges neither had been popular. Neither had been content with her “stack in the pack”, as Cary called status, but their styles of social mobility were different. Letty’s way was to cadge the lower orders and assert her rank above them, while Caroline’s was to scratch above herself and rise. Caroline had cut bangs in her tawny hair, growing it long and straight; she wore torn jeans and hoop earrings, Indian bracelets and faded work shirts in the grungy, Bohemian style of 1970. She had tried to make some smart, new friends in college, but wasn’t sure any of them sincerely liked her. She didn’t pledge for a sorority because the other art students ridiculed them and also because of her family’s pinched finances. She had thought about joining the cheerleaders, but none of the Jewish girls joined the cheerleaders; all of them joined the debating society. Caroline did, too, but soon dropped out because she could not orally present the arguments she made in her head or sometimes in

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longhand. And she was too jealous of her own ideas for partnership or anonymous collaboration: It wasn’t in her to be someone else’s speech writer: If she couldn’t state her own points, she didn’t want to prepare them for others, no matter how good at it she might have been. She could draw exceptionally well but that hadn’t helped her make friends: most art students were into abstraction; the fashion was not to think drawing from life counted much. And the other art students envied her favored position with certain faculty members, especially in Rome. So she hadn’t made friends in college, and was back here with her difficult friend from girlhood. In mid-lap Letty and Caroline passed each other face to face. Each was aware of the other’s familiar halfforgotten breath in her mouth, not sweet, not rank, and Caroline smelled something new: Letty smoked cigarettes. As children they had sworn they never would, and for Letty it was particularly dangerous, Cary suspected. She didn’t like the feel of knowing this and turned her face away, reminded of a day she once opened the door to Letty’s room when they were twelve or thirteen. She swam on to dispel the memory but it stayed with her. Letty had been lying naked on her beautiful Swedish carpet, spread-eagled, waiting for Caroline to walk in happy and excited to find her exposed. But instead, Cary bent straight down and punched her in the gut. Letty got up and pushed her face into Cary’s, provoking her to hit her again and again. That night when Caroline had gotten home, she tried her hand at a new experience, and climax was climbed many times thereafter to memories of pummeling her friend. For several years after, they

Section 1 Chapter 9: Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool

experimented with harsh children’s sex, Caroline detesting it, but each time complying with fascination. Letty made her do things she wouldn’t allow her memory to hold, brutalizing her friend’s fat body in as many obscene ways as Letty could dream up. Letty was reckless and masochistic and Caroline became drawn in. Sex between the girls ended when they left for college, but in these college years Caroline found that she herself had become a reckless partner, having sex with strangers often, male and female. Promiscuity was not unusual for the times; she was expected to have sex with almost everyone she met. Everyone was. There existed an anxiety in meeting someone new until they fucked: it affirmed their meeting, confirmed their acceptance of, or unprejudiced equality with, each other. It would have been considered rude to have done otherwise. It was everyone’s habit to say yes to everyone, everywhere, everything, and to initiate foreplay instantly oneself. Usually Cary carried her diaphragm with her, although not today. Her plan was to just meet Letty here, then visit a teacher. Caroline quickened the tempo of her slow crawl, touched the edge, summersaulted twisting underwater like an otter, and swam the next lap in loose sidestroke. Her body had gotten sleek as it matured. “Come back,” she shouted, sputtering up to surface at the wall as Letty ignored her there and flipped, with her natural walrus form and power, to begin a new lap and not hear her say, “Let’s talk.” Privately Caroline had been burdened all her life with equal pity and contempt for Letty’s case. She couldn’t behave normally with her; she didn’t even look

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normal; she was so fat, and a girl just couldn’t be normal without a mother. To Caroline, Letty’s life had been aborted by her mother’s death, but the father had no meaning. She wasn’t much aware of Letty’s father or her own or anyone’s, another common attitude of that time and place: most men were amorphous figures who left most household policy to their wives. Most fathers and daughters of Ellenville weren’t close. Letty recognized the signs of Caroline’s inevitable “friendly competition”, her undisguised disdain. Caroline had once confessed the nature of the unspoken grace race, reminding her smugly that even as children it had been Letty who’d been most eager for competition. Letty turned back in mid-lap, winded, and glad to provide (false) evidence that it wasn’t she who might still be competitive anymore, I’ve been avoiding Cary at the bottom of the lanes — didn’t Cary notice — not kicking off at the same time? She grabbed the edge and kept her shoulders under, chilly. Letty was cold even in the citymandated eighty-two degree pool. She couldn’t swim strongly enough to warm up. Once she sprung off from the wall, she slowed up as she swam. She was sorry she’d arranged to come. She’d get out of the pool as soon as possible and feign no rivalry. This was what she usually did. She had forgotten that she never liked her friend. Caroline caught up to her fast, and did a handstand underwater, reaching her shapely legs past Letty’s face, wiggling her toes near her mouth as she looked up at her friend from underwater. Letty imagined herself biting them, but she wouldn’t even grab them playfully. Cary emerged blowing bubbles. “So, what’s new?”

Section 1 Chapter 9: Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool

Letty had nothing she wanted to tell her. This meeting was a mistake, she thought. “Let’s swim more,” she answered. Caroline shrugged assent and took off with a racing butterfly, but Letty scooted underwater across two lanes to the ladder, and climbed out of the water. She clanged her way up three flat aluminum steps, smashed her way into her designer flip-flops, pulled her towel off the hook and pushed herself hard against the exit. Cary stood up in the pool and watched her. I don’t care; let her see what I look like now, Letty thought. She had deliberately arrived an hour early to conceal her gross body from her attractive friend, not so much its bulky form, but its mottled surface. Her form was nothing new to Caroline, but new to Cary should she see it: Letty’s new husband had beaten her badly; her body, although not her face, was horribly bruised. Letty entered the sour locker room alone. The few other solitary women kept discretely to themselves, head down. She was the largest woman in the area, and all were in states of undress. No one would look more than furtively at her and she could probably count on no one speaking. She didn’t want some do-gooder asking if she’d been beaten up, “abused”, they call it, “ battered”, but most New Yorkers could be counted on to mutely respect mute privacy in any circumstance — for fear of reprisals as much as anything. Oh, why had she suggested they swim today? Swim, of all things, especially at the public pool. She cursed herself; on purpose she’d wanted Caroline to see her body, craving to be humiliated as usual. Such was the role she could easily make Cary play, but she didn’t have the stomach for it today, she thought,

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thinking of how much a person’s body does their thinking. She scraped off the pinching bathing suit, watching in the mirror. She had never seen herself in so large a mirror before, never so accurately could look at herself. She faced the mirror squarely: harsh red lines eroded her flesh where the suit had bound. Sometimes I feel farther away from things below me, and I see more top than sides. Vertigo gave her the impression she looked down on the mirror image, or the mirror could possibly have been angled out at the top: she wasn’t sure. Which parts of my body are still a girl’s; which parts are already a woman’s? The bruises weren’t as bad as they could have been. She stared at her reflection, and wished she saw in faintest shading, the hint of a structure of muscle and bone within. She saw real bone articulated at the elbow and wrist and imagined a more direct line between them. She could be a beautiful woman if she wanted to, she thought. More beautiful than Cary, who had some good points but would never be anything more than plain, she tried to make herself believe. She knew Cary had become a real stunner. Letty knew she had some good features of her own, though too: her complexion truly glowed when it wasn’t bruised, and her large dark eyes shone out from delicately pointed facial bones, smooth forehead, eyebrows full and arched. Her mother had been the most beautiful girl in her high school: Letty and her mother had one face. Letty hadn’t begun to gain extra weight until her mother’s cancer had set in. What have I ever gotten out of this friendship? So her family was richer than Caroline’s. So she had a handsome brother’s memory to wound her with — Cary’s crush on him had never been secret. Why had she allowed Caroline

Section 1 Chapter 9: Caroline and Letty, Carmine Street Pool

to retain such a strong hold on her for so long â&#x20AC;&#x201D; only to increase her jealousy? She used to be able to make Cary do things against her will, that was one thing she prided herself in, but was such a thing lasting? Lettyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s marriage hadnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t won her any points. She turned in the mirror. How much did she really look like this and how much was distortion? The puckers in her thighs were real, and the overhanging flesh bags rolling everywhere, not just symbols of the elevated disgrace she felt. Letty faced her jealousy of Caroline, and faced the perverted pride she took in her own repellent corpulence. But her bluffing bravery failed the moment it was roused. Caroline entered the locker room and Letty quaked. Their eyes met in reflection first, but Letty whirled around and shook enough to hear her breasts and buttocks flap. Off-balance, she reached out for support and slapped her palm against the wall-length mirror, which quivered for an instant before it cracked and shattered, crashing to the tile floor.

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SECTION TWO New Jersey

Section 2 Chapter 10: The Birth of Jewel

Chapter 10 The Birth of Jewel Caroline lay in the hospital bed, on her back, bathed in sweat. Her new baby, Jewel Marie Rubin, slept in a tiny plastic cart against the wall. Caroline was wet between the legs, itching slightly, her skin chilly from hospital airconditioning even though some summer sun did reach her through the window. Internally she was warmed by low-grade fever. Jack would be coming soon; did she look OK? He set such store by beauty although heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never admit it. She ought to comb her hair, or at least the bangs, she thought, running her fingers through them. There was a comb and mirror in a compartment of the bed tray. She tried to unfold the mirror but it clattered and fell into the tray several times until she gave up. Her body was dull and limp, her hands uncoordinated and her mind fuzzy. 67

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An awful drawing pressure from fresh hemorrhoids and sharp perineal stitches streamed through to her attention despite an oozy, yellow disposable glove ballooned with melting ice chips and fitted high like a saddle against the sore strip, pubis to coccyx. The glove reached obscenely under her in a position of holding and stopping as well as feeling and probing the organs so recently active. She had been appalled when the nurse filled this glove. Was there no such thing as a real compress? Or even an oval balloon? The glove seemed to mock what she’d been through. Never had her back and limbs been so sore. When she tried to turn over they responded with wrenching protest. Her legs ached and her throat burned. She tried to remain still and go back to sleep. She couldn’t. The hospital room swam in noon sunlight, white paint, white bedding. Was it good for her pupils to be so pinpointed? Supposedly yes: she’d once read a magazine article about bright light being conducive to positive emotion. Caroline was alone except for the baby. There was no other new mother in the second bed. She managed to hoist her body for a view but yellow and black blotches splotched her dizzy vision. She did not have a good, clear memory of the birth. There had been some sort of twilight sleep induced by an injected drug she hadn’t planned for and which woefully disappointed Jack. There had been a dream, a nightmare, that her teacher Beatrice was the midwife, the three of them poised in a ritual melange, but Caroline didn’t recall it. The infant slept near her against the wall a few feet behind a naturally focused sun to shade division in the room, the light advancing imperceptibly toward the child. The planet is so crowded, she worried. What if this child itself were not a good addition, not an asset, or even 68

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worse, a burden on others, or on the world itself. What had she done, her worries thundered. Through her own doing the world had moved into the future. There should be standards set some day, she scribbled in her sketch pad on the tray table. Some day the competition on this Earth will be too much for just any offspring to be born of wantonness. There arose in Caroline a less than complete enrapture with her child, a sour-mist air of resentment. Caroline had suffered in delivery. Cary’s own mother had been furious about the sudden marriage and baby. She’d refused to come into the city to see them and at Caroline’s lowest moment, had told her on the phone that Caroline’s birth had almost cost her her own life. Cary had hung up on her mother at that, but couldn’t forget it. Caroline had been in vital need of comfort but she had not even one woman friend on whom to rest her thoughts. Her closest friendship was tainted with ill feeling; she dreaded even notifying Letty of the birth. An odd thought sprang to Carry, that Letty might be so jealous she might harm her family. Personal histories were so complex: who knew, who knows why anyone, might do the things they do. I’ve always been a bright girl, she reminded herself, glad to be married to someone as outstanding as Jack. She’d been intimate with so many but this man was the best, even his semen tastes like the heartiest chicken soup; she smiled, though the laugh had almost brought her pain, at the memory of telling him this recently. There was no doubt she’d be faithful to him. How different would Jewel be from Jack or herself? Ask him, she thought, genetics is one of his fields, but the thought depressed her. She hardly knew her husband. He was such a brilliant man. Caroline couldn’t even 69

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differentiate between what he called “his fields.” She thought of these fields agriculturally, all his areas of study lying adjacent on a vast patchwork plain, with Jack the landed gentleman strutting through them. She didn’t see him as a good farmer, though, but dismissed that notion, too. When she thought about what he did she could not understand how what seemed like such fundamental questions could take up boundless arenas of study, thick publications, complex conferences, lengthy meetings, volumes of dense text —. Why were cultures perennially at odds with each other? Why should anyone care what went on in their neighbors’ minds, hearts, bedrooms, churches? Couldn’t everyone just live and let live, keep our eyes on our own plates, as her mother used to say. Couldn’t there be just one answer, one definition, one agreement? Perhaps this is what religion does, she thought, it answers the unknowable with the single word, “God.” “God knows,” her mother would say whenever Cary asked a question about the world. It meant the question was unanswerable. But also it meant that one could live happily enough without searching for the answers, and perhaps unhappily if answers were found. No, God couldn’t help: more blood had been shed in the name of religion than of anything else humankind ever dreamed up. She would like to be in on discussions of such things with Jack, but he squelched her, which she resented. At a dinner party just a month ago, Caroline had come up with the idea of a universal agreement for cultural tolerance. He didn’t want to hear what he expected to be simplistic, and called out, “Oh you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” before she’d 70

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hardly begun. Jack had railed at her. He’d humiliated her in front of their friends. Cary had lots of ideas but Jack belittled them. “Just what kind of agreement? Some kind of charter? A written agreement?” He’d kept on at her. “Even the language it is drafted in would be subject to murderous dispute. Even the shape of the table could start a war.” Their hosts had tried to make a joke out of this and cajole Jack aggressively to bring him round. Cary hadn’t necessarily meant a written agreement, just an agreed agreement, “live and let live.” Couldn’t everyone understand what that meant? Why should Jack call her “naïve.” That incident had caught Cary off guard. She was shocked by Jack’s derisive anger, by his instantly competitive tone of argumentative debate. She had suggested the idea with temerity, jocosity even, simply for the sake of innocent dinner conversation. And why would he even say that? It didn’t seem consistent: As far as she knew, Jack supported leagues of nations, and spoken often of human goodness, no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary. It was their friend Beatrice who had no faith in humankind, and she wasn’t even at that dinner party. Was he conflicted on this point? She couldn’t ask him. Jack had really laced into her. They’d left their hosts soon after, and while getting into their car — Caroline’s car, really; Jack refused to learn to drive — she tried to tell him how he’d made her feel but he wouldn’t listen. He laughed at her again and grabbed her and made love wildly, right there in the people’s driveway. She succumbed with hatred and even though already eight months pregnant at the time, a ferocity of her own. She would never let anyone make her feel so 71

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inferior again. Jack could be impatient, grating, grand, an asshole. Cary pondered the idea of individual responsibility as mandate. How could peace and harmony be not just bullshit sloganeering, but actually practiced. It was frustrations like this which had caused her to shun debate. She just wasn’t able to make anyone understand. Did this new baby, Jewel, really carry the best genes of them both, that was what Caroline wanted to know. The most dominant, does that make them the best? What was “best?” Would Jewel turn out to be a product recognizably from them both? We are all descendents of the archetypes, after all, she had been taught in college. Caroline elevated the head of her hospital bed with a control button and looked at the baby. It lay snug in its pink lined bassinet with an index card printed G-I-R-L in huge type and under it, Jewel Rubin. She stared at the name of her child. It took a bit of time to realize why the name arrested her: her new daughter’s name contained the word “Jew.” It had always been a shock to see the word “Jew” on a printed page; it jumped from print like the word “fuck” or her own name. It was Jack who had suggested the name and she’d concurred without giving the matter much thought. Her own choices ran toward “Amy” or “Robin” but she didn’t mention those names to Jack, and when he said “Jewel” the other alternatives sounded so common and bourgeois that she shut up. For a boy she had thought of “Brian” or “Scott”, or maybe “Matthew”, or “Jonathan.” She saw herself as the mother of a son although it didn’t matter much. Jack never suggested a boy’s name, certain all along they’d have a girl, and Beatrice had predicted it as well, as had the nurses’ intrauterine heart rate monitor and a clever 72

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trick with her wedding ring on a string she’d read about in Cosmopolitan. So they’d named her Jewel. Cary didn’t make any connection between the name and their religion at the time. No, not religion. Neither practiced Judaism as a religion. What was the new word —? Their “ethnicity.” The baby’s religion and ethnicity had not been printed on the card although there was some sort of racial subgroup listed, corresponding to basic New York subgroup perceptions. She saw all the baskets in the nursery were labeled Cauc., Black, Hisp., Asian or Other. She knew that Hebrew was embossed into the dog tags of Jewish servicemen, and the tags shaped with a notch which would be kicked between his front teeth if he died on the battlefield. She’d learned that from an ex-Marine on leave from Nam in bed with her a few years back, as he’d tucked his bulbous glans between her upper lip and teeth, sliding back and forth across the arc. She hated it when men talked anything but pleasure when they fucked. How could she think about anyone but Jack now, and their new baby girl! She supposed she was glad she didn’t have a boy to raise for war, although in other countries women fought. Life was too perplexing. Sexdetermination was in the genes, of course. Is Jewish in the genes? she wrote in her sketch pad. Well, yes, if it isn’t religion. She was getting muddled. Neither the Klein nor Rubin families had been religious or observant Jews, not “Torah Jews”: therefore they were Jews only genetically. She didn’t like this thought. Torah Jews would say she’s not a Jew. Shit, man, they would have held my place in line at Auschwitz; we would have died there “starving, hysterical, naked” side by side. Not her three words, words 73

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of a Jewish prophet writing about his own time in the East Village, not about that time — but it isn’t possible to write about now without thinking about then. This is what the universal vow meant, Never Forget. It never leaves your mind. Jack’s own parents had been caught, but escaped thanks to a tiny augur of luck. Some day she’d like to talk to them again. She knew about the Holocaust, the millions starved in labor camps, thousands tortured in Nazi glee, hundreds of teenage guinea pigs for demented medical experiments, all children and those over forty herded immediately to gas chambers, slaves of the mines and fields and factories replaced when worked to death. The complicity of every nation of Europe, every village in the East complicitly committing its atrocities: pittsful of live burials, multiple-person one-bullet shootings, gas-wagons, on and on, over fifteen thousand actual concentration camps all over Europe, not just the one everyone’s heard of, the one that gassed six thousand a day to the strains of the forced orchestra. Cary stared at the ceiling. The miniscule percentage of survivors — eight percent — and how many generations after them — to remain victims of terror, night after night for decades, and things rumbling again with nowhere to turn. Jews being an unpopular cause, anyway, as are all others who hold mirrors to their confreres. She looked at her baby: Now she must teach a new generation. Caroline closed her eyes and pressed a button to let her bed down flat. Her mind was racing. Genetic weaknesses were most apt to occur in similar strains...The most disparate mixes produce the hardiest stock...What about inbreeding depression and outbreeding depression, what was that? Mendel’s Law, what was that? If she or Jack were more alike, would their children be more 74

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alike? Was there evolutionary benefit from the rape of indigenous women by conquering soldiers, as Jack was fond of saying? What were they doing, having a baby, this couple? They only just met and conceived and so married and now this. “Minor moments become major junctures,” Jack said to her a few weeks after Beatrice had introduced them and Cary called to tell him she was pregnant. There was no question the child was his. Caroline stretched out again, slowly regaining strength and awareness, and wondered if giving birth weren’t, after all, her own mandate, her real purpose, perfect achievement and ultimate destiny? She was aware that she, individually, had transported the present into the future and was directly responsible for continuance of the life of her species on her planet and of all life everywhere. She knew she had submitted to the fundamental drive of every living cell, the relay race transfer of genetic material over time. It is DNA itself which rules the universe, she remembered Jack telling her before the first time they’d made love. These proteins live out parasitic lives in the bodies of mortal dupes who believe they are masters of their own decisions. The idea disgusted her: that she existed merely as a host to pass this germ. He talks about life as if it’s a paintby-numbers kit. She felt indignant: Was her only purpose to produce that mewling lump in that plastic basket? And be expected to love it? She shuddered and pulled the blankets around her shoulders, thinking of how silly it seemed. For one thing her personal motives for having a child had nothing to do with evolution. Since she met Jack she had no defined personal motives, if indeed she ever had: Caroline had never had direction or ambition, only vague reactions for 75

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or against certain people, certain things. The present just pushed its way forward on her; she never questioned any moment as a crossroads for decision, but drifted with life as if in its suspension, shifting with experience, accepting every present as a product of the past, an inevitability of forces beyond her control, never to be deeply questioned no matter how she toyed with the words of the question, lest unwholesome currents be released. Caroline was superstitious and believed that to question destiny was to bring it down upon you. Jewel, to Caroline, was as much a gift to her as Jack had been, but before the memory of their first peculiar copulation was fully recalled, the hospital room door sprang open. Jack entered smiling, but bringing her nothing, Caroline noticed, resigning herself to a lifetime of such touching disappointments. Jack had not proved to be much in the way of a romantic mate. He looked good to her, though, the allure of their moderate age difference still hot and sweet. And he was her favorite teacher’s lover before hers, and he was her generation’s hero. Few knew of his raging inner doubts, Caroline didn’t. Reporters and photographers had flocked to the hospital at the birth of his child but guards kept them from his family. Jack hardly knew they’d followed him, although he would have been inwardly oblivious no matter how outwardly gracious he’d appear: his bevy of followers had less and less effect on his continual immersion in deep thought. Jack had dressed up some, but Cary didn’t comment. He was wearing a thin string tie and plaid cowboy shirt, his black hair, growing in thick again, was trimmed and neatly combed, and his sandals were new; when he’d brought her to the hospital the sandals on his feet were the pair he’d gaffer-taped to keep from falling off for 76

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years already. Since he’d met her, his appearance had grown steadily more conservative, but today he looked especially natty, especially like the hip young college instructor he presently was. And his hands and face were clean and bright, also unusual. Smiling and beaming and nodding his head up and down with approval, he helped his fevered wife stand for the first time since delivery. He had been at the birth; he had stroked her hair and soothed her agony; most men would not have done it. He had not wanted drugs to be administered but did not forbid it when she cried for them. The doctor had looked to him for approval and he at last consented. The drugs were on his mind but he didn’t mention them. “I love you,” he told her. Caroline smiled crookedly; he probably meant it. She held his upraised hand for balance as she sat and scuffed into a pair of paper hospital slippers. She leaned on him and he supported her but didn’t help. Why was he like this, Caroline wondered. He’s not warm. He’s not a likable person. He doesn’t meet people, assist them, reach out to them. He doesn’t even move; he makes a person shift toward him, even just to talk. He isn’t compassionate, he’s not even kind. His depth of human feeling is so shallow. With Jack’s minimal assistance Cary slid carefully to the edge of the bed, then feebly stood. He did help her slowly shuffle along the wall towards the bassinet, letting her take her time, but when she’d gotten across he let go. Caroline wedged into the corner, the walls propping her up as her husband unwrapped their sleeping baby, Jewel. The newborn was lean and proportional, bald and blossom-eyed with a rapturous, innocent face. A bissel baggy skinned, perhaps, in thigh and buttock, Caroline pointed out. 77

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Jack did not think Jewel looked thin or baggyskinned. And he bristled at the Yiddish, but let that go, knowing he wouldn’t allow it in the family lexicon once he got these two home. He hadn’t even known she knew any. “Please don’t find fault with her already.” He said this gently, and partly in jest, but the unexpected rebuke destabilized Caroline’s fragile postpartum chemistry and she fainted to the floor. When she revived she was back in bed on intravenous. Jack sat on a chair under the window reading a technical journal and thinking about how much pure information he would need to accomplish his goals, what technology he would have to develop for his latest project. He’d need to invent much instrumentation, much hardware, much computer code, on his own. The baby slept next to him in the sun, eyes averted from the light. “Cary?” Jack whispered. He was saving good news to tell her. He’d been offered an opportunity by Princeton to develop software for anthropological assessments. “Certainty must come before action,” he explained. “I’m quitting the radical life.” And Beatrice would become the child’s godmother.

Section 2 Chapter 11: Caroline’s Sketch Pad I

Chapter 11 Caroline’s Sketch Pad I Caroline slouched in the living room on an old wingback chair left in the house by former owners, the beautiful child, Jewel, cooing on the floor playing Pretend with miniature dolls and bedding, blocks and carts and delicate pieces of finger-sized furniture. She groped around for part of a minikin tea set. Caroline knew what Jewel was looking for: it was behind the chair, but she wouldn’t help get it. She knew that if she even so much as moved or called attention to herself, Jewel would intrude on the peace of her restful evening. She couldn’t place two thoughts together without the child speaking to her, disturbing her mind with questions she couldn’t answer, explanations she couldn’t give. Hearing Jewel’s voice aroused great irritability. She hadn’t minded diapering 79

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her when she’d been an infant, or feeding her or caring for her helpless state but since Jewel’s demands had become more intellectual and more personal, Caroline couldn’t stand it — not that the woman was doing anything, or even thinking anything at the moment. A brand new sketch pad lay open on her lap, and in a clean clear glass ash tray beside her was a set of soft B pencils a Brownie Pocket Knife for sharpening them, and several kinds of erasers, but she wasn’t drawing. She repositioned the ash tray by a quarter-inch twist for a slightly better esthetic on the lamp table. Jack was away. Clothes were tossing in the dryer, making little clicking sounds. 11 2 Mercer St., Princeton, New Jersey. W-h-e-n she wrote on the edge of the toothy paper. A stack of Vivaldi records was on the stereo. Caroline re-lit a half joint from her pocket and looked around for another ash tray. The radiant child looked up as the match was struck, but Caroline scowled. Checked, the little girl resumed her fantasy with the doll house. Caroline was irked by the child’s unassuming concentration. She tapped the light ash into a pile on the kneaded eraser, already too marbled, so a good time to change. She’d throw the whole gritty thing out later. Dear Letty, she left the first leaf blank in her new pad, and wrote this in pencil diagonally near the top of the second. It would be an assertion of her artistic spirit to send a letter from a sketch pad, she thought. Her creativity hadn’t gotten much exercise since college. Jewel and I have planted a garden of seeds and pits. I already know that pickled seeds won’t grow, but Jewel does not. She settled back into the chair for several minutes, toying with the pencil. The child had resumed play,

Section 2 Chapter 11: Caroline’s Sketch Pad I

clucking happy phrases to her things. Caroline erased the words with a soap-eraser and brushed the scumble into her hand. This is art, she thought, squeezing the cushy eraser dust, this dust. This is poetry: these mucky pieces of rubber contain my pictures and words. She emptied them into a Revolutionary War-themed wastepaper tin next to the chair and wrote again over the more roughened surface, slightly waxier for having been soap-erased, words she had thought after Jack left her thinking, words she could not utter to him because they contradicted his own viewpoint. The past determines the future directly. The present is non-existent. Past and future butt against each other. We can be sure of the change, not the position. There is no frame in the morph. A person is caught in the web of time as a mote in a weather front. That anyone can exert any control at all is an illusion. Jack thinks he will be able to. He’s a jerk. He thinks he can save the world. She pinched the half-inch roach between her filed but unlacquered fingernails, burning her thumb as she re-lit it, sucking and writing as best she could. Jack has been annoyed with me for our differences, but philosophy is trivial to our life together. He is never annoyed with me for anything real. He has become distant, preoccupied, lost in thought. We never have a normal conversation. He doesn’t like it that I hold any views. He thinks my views are trite, paradoxical, but he’s angry that he can’t refute them. He throws books at me — read this, read that — Jack says history is irradiated by individual lives. He says one can personally direct the historical present, command it, that one motivated individual can determine reality for others.

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My old professor says the present is not a short jump between long periods but is a long period itself, and open to revision. I say: If only the future could be determined by rational consensus, that people could sit down with each other and discuss things. But it’s delusional to think anyone control their own present. The present is where the past dumped us. Caroline rotated the paper over the spirals to the next page in the sketch pad: Dear Letty, she began again, choreographing her handwriting into falsely artistic loops and circle dots, Jewel asked me today what makes rain. I answered her in nouns and verbs but a better answer should be given in electrons. I know nothing about electrons. I want Jewel to learn everything but I wish there were no teaching. Yesterday she asked what rules the universe. I answered her flip as I could, “chance and proclivity, hope and greed.” Caroline re-lit the roach, scorching a yellowbrown arc into her right index fingernail, sucked at the last quarter-inch of flat sogginess, then swallowed the glowing stub. She glanced at Jewel. The child didn’t seem to have noticed. I’ll probably have to stop smoking pot before she’s old enough to know what it is, Caroline thought resentfully as she flipped to another clean page. I wish people can be raised better in places where there’s conflict. Wouldn’t it seem normal for mothers to teach children to reflect equably on encounters? Don’t you think if mothers just taught their children better there wouldn’t be any more war? Again she erased the words in frustration; her ideas 82

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diminished whenever she put words to them. She didn’t want Jack to get the idea she thought something silly, like “Mothers can save the world.” And she didn’t want to think she might not meet her own criteria. The “how do you make it happen” part. Dear Letty, she tried once more. Jack has been gathering statistics. He thinks it’s possible for a single individual to devise the perfect social structure and implement that structure if provided only with a population’s data. As you must see from the newspapers, he masses huge rallies and tons of money are donated to his Institute. But I want you to know, none of this helps our household and he has no time for me or his child, although when he’s home he makes a big fuss over her. Jewel adores him. When Jack is away in the evening she sleeps on the floor of the foyer, Daddy’s Little Girl. He’s trained her like a pet — the second he opens the door he grabs her and lifts her and shouts some ridiculous question — “What famous children’s poem features a green boat,” “What famous children’s story features a hay-filled sleeping loft?” He stirs her up too much. He spoils her and teases her. I’ve got some big ideas of my own, you know — but he won’t even listen to me — just insults me — yesterday he brought home the new book on Paul Klee and told me that’s where I should study genetics, and maybe while I’m at it astronomy, too. His new thing is he wants me to get into the social set of Princeton. Since when was he ever interested in this? Time was, I might have wanted to. I have made some friends here. But everyone’s too eager. Everyone is fawning and jealous — they use their children, stupid, 83

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spoiled, vacant, boring children, as go-betweens. Our Jewel is popular but I don’t like it. That child does not earn all the compliments people pay her. She doesn’t earn all the space she takes up in the world. Caroline flipped this page, too, not erasing the letter, but not tearing it out to be mailed. It was not a real letter; many of her entries took the form of letters never sent. She’d received a note from Letty recently but wouldn’t answer it, yet, anyway — Letty leaving husband, getting money from her widowed father to start a makeup company — Cary wished she could finally drop this relationship for good, had dropped it years ago,. Letty wanted Caroline to approve of her, and Cary needed someone who did think her opinion mattered. All the drawing books Cary completed, collected more words than pictures over time. She dated the next line, Sept. 15, 1974, and wrote, Jack is not good at handling money, and becoming worse each month. He insists on spending his own money on travel, photocopies, postage, supplies — refuses to apply to the Institute for reimbursement — insists he’ d rather pay than keep receipts. His work is funded adequately but there’s not enough for our life, nothing at all for the entertaining he wants me to do. He says that soon money will be obsolete — speaks of grand social schemes, yet his real life has no system. And he violently opposes any implementation of order from me. Caroline cradled herself deeper in the cozy chair and regarded her contented daughter playing quietly at her feet. I do love Jewel. I really do. She closed her eyes, the suburban stillness welcome, and let herself drift. Sex this morning good, at least we’ve had that, she wrote again. But it is not enough of an outlet for my rage, when rages rage. 84

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Drowsy from the marijuana, she kept her eyes closed for a while, listening abstractly through the Vivaldi. A scratching sound came from the back of the house. She wasn’t worried, but the drug clicked its opposite switch, and alerted her sentry. She sensed the autumn and shivered. A clatter against the back door urgently repeated itself. She sat up quickly. The child stopped playing, a gesture frozen in mid-air as she looked at her mother. Caroline put her finger to her lips and frowned and shook her fist Jewel shouldn’t make a sound. There had been a recent rash of robberies in the neighborhood — on this block already one. Jack’s new home-computer was visible from the windows. Caroline clung to the arms of the chair and listened, her eyes fixed on the IBM’s gray glowing screen. With this new computer Jack worked privately on material he kept secret from the Institute. Some of the work went far beyond the simple encoding of genetic statistics. And he’d set up some kind of equipment above the garage, too. Cary took a mental inventory of what a burglar might be after. For many moments she and Jewel stayed stock still, listening through Vivaldi’s energetic harpsichords and flutes for more sounds of danger. There hadn’t been another noise. Jewel adjusted slowly back into play. Perhaps the marijuana had magnified the normal nighttime sounds — probably just a cat or falling branch. She could build a fire in the fireplace, dispel the chill. She would, she thought, if alone; the wood was already stacked. But if she got up, the child would be enlivened and sure to whine and want something, and then whatever she did for her wouldn’t be perfect, and then she’d have to get something else and do something else that had to be done before the thing to be done could be done, and do things over and over — 85

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Caroline looked at Jewel resentfully; the child’s eyes were again fixed on hers, her small body again immobilized in a fearful gesture, awaiting instructions. Caroline rolled her eyes disgustedly and motioned to Jewel to resume playing, not to bother her or speak or ask what happened. She slumped back in the old chair. What if there had been prowlers? Could she protect her daughter if she had to? Or would a child weigh a woman down, keep her from saving herself in an emergency, prevent her from running fast enough, getting out in time. How many women were lost in massacres trying to rescue their children? “Look, Mommy!” Jewel tried to take advantage of her mother’s brief concern, taking a chance, disregarding her unmistakable gesture of dismissal. She wanted to show her something wonderful: Inside the play house, shafts from Caroline’s lamp reached through the tiny windows to figures Jewel had placed so that ribbons of light touched each painted face to give the toy family a holy look. The little boy and girl doll children shared a single beam. Oh, it was just inevitable this child would interrupt with some nonsense. “Shut up,” hissed Caroline. “Use you eyes before your mouth, use your ears before your mouth. Don’t you see me listening to something? Don’t you see me thinking about something?” All the Vivaldi records had ended and the stereo was making an airy sound. Jewel couldn’t see her mother listening or thinking, but withdrew immediately back into her fantasy of the family with twin brother and sister inside the doll house, bathed in magic light and entreating her to join them.

Section 2 Chapter 12: Caroline’s Sketch Pad II

Chapter 12 Caroline’s Sketch Pad II On another day Caroline wrote at the dining room table, dishwasher churning, Jewel at school. April 18, 1976. Smoking a great deal again. 5 or 6 joints a day but nothing to what Jack is smoking — Princeton Project growing far beyond initial plans. He works night and day and is away often. Blinds drawn habitually. Phone calls don’t stop from diplomats and statesmen, and always the press, the press. Forced to write complicated messages of phone calls he’ ll never bother to return. He is aloof to everyone, just keeps doing his work, smiling and nodding and showing no emotion except condescension

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to me. There is never a moment to think. People from all over the world drop in without calling — can not keep up — do not have a minute to myself. European visitors, Asian visitors so elegant. Catch myself talking too loud. Using hands too much. Dinner guests, weekend guests, scientists from abroad, politicians, religious leaders (particularly the Catholic clergy, who seem to be cozying up to American Jews and getting deep into international politics everywhere you look). Jack expects me to be a svelte fashion plate, a charming hostess, the ideal intellectual wife. But he hates it when I open my mouth. He minimizes and maximizes my talents simultaneously. He introduces me as the ex-student of the famous artist Beatrice Stregasanta Madragiore, as if the slightest bit of her fame or talent has rubbed off on me. Even Beatrice herself is interested more in our daughter, Jewel, than in me. At least there is a new budget this year from the Institute — with an expense account for me, as “Consultant.” I insisted on this, and got it. I bought a beautiful faux-pigskin-bound drawing book yesterday to draw in separately from these sketch pads that turned into diaries, 40 bucks, what the hell, they’re paying for it finally, I might as well get what I deserve. But I’m sure it will never be used. Drawing just gives me anxiety. Words come out instead of pictures. Even in the years I drew what I saw in front of me — fruit, boxes, chairs, glasses, bottles, my own hands, my own plain face in the mirror — smudgy picky pencil drawings. I have no art to make. Life is traveling too fast for me to perceive enough even to catch, let alone to make art out of. How could I add any visual material to this visually polluted world — how could I justify any of

Section 2 Chapter 12: Caroline’s Sketch Pad II

my still lives taking up wall space in rooms which grow more cramped in every new building. I’ ll be thankful if I survive life, let alone survive life and art, too. Maybe I’ve got to get a grip on myself and force myself to give in and be content to find fulfillment through my family. No! I can’t stand it! Daily life, continual service! Dust up my nose all day long! Bags of heavy groceries! Hands constantly wet. Record-keeping way out of proportion — paying bills, addition and subtraction never right, numbers transposed, checkbook never agreeing with the bank, skipping numbers on the calculator, faulty appliances, leaky plumbing, hours on the phone with service people who don’t show up. Maintaining car — oily rags, rude mechanics. Hyper state. Must take a few breaths or a walk around the block and pretend to be normal — that works, imitating normal people, their tempo and gestures and speech — and take another Valium. Worked hard this morning putting everything back to sorts in the house. Jack won’t allow domestic help — but of course it isn’t Jack who does the housework, is it —. Hands have begun to feel weak in the evenings, skin shredding. Must buy rubber gloves. Emotions hitting extreme highs and lows, angry all the time — and the unending care for that child, catering to her boring kindergarten needs, chauffeuring her around on constantly changing minute to minute schedules and play dates and parties —. She’s become a total brat. I can’t make her mind me or take care of her own things. She can’t even brush her hair properly. By the time I was her age I was already running errands,

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dodging shopmen’s fingers. She should do her share of work. Instead, she tells me she loves me and presses her body to mine in obscene ways. Actually touches my breast with her hand when she reaches to kiss me. I find it repulsive. Often must push her away. Why do children want so much: sweets, baubles, nothing, crap. At least most of the toys I have to get her I can find at rummage sales — they’re good enough — it’s no sin to play with slightly broken toys — she’ d break them anyway if they were new — she’s lucky to get anything — the girl makes me slap her — provokes me. I warn and threaten and cajole until she doesn’t leave me any choice. Could hit her a lot harder. Could let the kitchen door smash her face when I’m standing there holding it and she’s taking her sweet fucking time. The one time I let it drop, it was me had to waste an hour cleaning her bloody nose. Must teach her economy and reservation, force her to be frugal, not take up so much space in the world. Civilized behavior is due to one’s experience, one’s past. In a child’s recent past it was an animal. Jewel is the most beautiful of all the Princeton kids. Trim and lithe and pale and angular. She swims nicely and I do enjoy taking her. But I must teach her harder to be better, to be meeker, more respectful, to behave beyond reproach, to put herself last, to expect nothing. I suppose I can love her and forgive her anything because of her physical beauty, although I have tried to resist this. It is her uncut auburn hair I love the most. And if Jack loves me for anything it is for giving him this child. (Maybe I should have another one.)

Section 2 Chapter 12: Carolineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sketch Pad II

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Chapter 13 Jewel Jewel, an exceptional child, a genius. But in teaching her Caroline scolded and raved. Jack thought Jewel was naturally brilliant and beautiful; he loved her without reservation. But Caroline thought Jewel could absorb learning only through effort. Caroline was able to see Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gifts solely in comparison to other children â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and looked for comparison frequently â&#x20AC;&#x201D; but the dullness she saw in other children was a constant shock to her: the other children were a joke, not a standard, even the children of other professors and notables. Local parents were eager for their kids to play with Jewel: her father was one of the most important men in a town of important men. But besides that, the children themselves loved her; to them she was a fair and 92

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caring friend. Her popularity among her peers was well deserved. She was a model and exemplary wunderkind. But no matter how humanly perfect Jewel had trained herself to be, she never quite measured to Caroline’s unattainable standards. To Caroline there was only one standard: absolute perfection, unparalleled excellence. Caroline raised and cultured little Jewel as if she were her daughter’s manager and trainer. “Faster, faster, harder, higher, neater, straighter, smaller, less —.” From time to time Caroline came close to perpetrating gross physical abuse. For prolonged periods, in waves or cycles, the woman was enraged over trifles, angered that she worked thanklessly at menial degrading tasks of unending servitude. Jewel witnessed her tirades with true compassion and tried to comfort her while shielding her own little head and body, but for the insolence of her pity she was often locked in a room or closet. Jewel Rubin’s genius lay in her sparing innocent nature, the breadth of her interests, her rarefied concepts, frugality with materials, comprehension of essential similarities, and a sense of humor so wry it challenged her one day as she noticed that her father wore an incessant smile, to discipline herself never to smile, never to laugh, except with him. Although it was her mother she had to account to, it was Daddy for whom she kept herself smart and good to look at. Her aptitudes and interests were especially high in the sciences of astronomy and physics, the history of pagan myth and fable, the English and American and translated Russian and French literature of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century, and the puzzles of German philosophy. 93

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Section 2 Chapter 14: Caroline and Jewel Drive to the Country

Chapter 14 Caroline and Jewel Drive to the Country For many years, at 3 o’clock, Caroline picked

Jewel up after school and often, off and on, spent a sunny afternoon driving around the Princeton countryside and farmlands. On one particular early autumn day when Jewel was twelve, they’d planned an outing in advance, but when the time arrived the weather changed to a bleak, raw, darkening, stormy matinée. Jewel waited for her mother at their usual point of rendezvous: a large Dutch elm left standing when the rest of the land was cleared for the school, a ring of earth left with it, wooden ring-bench screwed half-way round and painted forest green enamel, concrete walkway leveled over its roots, a huge tree from primeval America, now carved and festooned with modern messages. Jewel leaned against the tree, holding a book from Mythology class, a thin, loose-jointed girl with a full head of bushy, coppery hair. 95

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Everyone waited around the big, enduring elm for their mothers’ cars. Girls nearby were talking about how dark the sky had turned. Jewel knew them and nodded when one waved to her, but she didn’t join in. Her schoolmates were used to seeing her huddled reading, alone. They came visiting less often to her house these years. She’d shed the friends her mother didn’t approve of, but taxed the patience of the others. None of them liked her mother, no matter that their own mothers pressured them. No delight were the trades of home and motherhood to Caroline: she exaggerated their complexity and made Jewel suffer for it. The kids clung close together, not entirely ignoring her, but they’d grown alienated by her rejection of their childhood adoration and put off by her unconcealed, perennial wish not to join their clique. Another girl nodded now, too. Then looked away. No matter, she often rattled to herself: however closely any friends encircled her they never held her interest more than reading. Jewel gravitated naturally to science and for what could not be learned there, to literature. The term “rara avis” suited none better. Jewel, the sweet and patient child, never withered in her grim surroundings. As she waited out her dismal girlhood, she learned to hold her tongue and keep her room and get all A’s. Locked up so often as punishment, Jewel developed the ability, no matter how attenuated the molecules in her oppressive atmosphere, to secretly scent from different directions the cooler air of the natural world and the humid jungle-must of original thought. Jewel breathed in the damp tree. She put her cheek against the large scores in its bark. She put her nose into a crevasse. She imagined herself deep in a forest. She 96

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turned another page in the book of myths. The one or two friends she did admire, and covet, and visit secretly, were of high eccentricity and questionable repute; they lived in strange neighborhoods, or went to other schools, or older kids, drop-outs. She flicked her eyes down and reread the passage, a storm so dark nae land nor sky could be discerned.... Jewel pulled her cardigan closer and folded her thin arms around her chest. In the past hour, nimbus had rolled overhead into gigantic pillars, closing ranks from the northwest and the east, the air inside these heavy clouds from Canada battling and changing form to water about to be sucked violently by Pennsylvania Jersey earth. She was not dressed warmly enough. She watched the sky and down the circle-drive around the school for her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s car. Maybe Caroline would think to bring a jacket. But Mommyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s touches were not consistently of kindness, Jewel knew. She rearranged the book in her cramped left hand, wishing that gutter margins were more generous in paperbacks, and rubbed her cuticle-bitten fingers across each other against the chill. She slid the fingers of her right hand into her left armpit to warm them, furtively passing over her own new bud. She reminded herself to ask her mother what kind of car she drove: a question for an insipid but required homeroom personality quiz game assignment she couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t get out of. Unlike her cohorts, Jewel was generally ignorant of brand names and of the presumed symbolism of cars. Her mother drove an old tan car; she knew this much. Her father had never learned to drive at all, never trusted cars; he rode his bicycle when he was home. Last year he had bought himself a Peugeot top-of-the-line bike for his fortieth birthday. He had had 97

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his eye on a Bottecchia Pro, and almost bought it but withheld himself. Despite the sky Jewel hoped that Caroline would keep her promise. She always wished for happy times with her mother, and, as she had learned recently in a “Little Women’s Club” discussion of B.F. Skinner, the unpredictable infrequency of such times was precisely the reward that kept her stimulated, kept up her hopes, made her heart leap now as Caroline’s ugly tan car turned off the road into the drive behind a station wagon. Like a circus train, her mother was tailgating, almost plowing the car in front of her out of the way. Would she have a jacket with her? Jewel silently begged, being careful not to let her mother see how cold she was: she might be angry that Jewel hadn’t brought heavier clothing this morning herself; she might even blame Jewel for intentionally failing to predict the weather change. Jewel would greet her with reserve and wait to see exactly what was what. The car in front of Caroline picked up a brother-sister set of fraternal twins, and finally drove past. Caroline opened her window, honking the horn insistently and unnecessarily. Jewel could feel the other kids staring as Caroline waved to them all, and Jewel watched their glum reactions and their snickers. Most turned away from her mother; a few very old friends from infancy timidly waved back, glancing sidelong at Jewel. No one called out loud. Caroline was wearing ridiculous, huge, mirrored sunglasses despite the dark day, and a very stylish sheepskin-lined denim outfit. Her new pageboy haircut was too cute, but at least she’d washed out the intensifying blond rinse she’d tried the week before, deciding that her own honey color was good enough. 98

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Jewel climbed into the front seat. She wasn’t happy that her mother had lately been going in for what she considered an unbecoming flamboyance. She’s getting increasingly unpredictable, even in public, Jewel thought. “Yes, yes, yes, of course we’ll go,” Caroline was saying, chattering happily as she hardly braked long enough for Jewel to sit down safely, “lots of food...picnic basket checked napkins...bought them at a garage sale...” Jewel was half listening, glad her mother was in a good mood as long as it lasted. If the mood was genuine and kept up, there might be a few words she’d like to share with her. She’d wait and see. She fastened the seat belt and dropped her book in with the food, Insect Characters in Meteorological Legends. The car was warm and snug, and smelled only faintly of the joint Caroline had smoked in the garage before setting out. Jewel hated that her mother smoked this crap; it made her especially volatile. She was glad she’d put the book of legends away. Beatrice had given it to her — her father’s ex-girlfriend and her mother’s ex-teacher, a blind, black celebrity who’d become her godmother. Caroline was jealous of Beatrice’s relationship with Jewel. Jewel had better not provoke her. Her mother was still talking, happy, nice to her. Jewel would try to be quiet and good as her mother liked her to be. She didn’t see a jacket for herself and wouldn’t ask. Jewel knew Caroline might turn on her then, blaming her for whatever wasn’t perfect, for not planning, for expecting a mother to remember everything, do everything. She could almost recite Caroline’s lines. Jewel breathed in fully and strengthened her resolve to stay tightly in check, keep her childhood impulse toward enthusiasm, and her newly emerging tendency toward 99

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sarcasm, prudently reined. The least little thing could set Caroline off. Yet they both had sincerely looked forward to the picnic all week. Jewel wondered if her mother was even aware of the grave degree of foreboding in the weather, so enraptured was she by her own ebullience, talking away about some neighbor’s garden, “still have tomatoes growing, pumpkins much larger than last year, bumper crop of late corn, marigolds kept insects out, plenty of Earthworms, found a hornets’ nest under the porch — or maybe it was wasps under the porch, what kind of black insects live under porches,” did Jewel know? “Hornets are wasps,” Jewel said, “especially social and predatory.” “Sting badly?” Cary asked. “And multiple times, and don’t lose their stingers. Some of the other wasps can be solitary,” Caroline let her daughter tell her. The conversation was loose and they were more or less having a good time. Sometimes Cary could work herself into a frenzy of good spirit and fun, and at those times Jewel loved her unconditionally, overwhelmed by happiness. But at twelve years old, Jewel knew not to completely trust these joyful moods; thus, the anger that inevitably followed was less the bitter disappointment than it had been earlier in her life. As a little girl, Jewel had held down tears and bitten her nails for being told she had ruined, in some way unendurable for Caroline, each and every of her mother’s real, or possible, or hoped-for pleasures and spoiled what could have been very good times. In no case did Jewel ever understand what she had done. Car radio might be nice. She’d like to turn the 100

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car radio on, but Caroline would only turn it off again, she knew, and quite possibly anger. Rain began, hard, before they reached the state road. Caroline kept talking and talking, insisting it was “only a passing shower, it would pass over soon,” they’d “drive it out,” she’d seen “a road once, County Road 502,” she “remembered it, there were plenty of little barn shelters out there, unused....” “Big house, little house, back house, barn,” she recited. They “could be outdoors today after all.” Both wanted to enjoy the day. Neither wished it spoiled. Jewel cautioned herself to remain silent, not to ask questions, just be patient, just wait and see. Caroline chatted away, gripping the wheel, complaining about her knobby hands. Jewel watched her mother’s fingers knead the worn, black plastic steering wheel. Her mother had always despaired of her hands, but any defects she saw in them were exaggerated or pure fantasy. Jewel studied her mother’s hands from across the seat; they weren’t Cocteau’s, they were just neat, trim hands, “...chapped, bent, arthritis setting in,” Caroline was saying, jangling the heavy, gold charm bracelet on the left one. Jewel detected the first unmistakable signs of Caroline’s familiar mounting hysteria, and increased the suppression of her own body and mind, slowing down her movements, becoming less detectable. She was used to her mother’s episodes and had learned to survive them best by remaining passive, catatonic, as out of sight as possible. Let her just go on by around you. They drove a long time west and a little north, crossing the river, driving deeper through empty rural areas, through farmland sold for tract developments 101

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and new big box stores, through farmland up for sale, squatted land, abandoned; rain splashing against the car doors, but Caroline hadn’t found the road she said she’d planned to take. For quite a period there had been no traffic in the other direction. “Let’s not get lost now,” Caroline was yelling. “Remember this!” she shouted, driving faster, pointing to some specter of a hidden landmark through the rhythmic broken wedge the wipers smeared on the glistening windows as she made a wild turn onto yet another gravel road. She called Jewel’s attention to the visual effects of the light and the rain outside the moving car. “...lens drops on the windshield...” Caroline rattled on, motioning with her hands, shaking her right hand at Jewel, tapping the window with her braceleted left, driving fast. Jewel wondered if her mother could really be watching the road, steering the car. How could she talk so much and gesticulate and still drive? She looked so stupid in these chic designer outfits she’s been wearing lately; and how could she still be wearing sunglasses? The windows were getting steamed up: the defrosters were blowing but provided only insufficient oval pools of clarity on the foggy glass. The headlights picked out reflectent markers which seemed to switch sides of the road as the unsteady car swerved around curves. When Jewel rolled open her window a crack to let in crisper air, the wind whizzled for a second before Caroline ordered it closed. Several times the car displaced abruptly, on a skid, fishtailing. Caroline oversteered at every frequent turn. Jewel got up on her knees on the seat, keeping her seat belt: she needed a better look. 102

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Where was this? She rubbed away the cold moisture on the window as her mother careened recklessly, mud splashing around the sides, splattering the windows. It was difficult to see out, no lights, no lines, no markers. This hardly seemed like a road, maybe a dirt road, a wagon path, not residential, not farm. It looked like scrub, prairie, a darkening wasteland. A few trees out of place, single, rushing by, sliding. The road was not straight, and Caroline was driving and braking, swerving, skidding, almost twirling. Jewel strained in her seat to see out the car. There was no road at all. Caroline was driving every which way on an open field like a maniac. “Ma! Stop! Stop driving! Stop!” Caroline did not hear her. Jewel was out of her seat belt and tossing in the car like a bag of loose groceries. She pitted herself against the changing physical forces and demanded her mother hear her now and stop! “...always loved you, always cared for you, always wished...” Caroline screamed. “Do you know how much you mean to me? How much I always wanted another child? How much I want you to be perfect? I always minimized your joys to strengthen you, to prepare you for life’s disappointments....” Whether it was because Jewel suddenly did understand her mother at that moment and was overcome by an urge to embrace and comfort her, or because she was physically insisting that Caroline heed her demand to stop the car, she lunged across the seat and grabbed her mother around the chest. The car hit a lone tree in the field. Jewel was hurled forward into the dash and windshield, her head crashing into the glass and breaking it, her body flung 103

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back, and flung against the seat. The windshield was bashed in. Much of the glass had held together in its plasticized net and maintained contiguity, but many shards burst out. Pieces of broken glass filled the front compartment, and cold rainwater rushed in down from the roof in a final gush as the rain from the sky slacked off. At the point of impact Caroline had been tackleblocked by Jewel, and so in large measure spared, but Jewel received more than her share of the accident. Jewel was completely covered with bits of broken glass. She thought her face might be cut, too. Caroline groped to switch on the dome light, which glowed amber for a second before it dimmed and went out with a faint hissing buzz. The cave of the car was very dark. The side and back windows and what was left of the windshield were caked with mud. Heavy silence. Jewel lost consciousness momentarily.

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Chapter 15 Incident at the Abandoned Farmhouse “Get out your side carefully,” Caroline instructed, dampened, sobered, frightened, commanding, practical, so different from a moment before. Jewel carefully shook the glass off herself, making sure it landed well inside the car, not near the door where it might fall out and mix into the soil. She wasn’t badly cut, but was disoriented. She dabbed at her wet face with her wet sweater sleeve. The door was broken but groaned open. She eased herself out, each long leg in a twisted loafer, both sorry white knee socks pooled around her narrow ankles. She straightened up in the sharp air. With the heater on in the car, she had forgotten how cold the weather was. It had almost stopped raining,

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but the sky was as dark as an eclipse. It wasn’t night yet, was it? She was having trouble thinking. She took a step backward. The ground was thick and swampy and when she reached to steady herself, she stumbled. The car was plastered with sticky mud and folded around a thin, yielding birch tree. Besides the windshield, one headlight was broken and there was damage to at least the hood and grille, maybe more. The one working headlight shined on into its dense surroundings, catching tiny beads of icemoisture in its beam. “Electra,” Jewel felt written in cold chrome beneath her hand as she grabbed the car to keep from slipping. She shivered and stretched and looked straight out across the land. At first Jewel saw only blackness. There was minimal difference in optical tonality between the form coming into focus on the plain, the plain itself, and the sky. So little light was reflected that all three elements were practically an equal black, but slowly Jewel realized she was staring at the ruins of an enormous darkened mansion on a small rise in the center of the field about a hundred yards away. Jewel looked back in through the car door at the stupidly dressed hulk of her mother slumping in the big seat, looking out at her. “There’s a house here,” Jewel said, keeping any intonation, which Cary might interpret as emotion or opinion no matter what it sounded like, out of her voice. Whatever her feelings for this sad woman might have been a minute earlier, Jewel had them under her practiced control once more. Caroline Klein Rubin, she thought, was the most preposterous of mothers. Look at her, sitting behind the wheel in this impossible situation,

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still wearing her mirrored glasses, oh, now, finally removing them, pretending everything was normal, folding the large frames carefully into a case clipped behind the visor. Caroline craned her long neck toward Jewel but didn’t reply. “The house looks dark. Probably abandoned,” Jewel continued warily. She kept her voice even and flat, straining to put Caroline’s unpredictability out of mind, just go forward, not stop either to be considerate or to debate, just behave automatically. Any reaction, any pity toward her mother could be disastrous. Each disappointment between them had driven Caroline’s child further from her, and from almost everyone. There were only two people of any importance in Jewel Rubin’s long-suffering life: her father and her godmother, and while Jack was becoming increasingly absorbed in his work, Jewel’s love for Beatrice had grown proportionally. Jewel stood in the pouring rain in the muddy field, leaning on the car, awaiting Caroline’s reply, her face stinging in the frigid air. It was not up to her to bail her mother out, understand her, befriend her. Caroline would only use the aid against her in some way, against them both; she was as emotionally cruel to herself as she was to her child. Jewel must wait, grow up, grow away. She watched her mother slowly gain authority, come to life, finally motion for help getting out of the car. At least, Jewel faintly saw, Caroline was wearing boots, metallic gold and fancy, studded with fake gems: they’ d get ruined in the mud, but they’ d do. Jewel’s broken shoes and dirty socks were already soaked and soggy, her right toes painful, but not

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smashed. Caroline hesitated for a moment as frail Jewel struggled to hoist her out of the battered automobile, not even a glimmer of surprise remotely present in the woman’s eyes. The house did not surprise her. Their circumstance didn’t faze her. “Let’s not forget the food,” Cary said as she lunged ahead, grabbing the picnic basket, fluttering the red-and-white-checked cloth littered with shards of glass, shaking them into the rain puddles around them, pretending they were all gone as the big ones tinked to the ground and she kicked them underwater, Caroline unconcerned about the glass and Earth, and Jewel not standing up for.... Not speaking, mother and daughter made their way across the cold, muddy field surrounding the derelict farmhouse like an ocean around an anchored ship, unseamed by any road or path. They walked the hundred yards or so in single file, Caroline in the lead. The house was isolated and there were no vehicles in sight. They stepped onto a wooden porch and found the building less decrepit than Jewel had been expecting. Caroline jangled commanding gestures with her gold charm-braceleted left hand, her right hoisting the food basket to her shoulder. Jewel followed like a zombie. They stomped around the porch. The house was well weathered but not in total disrepair. It might be occupied after all: there were still places without electricity in the MidAtlantic States. But wouldn’t the grass be trodden down outside? Jewel wondered: it was possible to live without going out, but only if people came with deliveries. The porch wrapped around on three sides. “Veranda,” Jewel thought, as she stood by silently.

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Caroline peered into several dark windows, but detected nothing. An old brass key was in the front lock, but there was no bell or knocker, and no response to her fist bangs and repeated calls. “Anyone home? Anyone home?” Bravely and cautiously she pulled the heavy, creaking door open, and boldly entered, her daughter, Jewel, cautiously behind. The house was darker inside than out. It was unheated and smelled of rot and mold. They stood still a moment, just within the entranceway. What minimal light there was seeped into their wide-stretched eyes, and thus their range of focus was short and close but sufficient to discern about the derelict building something weird. Jewel had expected to enter onto the floorplan of a typical Eighteenth Century Pennsylvania Victorian or Carpenter’s Gothic frame farmhouse; she expected to step in from the doorway and see a large dado-paneled Georgian foyer into which presented a central stair, with substantial rooms leading off to right and left. But even in the dark she saw that the interior of the house had been entirely gutted or burned out — if indeed it had ever been built. They stood inside an enormous shell, a black barn or hall or meeting room the size of a circus tent or the hull of a ship, rising around them like a dead Coloseum. Yet it wasn’t a barn, nor a barn attached to a house; Jewel knew that although in the Old World, a farmer’s house and barn shared a single roof, the settlers didn’t bring this tradition to Pennsylvania. Jewel’s mind was full of little facts: only with verifiable facts could Jewel make sense of reality. Caroline stepped a bit farther in: if they could

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penetrate the interior, they might see better. In the doorway, light from the sky, dark as it was, seeped through, and the hall was lined with dim windows. They ventured in a few more yards. The floor was strewn with something brittle, crackling. Glass maybe, just some glass still sticking to my skimpy clothes, only just now shaking to the floor, Jewel thought. She gave a shake to dislodge any, but no more fell. Anyway, there was more spiky litter on the floor than that could have caused, and it appeared to glint more than glass, even in what little light there was. Caroline shuffled a few feet deeper as Jewel crunched behind her, trying to keep her soggy loafers balanced flat on top of whatever it was, some kind of shiny, flat bits of mirrorlike shards, not let them fall inside. Jewel began to make out the walls as she entered the gigantic room more fully. She stopped near the center of the space to breathe the dank unholiness and get her bearings. The slivers were definitely there on the floor; she hadn’t brought them in . Many slices of mirror also adhered to sections of wall. And on those dim, reflectant panels, murky shapes like shadows glided. Caroline and Jewel realized they weren’t alone! Several small groups of old women, rag-women, were wandering up to them silently from the blackness. Caroline and Jewel were surrounded. “A child, a child,” one crone rasped. The women were shrunken, shriveled, blackened, dried. There was something familiar about them, Jewel thought as they approached her, a certain smell, maybe, something evil, she meant; yet something about them reminded her of her godmother Beatrice,

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whom she loved in such contrast. Were these women blind? Or perhaps it was she and her mother who had been blinded by the accident, or perhaps it was only she. She couldn’t tell if Caroline was experiencing the vast darkness as she was herself. Jewel didn’t think she was much injured. Had she sustained some optical damage or possibly brain damage in the accident? Were these dry, wasplike creatures even really here? Old, dark women of every race snatched the food hamper and put out their hands to seize Cary and Jewel, grabbing and separating them, pushing them far apart. Jewel tried to fight them off, pumping her arms and running helter-skelter back toward the door, but they overtook her. She lost track of her mother. She could hear a group of harpies fighting Caroline, pulling her screaming, farther away, as a larger pack wrestled Jewel herself to the filthy floor. It was as though they’d appeared from nowhere like bats or vermin, like swarming insects, hornets or roaches. She heard the women fiercely attack her mother, shrieking and wailing and pounding and flailing and stamping as they punched and kicked and bit and scratched and stung. Caroline’s heavy denim would protect her, Jewel thought as her own naked limbs were sliced by a carpet of slivers. She was dragged across the rotting floor by her arms and legs to a stinking, wretched corner, not even an open corner, but a cramped bunker or crawl space, low, as if under a platform or stage or interior raised veranda curled around three walls inside one end. Jewel could not fight back, so she put into practice physically her mental habit, and went limp, as every last one of the queer women swarmed and squeezed

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her into the cramped, curling nest-space under the stage. Jewel was stuffed into this curving crack, a hundred furies forcing her toward one witch huddling among rancid blankets in the farthest corner of the pitch-black hole, her fetid odor choking Jewel as the others pressed and locked the two together. The queen bit and clawed her, poking and jabbing her with a stinging stick, a wand, a scepter, sucking Jewel’s spurting blood as it burst and ran. If the girl had not been slashed in the accident, she surely was so now. The filthy matriarch tore Jewel’s face and eyes, ripping her thin clothing, mauling her flesh as her subjects cruelly held the child down. The stench and pain were unbearable; her consciousness wavered in and out. At last, Jewel came to to the thud of her mother being tossed onto the low wooden platform above her head. Finally, Caroline was thrown and abandoned by the group of scarabs holding her as they, too, fought their way into the darkest darkness with their sisters. “It’s getting light!” Caroline was calling from above. She rolled flat and extended her arm, still protected by the heavy denim, to grope underneath for her daughter. Through the blood burning in her eyes from spurting gashes, Jewel saw Caroline’s silhouette near the opening. What’s the use, Jewel thought, allowing her head to drop, her hair already yanked and plastered to her face, her mother’s hand not close enough to reach. But the strength of their phantasmagorical attackers was no longer at its peak and Jewel managed to make her way along the floor of the crawl space as the colony of bodies weakened, their tearing at her lessened, and finally they

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let go. In a swimming motion she reached Caroline’s fingers and was pulled out. Her knees and hands and arms were full of splintered glass; she was in deep pain but did not cry. It was, as her mother had said, getting lighter. No harpies or hornets or wasps or witches were in the large room any longer. All had retreated into their dark nest. Jewel’s face burned and bled as Caroline led her through the enormous room, retrieving the broken empty picnic basket as it lay in their path to the door, and grabbing their two checked napkins smeared with dirt. They ran through a wall of frigid air and jumped off the porch onto the sucking, boggy earth. They slogged through icy cold unfrozen mud, slipping to their knees, but found the car and got it started. Glass was everywhere. Jewel tried to look at her face in a piece of rear-view mirror still adhering to its frame. She was a bloody mess, her eyes so swollen she could hardly see to recognize herself. Her mouth was badly cut. Her whole body was torn and damaged. She narrowed her swollen eyes at her mother. Caroline’s hands were a little roughened and her hair was disheveled, but that was all. Slowly, with the hood and the roof of the car crushed and waving, and the windshield mostly gone, semi-attached pieces of glass shearing off and hurled inside at them by freezing wind, they made it home. Caroline cleaned Jewel up and tweezed out the slivers with a magnifying glass, bandaged her and sent her to bed with no time to eat. When Jack came in later Jewel listened as Caroline did not tell him the truth. It became known that they had a “car accident”, which left Jewel marked. Rarely did the family mention the incident afterward, though

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in many ways it shaped their lives. Jewel was forced to accept her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s version, a simple accident on a rainy road, her memory fading finally to a half-remembered dream: an abandoned farmhouse, witches, wasps, a barn-theater, Beatrice... When the bandages were removed her wounds healed to disfiguring scars. There was talk of plastic surgery but Jack said it was unnatural and so to please him Jewel refused, and for a long time, stopped even returning his smiles. One curious thing was that whenever Caroline was asked what kind of car she had been driving she replied, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Toyota.â&#x20AC;? Jewel could never reconcile this. Caroline had, on earlier occasions, suppressed other memories as seminal and bizarre as was this accident.

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Chapter 16 Jewel’s Notebook Throughout adolescence Jewel kept a notebook, a habit encouraged by Caroline, although Cary had long since ceased writing in her sketch pad by the time Jewel began. In Jewel’s notebook she kept track of scraps. Husserl, Ideas, pg. 45. “Chapter One. Fact and Essence 1. Natural Knowledge and Experience Natural knowledge begins with experience and remains within experience. Thus in...the ‘natural’ standpoint, the total field of possible research is indicated by a single word: that is, the World. The sciences proper to this [unique] standpoint are accordingly in their collective unity sciences of the World, and so long as this 115

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standpoint is the only dominant one, the concepts ‘true being,’ ‘real being,’ i.e., real empirical Being, and — since all that is real comes to self-concentration in the form of cosmic unity — ‘Being in the World’ are meanings that coincide.” “He [sic] who looks at beauty is proof against the breath of Evil; he is in harmony with himself and the whole world.” Goethe, Elective Affinities. “Only objects of experience (phenomena) may be known. Things beyond experience (noumena) are unknowable.” Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804. Critique of Pure Reason. “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.” Einstein. “God himself [is] drawn to the disinterested soul.” Saul Bellow quoting Meister Eckhart, Mr. Sammler’s Planet. “...the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment.” J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey. “The innocence of a being lies in its complete suitability to the world in which it lives.” Albert Camus quoting Jean Giradoux. Camus’s Notebooks, Oct. 15, 1937. “The first thing to do is to keep silent, to abolish 116

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audiences and learn to be your own judge. To...wipe out all earlier stages, and concentrate all your strength first of all on forgetting nothing, and then waiting patiently.” Camus’s Notebooks, April, 1938. “Next to the hunger to experience a thing, [there is] perhaps no stronger hunger than to forget.” Herman Hesse, Journey to the East. “When one object exerts a force on a second object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite force on the first object.” [Action = Reaction] Newton. “During equal time intervals, lines drawn from the sun to a planet sweep out equal areas.” [Second Law of Planetary Motion] Johannes Kepler. “A wave front is the locus of adjacent points of a wave which are in phase.” Huygens’ Principle. Jewel jotted down reminders. Many thoughts jammed with many facts. Planet: Earth // Domain: Eukaryota // Kingdom: Animalia // Phylum: Chordata // Subphylum: Vertebrata // Class: Mammalia // Subclass: Theria // Order: Primates // Suborder: Arthropoidea // Outer Family: Hominidae // Genus: Homo // Species: Homo sapiens // Subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens // Nation: Children of Israel // Tribe: Levite // Clan: ? // Inner Family: Rubin // Individual: Jewel Marie. 117

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Acetylcholine : chemical which conducts impulses from one cell to another. Carbon cycle: exchange of carbon between living matter and non-living environment. Celestial mechanics: study of the motion of astronomical bodies moving under the influence of their mutual gravitation. Gravitational collapse: last stage of a star, infinitely diminished size, black hole, enormous pull of gravity produces greatest curvature of space. Chaos theory: scarcely measurable deviations lead to wildly divergent results as the deviation compounds over time. Baal: God of satanic cult practicing holy prostitution and child sacrifice. Andromeda, Princess of Ethiopia: Sacrificed by her parents. Became constellation as did they, Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Syzygy: Three astronomical bodies nearly aligned. Binary star: pair of stars held together gravitationally Hermeneutics: Circular understanding â&#x20AC;&#x201D; The whole is understandable only in terms of the parts; the parts only in terms of the whole. 118

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Ludwig Josef Johan Wittgenstein, 1889-1951: Relationship of language to thought and world; language can represent ideas and things which can not be clearly expressed by language; philosophical problems are illusions created by ambiguous language. Logic: concerned with formally constructed argument, not its basis in fact. Before: In space — ahead. In time — behind. After: In space — behind. In time — ahead. This is what my family thinks about time: 1. Caroline: The present is an imaginary location between past and future. 2. Jack: The present is a time of action produced by the (real) past and undertaken on behalf of the (ideal) future. 3. Beatrice: Past and future are only aspects of the present. Realism: things exist independently of the mind. Idealism: reality exists only in the mind. Allegory, Parable, Fable: Literary forms wherein characters, plots, objects symbolize moral, political, religious or theoretical constructs. Acmeists: 1912 Russian school of poetry; concrete imagery, clear expression; reaction to Symbolists; Osip Mandelstam. 119

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Anthroposophy: German occultist Rudolph Steiner’s 1912 explanation of the world in terms of human spiritual nature, thought independent of senses. Messiah: Man sent by God to rule justly over humanity. The Significance Of The Phrase “Take Me To Your Leader” In Science Fiction Comics. Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1777-1855: German mathematician; made numerous discoveries before age twenty, but refusal to publish anything without complete proof caused many of his ideas to be credited to others later. All elements of universe are transformations of fire. Change is the only reality. Becoming is the only form of being. Transition is the only permanent event. Heraclites, 535-475 BC. Quantum theory: energy and other physical properties exist in tiny discrete amounts. Quarks and leptons: the most elementary classes of particles. Five flavors of quarks: up, down, strange, charm & bottom; sixth predicted — top. Each flavor in three colors. Cosmic rays: Origins unknown, acceleration process unknown; high-energy particles bombarding Earth from outer space; can pass through matter; some with energies a billion times what our particle accelerators reach. 120

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E=MC2” Einstein’s Principle of Relativity Jewel tried to put this principle into words: The number that represents how much energy is inherent in an object is the same number that represents its mass, (which is the amount of matter in the object, which is the number we assign as its weight on Earth), if multiplied by the speed of light times itself. All matter, then, she surmised, is inherently E, energy. “Expanding the universe without expanding our inner perceptions becomes...the dangerous experience of void...” Anais Nin, Preface to La Volunte du Bonheur. What does this mean for me, annotated Jewel, hardpressing fast in a hand that hadn’t a single unnecessary loop, a straight, sturdy script with prescient gaps between each letter. How can I be a knowable thing in the way science is ultimately knowable? A thing can be understood only through definition and measurement. Until such technology would be developed, Jewel could only guess about the self she acted out. That her father had already produced several prototypes, she would soon realize. I wish I could dematerialize. I’m going to shave my head. My real self is already camouflaged by disfigurement. I’ve only ever shown myself with blind Beatrice. She’ s giving a party tomorrow to celebrate Daddy’s new job at the U.N. Lao Tse: “The surest way to destroy a man [sic] is to lift him up with praises.” Let’s hope this doesn’t mean Daddy. Mother and I will drive into the city together and Daddy will meet us there.” 121

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Chapter 17 The New York Times Article about Jack

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COMPUTER BRINGS BRINGS MESSIANIC COMPUTER MESSIANICLEADER LEADERTOTOUNITED UNITEDNATIONS NATIONS By TESH MADYNS By TESH MADYNSNew York UNITED NATIONS, NATIONS, New social York -- Dr.UNITED Jack Rubin, 46, Princeton --scientist Dr. Jack 46, Princeton social notedRubin, for his early student activism, scientist noted foryesterday his early student was appointed by the activism, General was appointed by the General Assembly as theyesterday next secretary general of Assembly the nextsucceeding secretary general of the UnitedasNations, Mu Tang the Nations, succeeding Mu Tang Pi. United Dr. Rubin was greeted with prolonged applause by thewas 145greeted members as he walked Pi. Dr. Rubin with prolonged applause by the 145 members as he walked this world body. His body. election came several weeks after this world the Rubin Computer donated to after the His election camewas several weeks United Nations by Dr.was Rubin jointlytowith the Rubin Computer donated the the Socio-Genetics Institute Princeton United Nations by Dr. Rubinofjointly with University which hasInstitute funded and the Socio-Genetics of supported Princeton its development past and sixteen years. University whichfor hasthe funded supported The Rubin Computer provides a model of its development for the past sixteen years. The Rubin Computer provides a model of patterns, and social, psychological and physiological updated in their patterns, and factors social, psychological and ongoing changefactors by a centralized of physiological updatednetwork in their

ongoing change by a centralized network of The Rubin Computer maintains

and factors integrated genetic, physical, The Rubin Computer maintains experiential, cultural and personal and factors integrated genetic, physical, information from every documented human experiential, cultural and personal being on earth. U.N. spokesman Xi Men Ba information from every documented human noted today that through this computer all the being on earth. U.N. spokesman Xi Menare Ba priorities and desires of every individual noted that through computer all the codedtoday as statistics whichthis the U.N. will factor priorities and desiresagricultural, of every individual are with geographical, ecological coded as statistics which the U.N. will factor and commercial data for comprehensive with geographical, worldwide, local andagricultural, even familyecological decision and commercial data for comprehensive making. worldwide, local and even family decision making. model of the computer as a Graduate Teaching Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer model of theUniversity computer from as a1965-1969 Graduate at Columbia Teaching Fellow andwasAdjunct Lecturer during which time he well-known as a atpeace Columbia activist University and campus from leader.1965-1969 In 1969 during which time heofwas well-known as a he joined the faculty Princeton University peace activist and campus leader. In 1969 he joined the faculty of Princeton University

of anthropological statistics to be later of anthropological togenome, be later matched by Rubin withstatistics the human matched Rubinwhich with the or geneticbycode, he human expectsgenome, to be or genetic code, which he expects to be soon unravelled. soon The unravelled. Rubin Computer at the U.N. will The of Rubin at the through U.N. will make use this Computer data collected make use of this data collected through

successfully and generate decisions under

social circumstances otherwise impossible successfully and generate decisions under for political negotiation.otherwise impossible social circumstances It is hoped by the U.N. that Dr. Rubin for political negotiation. in the Itposition will is hopedofbySecretary-General the U.N. that Dr. Rubin synchronize worldofgovernment with human in the position Secretary-General will and planetary ecology in one generation. synchronize world government with human Secretary General Rubin is the son and planetary ecology in one generation. of anti-Nazi resistance Secretary Generalworkers Rubin currently is the son residing in Forest Hills, workers Queens. currently When of anti-Nazi resistance asked for a comment today, his residing in Forest Hills, Queens.mother, When Chava who says she likes quiet asked Rubin, for a 63, comment today, his amother, Chava Rubin, 63, who says she likes a quiet â&#x20AC;&#x153;Only he should live and be well.â&#x20AC;? Jack Rubin was unavailable for comment. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Only he should live and be well.â&#x20AC;? Jack Rubin was unavailable for comment.

August 21, 1985

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Chapter 18 Caroline and Jewel Drive to the City Caroline and Jewel drove up the Jersey Turnpike towards the city. Caroline wore elaborate new sunglasses with large red circular lenses. They afforded some protection against the intense day, but even so, she felt enlivened by the glare. The beneficial effect of the splintery reflected light, which compressed her pupils and thereby chemically induced well-being, was in competition for her mood against unease and bitterness resulting from the outrage of her daughter’s hair. Jewel’s head was bald, pink, a tight bright skull. Caroline considered it even as an obstruction to her driving visibility; her daughter’s hairstyle was a hazard. They didn’t need another accident. Caroline just did not know what to think. 124

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“And of course with your scars you should play down your looks, not play them up.” Caroline’s own face was, as usual, made up to the point of garishness, her white silk and linen summer suit overdone crisp, overdone smart, her inconsistencies of appearance disconcerting. “Hell,” Caroline went on,“why should I care what you do to yourself? Why should I care what you look like? I know you’d go to any length to spite me.” Jewel squinted at the drivers of the cars they overtook, the contrast from the blinding light too high for color. “Those horrid punk styles of the last few years are dying down finally,” she kept going, “everyone is saying so. Even the boys who shaved their heads, or part of their heads, not like you, but in style, they call them Mohawks, there’s precedent for that, fashion history at least, even these boys are growing their hair again.” All of Caroline’s smart new friends had stylish children and all the neighborhood kids had blossomed into fine boys and girls. Over the years Caroline had thought better of Jewel’s peers as Jewel had one by one locked them out. It had taken her a while but over time Cary finally began joining in with the people who would have welcomed her into Princeton society from the beginning, when Jack tried to urge her to, but by then Jewel had lost interest in wholesome friends. “Those children have grown up, outgrown their baby dullness. But you, who had the most promise of any infant — look what you’ve done to yourself.” Caroline jabbed the rear-view mirror with orange fingernails, “Their distinctions do not disgrace their parents, What they might lack in genius, they make up for in success!” 125

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Jewel choked. Caroline’s unattainable standards for Jewel had never diminished, yet it was only for her father’s praise she worked. Jewel cast her eyes into her lap. When he came home from trips, she organized a sequenced display of school papers, to make it easier for him to focus his attention on, but Jack never had time for a glance. She read to him through closed doors, and followed him from room to room quoting fragments while he read other documents to himself. “Are you listening to me?” she had once asked. “Sort of,” he replied. “I know you’re talking.” The light glared to badly on this highway. But as fierce as she wanted to appear, Caroline couldn’t pull herself any deeper into hatred. She was still in good spirits no matter how angry she was. Angry and happy. She yelled and shook her fingers, drumming against the mirror, tapping against the steering wheel and dash in exhilaration and relief... She felt vindicated. If Jewel can make herself deliberately ugly now, how could anyone blame her mother for how she ever looked ever? For years people consoled her, “It was raining, it was raining...” Caroline couldn’t admit her twisted approval of Jewel’s latest disfigurement, though. “Why do you want to call negative attention to yourself?” she made herself go on. If my mother can mount her hysteria to such a pitch, thought Jewel without replying, I can subdue mine. And as Caroline continued Jewel knew she would fare best, as usual, silent. They were in the left lane where Caroline usually drove, keeping up with the fastest traffic. Jewel could learn to drive in school next term but was deciding

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against it. Her father never learned; why should she? She clenched her jaw and sat as still as possible, staring at the turns ahead. “Your hair,” Caroline whined, slapping the seat between them, almost hitting her, “the one beautiful thing about you you knew I loved.” Jewel caught herself about to respond as she rampt against the door to avoid the slap. She had never been told this. The sole way she knew she pleased her mother was by swimming, which served as a truce. Jewel had fortitude swimming, and her mother admired that — and it’s been quite a long time since we’ve gone; but she’d never said anything about her hair. But she mustn’t reply, vowing again not to give in to Caroline’s emotions. Some day she hoped she could stop speaking, and perhaps even moving, altogether. Jewel recited to herself a list of disciplines she practiced: remain deadpan, present a puppet body, stand aloof and watching, do not have a personal reaction, and surrender all prerogatives. Only with Beatrice did she allow herself to feel real. Jewel knew that if nothing else, she had inherited her mother’s complexity; there was nothing she could do about it. Just wait it out. Soon she would be grown and gone. She wanted to reach for the book she’d brought along tonight, Banesh Hoffman’s biography of Einstein, but she didn’t dare risk pushing Caroline over the edge by moving. It was subtitled, Creator and Rebel, which irked her. To Jewel’s mind Einstein did not create, but discover and intuit, and he was no rebel but a diplomat. These differentiations were by no means disparagements, all seemed equally valuable to Jewel. It would be nice to have a normal conversation with Mom about things like this.

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“Answer me, answer me! Answer me, I’m talking to you!” “No, Mother.” Jewel cleared her throat. “It’s all right that I am as I am.” She liked using this phrase; her private jokes were her only quid. “And for God’s sake don’t lose any more weight. If you were any thinner you’d be dead. You’ll do anything to hurt me, you don’t care what you do to yourself as long as it gives me pain.” Jewel smiled inwardly. There are still a few pats of fat on my body, she thought. My mother accepts a lot of fat on herself and considers herself slim. She had to admit, though, her mother was becoming more attractive, even though she spent much money to do it, and Jewel couldn’t condone her taste. Jewel never blamed her for the accident, though, although so many people told her not to that she wondered if she should. Her mother was a hysteric. Faulting someone for too little self-control would be as senseless as faulting herself for too much. Even her memory of the event had faded to a vague dream. Jewel had been told she’d blacked out, and never even left the car, and after a while she stopped insisting. To Jewel personally, her disfigurement had become an ornament, a grotesquerie to hide behind. Her face, if grown in normally, would have revealed all her daily anguish. She was better off shielded: as long as she wore this face, she wouldn’t be on display. The scars weren’t a handicap: her schoolmates were sophisticated enough not to taunt her even though she didn’t mix. And it had been she who’d refused plastic surgery. Daddy had simply agreed; at least so she recollected. All he said was

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“ daily life is where we landed.” Beatrice had given no opinion, blind: Jewel’s scars didn’t come between them. How different I am from my godmother, she thought: the physical perfection of Beatrice echoed the artist’s charm; her radiance bespoke ideas and fame and magic. Beatrice had recently designed a fountain along the Potomac River, and Jewel had gone to the opening gala. She thought it was Beatrice’s most magnificent public work. Caroline and Jewel drove east against the rush hour, sailing at 70 through the chemical wetlands of New Jersey. New York City arose illuminated full flat face from the western late afternoon sun at their back. Caroline brooded loudly of her rough hands on the wheel, the one part of her anatomy she despised, but bragged of her legs, which were shapely and that her husband loved. My legs, she thought, my legs trembled as I gave birth to her. It was the disgusting trembling in my legs that told me she would tear out any second and be born. Caroline quivered at the physical memory, and swerved into the center lane as two cars on the left and right honked and braked, avoiding her and each other by infinitesimally fractive coordinates of time and space. Jewel gasped and quickly stifled herself, but her mother had luckily not noticed; she was deep in thought: once she had had a beautiful daughter, even Caroline herself could find no lovelier among all the children she knew. Yet she’d been dissatisfied by her day and night. She admonished Jewel as Jack had praised her time for time, no matter that she spent time with her and Jack did not. And what about my own life, Caroline asked herself, indulging in the question she usually knew not to ask.

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What about my own dreams when I was an art student? Where had my hopes gone so many years ago when Jewel was born. Well, she knew: Caroline’s own standards were so high they exceeded her attainments all her life. She had never dared let herself create anything for fear it might be scorned. She never produced a piece of transcendental art, High Art, but if she had become enough obsessed by drawing, or by any medium, such obsession as never drove her could have gotten her places. Caroline’s husband was her success, she told herself, and her marriage was paying off socially. This is what she’d wanted most from college: connubial status. The marriage itself, though, was bitter compensation. He never pays me the least attention. She often had the silly but disturbing thought he’d only been lent to her by Beatrice — possibly just to produce the child. Cary had known he was her lover at the time. They still spend time alone together. The circumstances of Jewel’s conception in Beatrice’s bedroom had been so strange and unexpected — Caroline always stopped her memory at this point. Waves of long-borne private disappointments flooded Caroline and Jewel. Jewel wished she could disengage from the transitory crises of real life, could ignore all stimulus but the intellect. She wished she could become catatonic, or could will herself into what she’d heard of as “locked-in syndrome”, the most dreaded of comatose states, wherein the intellect remains alive but response functions null and the individual appears to be brain dead, but they’re not: they’re fully sensate and cognizant. Or could develop amnesia and begin another life. How could she, though? Her father was so well

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known. Many photographs of him, Jewel alongside, her hand or his not raised fast enough to shield her scarred face from the flashbulbs, appeared often in half the world’s papers. She’d bound to be recognized by somebody. She sighed and tried to relax and let go of the furious tensions across the scars of her face and body. She looked forward to seeing Beatrice. With Beatrice she would be invisible and happy. Caroline had also begun to think of the party. “Bishop Something-Or-Other is coming,” she said to Jewel in an effort to make some sort of peace. “You know who I mean.” Jewel knew, but didn’t supply the simple name her mother had tried for. Besides, Jewel didn’t care for international fops who deflected the attention of serious causes toward themselves. “That’s nice,” Jewel said as evenly as possible. Their car lifted to approach New York on a ramp above, then dove through a tunnel beneath. “You go in,” said Caroline, stopping abruptly in front of Beatrice’s building, and letting the traffic pile up behind her on her narrow street. “I’ll find a parking space and then walk back myself.” She pulled the emergency brake and leaned to kiss Jewel. Both stiffened. Neither could completely relax. Both of them hurt one another. But Jewel let her guard down and softened, trying to be nice. “Halley’s Comet will rise in less than an hour,” she said. Her mother abruptly soured. “So what.” Caroline had avoided the hypocritical popular fuss over the comet’s return. Many Princeton women had been

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taking their families on exotic trips and cruises for a good view but Caroline would not let herself be drawn in. The contemporary era was not peopled with star-gazers, she thought, the comet traveled too slowly to be of interest to its 1985 viewers. The ancient sky had been better known to Earth’s inhabitants than those fancy families knew their own backyards; that is why a new astral body had been worth a stir; it had once even been thought that a comet heralded a savior. She had human needs here, for God’s sake, human needs right on the face of this Earth. Jewel scrambled out of the car and slammed the door fast, as a few vehicles behind them honked. Caroline shouted after her, “You know the comet can’t be seen through city lights.” She watched her daughter pass through the gate of Beatrice’s courtyard and then drove off. She thought the girl looked ugly bald, and was glad she had nothing to do with it this time. Beatrice lived in a miniature two-storey wooden house still standing at 100 Bedford Street since colonial New Amsterdam. In the rear the house opened to a private garden. The front of the building was recessed. Jewel stood in the courtyard facing the old iron nameplate on the heavy wooden door: Beatrice M. Jewel rang and the door was answered immediately by one of the artist’s current students, a Haitian girl Jewel had seen several times before. Tonight she wore beaded dress and headgear, which Jewel, after admiring, correctly guessed was Xhosa. “I never learned your name,” Jewel said, embarrassed. “Pearl,” she said, and kissed Jewel, cupping her ear. “Your head is beautiful.” Jewel looked at Pearl, feeling a strange undertow.

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Many guests from their circle of friends and in the U.N. community wore ethnic costume or fashionable clothing, and the artists were tattered, the politicians dapper, the media poets wore black.... This would be her first appearance bald, Jewel realized — and no earrings or false elegance to set the baldness off, and no Joan of Arc concentration camp waif look in shift or sack to accessorize any “bald-look” either, no matter how thin she happened to be. Jewel wore contemporary normal clothing, natural fibers, subdued hues. Except for her hair and her scars and her skeletal appearance she thought she looked like any of her classmates. She didn’t like feeling this young woman’s attraction, uncomfortable at the unnecessary time outside the door. I’ ll let my hair grow back, Jewel decided then and there: there would be no nauseating repetition of the grizzly act of shaving. She did not have the stamina of an ascetic, nor was she polished for the gem of intrigue being offered. Neither girl pursued the moment. The heavy door swung open. In this crowd her baldness would be welcomed as mode: Pearl mentioned it approvingly again, more sisterly, and brought her inside.

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Chapter 19 Caroline Parks Car and Walks Back Alone Caroline sat in the car smoking a joint at 6:43 PM. Parking on this side of the street wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t become legal until 7 and so, as was the custom in most New York neighborhoods, she waited in the car. She would let the engine idle awhile, not to lose the air-conditioning. Who cares about the energy drain, what about her personal drain. And she could turn the radio on if she wanted. She pushed on the clumsy radio buttons, taking care about her nails. QXR played French Baroque flute sonatas by Jean-Marie Leclair. She took another deep toke on the joint and lounged against the seat, flipping off her fancy sunglasses but taking care they landed on the dashboard. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d have

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fifteen minutes to wait in the car and listen. She stared at her hands and rubbed them together; they were rough and red, dry and peeling. She had filed her nails with an emery board and then applied bright orange lacquer; many people would be shaking hands tonight, many kissing her, too, she thought with mixed feelings, trying to recall if there would be anyone she’d be happy to see. Perhaps she might splurge on a professional nail salon one of these days; such new indulgences were increasingly frequent. She thought of Jewel and knew that any chance to influence her daughter was gone. At fifteen, sixteen, girls led their own lives already. She told herself, in her own mother’s voice, “Be grateful you have one at all”; many women her age didn’t and now seriously regretted it. Several she knew were taking desperate measures, making last-ditch medical efforts to become pregnant, even after forty. The comet, Jewel had said — what nonsense. “So what, the comet,” Caroline said again out loud. She looked around fast but no one was passing by the car to hear her. “So what, so what, so what.” She thought about what this important new position at the U.N. would mean to her husband and herself. Charismatic as Jack was, undocumented terrorists still grouped in factions of opposition to all logical systems, and individual anarchists and loonies would always roam the globe. He had laughed at the idea of bodyguards for himself or his family. And would even this be enough for her to finally be accepted by the really “ hoi-poloi”? — her mother’s phrase. Her mother, who had thought she’d gotten too big for herself in even just marrying Jack. When she had declined the invitation to their wedding

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she’d referred to Jack Rubin as “a prominent Jew.” “Why do you have to go marry such a prominent Jew,” she’d said. It’s true, Caroline thought, in newspapers during the 1970s he was commonly written up that way. Caroline had never driven Jewel to Ellenville to meet her parents, nor had her little family been invited there. Her own invitations in the early days for her parents to come to the city to visit her were at first refused politely, then ignored. She realized like a shot what was bothering her, why she was so restless, so uneasy, anxious, angry. She was afraid for Jack. She feared he put himself in danger, number one, and number two, she was afraid he was going crazy. Although everyone at the U.N. assumed Jack had been considering solutions to problems of human ecology, truth was that at home in his study and in his secret workroom over the garage, Jack had been writing and thinking and God knows what about outer space. He had devised and deployed mechanisms which signal other intelligent life. These experiments were contrary to the repeated directives of NASA and NATO and every world agency. He’d issued simplistic denials of all rumor, laughing away the near-scandal which almost arose a few months ago when a reporter, systematically collecting Dr. Rubin’s office trash, found a — flimsy, unprovable, but nevertheless very real — scrap of evidence. “Science fiction,” Jack had laughed it off as, and gotten away with it at the time. So far, the reporters concentrated only on Jack’s digs at the college. His home workshops had not yet been discovered. In the den of their house Jack had completed the development of an extremely complex miniaturized

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super-computer, the Rubin II, on which he transmitted, scanned, analyzed, decoded and responded to signals across space and which was programmed with the ability to monitor and revise or interfere with all Earthoriginated satellite communications, coded or not, and to directly project a message from himself to any civilization or individual on Earth or in space with access to even a rudimentary receiver. He had constructed an ingenious series of tiny relay devices to send signals to the powerful boosters in legitimate astrological facilities and bounce them back to his own station for transmission. For years he had sent radio messages in search of intelligent life, and, as he had confided to Caroline one night recently in bed, replies had begun to trickle in. “Twinkle in”, is what he’d actually said. It had only been a matter of time. The word “messiah” crept up frequently these days, too. Jack had patiently explained to her that although the question of God was irrelevant, people, and presumably other otherwise intelligent bodies, would only unite behind a leader. It was impossible, however, for Caroline not to put the messiah question to her own logic as well. Why couldn’t Jack truly be the messiah? What else would a messiah need to be, she asked. Or do? They would need to succeed, maybe, she answered herself. Why? Her questions continued. Did Jesus Christ succeed? Hardly. She lit the joint again; it had gone out. She thought of the people close to her, and sifted through her bag for something to write on. There was the back of an envelope, a letter from her old friend Letty she’d have to think about but not now, and digging around some more, she located

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an expensive inlaid fountain pen recently given to her as a house gift from a supplicant who’d come to offer Jack a bribe, but left disappointed. She looked at her watch, a large pink plastic triangular bubble with hands but no numbers, bought at an expensive museum gift shop — almost useless if one wanted the time, that is, the time as announced by the radio, because it took so much time to read its time. The car had a digital clock, too, besides a radio. Less than five minutes had elapsed on all of them, but not in all the same way, she noticed, and wrote that on the envelope. The street outside glowed hot and muggy. She’d leave the motor running longer and keep the air-conditioner on. She knew that automobile air-conditioners were the single worst cause of ozone depletion but didn’t care: as a matter of fact, when she remembered this it pleased her to think the whole planet was sacrificing itself for her comfort. Or even just to prevent a single wrinkle in her new white suit. She had been trying to look California cool this summer. Would it prove a mistake on Beatrice’s part not to have invited the Reagans? They hadn’t become personal friends, she knew, but the President himself had called to congratulate Jack when the U.N. news broke. A White House dinner was to be scheduled by Nancy soon, Ron had told them when he called, apologizing for Nancy Reagan’s legendary scheduling delays, something about astrological planning. Perhaps Jack might one day have a shot at the presidency himself. No telling how far something can go. She looked out the car window again; she’d have to leave soon. She demanded of herself that she focus now, prepare for the street and the many people at the party.

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She tapped out the roach carefully, folded the ends, and placed it into a tiny faux-snakeskin pouch. What was the presidency, if one was the messiah? Why was she addicted to marijuana, she asked herself for the millionth time, and how could she stop smoking or alter her habit without losing the benefit, and what was the benefit, exactly —. Drugs were so unfashionable now. She had seen Arlo Guthrie on TV the other day, an old friend from the Movement she and Jack had lost touch with. He was such an anachronism; it had been like watching Arthur Godfrey on TV as a kid, an individual who didn’t change with time, who had an identity rooted in an earlier epoch, complete with costume and persona, not reflecting current events, current realities, like a statue in a wax museum — yes this, this, this was the benefit of marijuana, she knew, this endless musing, endless deepening and linking of ideas. She carefully blew an ash off her shirred blouse front. I love to do this more than anything, she thought, just sit and smoke and think without fear of interruption. There is nothing I can do about Jack; she slipped him out of her thoughts again and flipped on the radio, set as usual to WINS News. She heard the word “today” and turned it off quickly, deciding it was late enough to prepare to leave the car: 6:56 PM. She teased out the roach again and re-lit it, sucking the last few tokes before dropping its remains in the pretty case, but changing her mind again, fished out the eighth inch butt and swallowed it. She was thirsty. She’d have a good stiff Martini as soon as she got there. She took out a comb and a tube of orange lip gloss, turned the rear view mirror to herself and touched up her face, putting her red sunglasses back on.

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The lipstick didn’t quite match her nails, but she never noticed. She pulled at her bangs, covering the first vague but permanent creases in her brow. She had recently gotten an ear-length Dutch Boy haircut, and had tinted the color a bit to cover the first noticeable grays. They were funny hairs those grays, curly and wiry among the soft, straight honey blonds. Her new hairstyle was loose but geometric, tame, but suave. Caroline debarked from the car by swinging first one, then the other tan, shapely, unstockinged leg to the ground, and then stood straight up smoothing her short skirt. She was glad she wore the white suit and white spike-heeled espadrilles, but then noticed her red hands again, and resolved: if there was a pharmacy on the way she’d get some cream. As usual, she secured and checked all four door locks and turned to see if anyone were watching. No one was, and she checked the signposts, Bleeker and Thompson, trying to adjust to the great change in the air from the air-conditioned car. The city was humid and hot and dirty, and reeked oppressively of urine and exhaust and rotting August garbage. Black and white and gray 50-pound plastic bags were stacked like barricades along the curb, with loose trash strewn across the top and stuck into chinks between. She turned slowly, trying to breathe through her nose as shallowly as possible, exhaling long and lightly to comb the cilia in her nostrils downward against the odor, and began to walk. At 7 PM there was still an hour of daylight in late August. It would take more than a few minutes to get back to Beatrice’s; she’d parked farther away than she’d realized, that old habit of frugality: she should have found a parking lot

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near Beatrice, or even driven around to see if there were any 6 PM spots still open farther west. She walked half a block and stopped; she thought she’d known the Village streets but had forgotten them. Reality is so jumbled, she thought, information always catching up too late. “Excuse me,” she said reflexively, grabbing her big handbag in close to her body, readjusting it as someone jostled her, hurrying past. The street was cramped and busy and crowded. Everyone was out. Many single people on the prowl bobbed up and down watching for each other. The sidewalks were cluttered and obstructed with cafés and tables filled with young people looking miniaturized, dressed up or dressed down, self-conscious. Caroline wondered if she might be becoming more confident; she just demonstrated she could recognize insecurity in others. The perception of herself as confident was new to her, and needed testing. People were trying to make eye contact from every direction: some eyes had penetrated her cherry lenses. She reminded herself to remain high on the dope as an onlooker, not allow the drug to trap her into participating on the street in any way but as a random invisible pedestrian, an object, a moving sculpture, not a personality, not a woman on the loose. She passed an art house cinema. Night of the Hunter with Robert Mitchum was playing; she’d seen it once a long time ago and been much moved, but couldn’t remember it now; she couldn’t associate a film like that with her present life at all; if there were parallels she’d think about them another time. She hadn’t been out alone among a young and rowdy crowd in the evening like this since she was twenty. How

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old did she look this evening? Maybe twenty-five, twentyeight? Most classy women in New York at thirty-six looked twenty-five, or thought they did. She periodically came into the city with other Princeton women, to Midtown or the Upper East Side or Museum Row. Lately she’d been to charity affairs, courted by the women who catered them. The Institute didn’t pay her way to charity events unrelated to Jack, nor pay him a salary large enough for her to attend, so she was asked as a guest. But the U.N. might have smart parties just for her. As the wife of the Secretary-General, do I rate a staff? She was getting interference every which way here on the street. She was thankful she was at least wearing sunglasses to help avoid direct eye contact. But perhaps the red lenses encouraged stares; she worried but she wouldn’t take them off: at least no one could see her looking back. Her skirt was pretty short, too. There were other women in revealing skirts but they were younger, although surprisingly to Caroline, many were lumpy. How could ugly girls reveal their shapes that way? Weren’t they ashamed? On the other hand, it took a lot of courage to let yourself get fat and walk around in public. Cary didn’t have that kind of guts. She’d been taught early not to provide cause for attack or correction. Men stood still on the street to let her by, then turned as she passed to watch her buttocks. It was so deliberate. They turned in step, in stride with her, and twice she removed her eyes from urinating men hardly concealing themselves, one in a doorway and one in a parking lot. This is what someone should write about in the About Men column of the New York Times Magazine, she thought, the outdoor pissing phenomena by men of all classes. Why

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does society succumb to the lowest practices, she wondered with irritation. Why can’t families raise their young with high ideals. Men, and women, too, leered at her openly, many people younger than she by ten or twenty years. Her picture had been in the paper with Jack’s this week, too, and while she wasn’t Jackie Kennedy, she noticed here and there a person recognizing her as Jack Rubin’s wife: Cary’s eyes splashed to the sidewalk instantly in those cases. She was glad she’d bought this suit. It gave her the stylish, youthful look she prized. It had cost quite a bit but she could hold her own in Manhattan now in front of anyone. Maybe they would go to Brussels, or Paris or Rome. With a small crowd she stopped for the light at Avenue of the Americas. The offal was most disgusting here. An animal hospital and a fast food restaurant abutted the pavement. She took shallow breaths against the stench, thinking of how solitary she was, each of the people at this corner was, in a pack waiting patiently or impatiently for the light together, each staring into space, bobbing to their own rhythms. All the people she was close to in real life were solitary, too: the sullen Jewel, who encouraged few friends, Jack, always the aloof automaton, smilingly oblivious to his devoted crowds, and Beatrice despite her paparazzi and the faithful students who fought them off. Jack and Beatrice had been lovers, Caroline remembered. That memory was never far from her mind. Had they resumed their affair after Jack’s marriage to her? She had no proof either way. No proof either of any of Jack’s many other comes-and-goes, although about these she had much suspicion. She knew there would have been no

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point in discussing the subject; he is what he is; she never looked for proof and frankly hoped she’d never find it, even by accident; she wouldn’t want to have to leave him; if he had a private life, she hoped it would stay private. Men, of course, flirted with her all the time, but she didn’t care to complicate her life with any, though she left the possibility open. “I’ll make you happy, lady,” a boy buzzed in her ear as the light changed and he stepped ahead, turning back with a smirk to watch her reaction. She had hardly heard him until he passed. She stared after him as she stepped with the crowd down off the curb. He was an unusual type for New York, a beautiful, young blond boy like that. Why would he want her? What would he do to make her sexually happy for an afternoon? The idea was dizzying. Too many cars were turning into her crosswalk; she couldn’t find the rhythm to continue once she became aware of the scene she was in. The experience was impatiently prompting her as if she were a character who forgot her lines. A bicycle came from nowhere and the “Don’t Walk” sign blinked a warning. She didn’t feel like running, so stepped back up onto the sidewalk into a different crowd waiting for the next light. “Excuse me,” she said again. A man here bumped into her and leered; his face was sweaty, lubricious; he spat into the street as she met his eyes, reminding herself not to let on she was stoned. Just, as the rest of the prudent city, cautious. A women alone must not smile or carry an expression or fix her eyes on anyone or move too much or stand still too long or swing her bags or let her shoes or jewelry clatter or toss her hair. She looked around more slowly this time. Shops

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along the north side of the street offered for sale the last artifacts of dying cultures. Peddlers sat on blankets along the ground with trinkets, children begged, filthy souls huddled in doorways; she recognized Dickens’s London in New York, or in this heat, Calcutta. Was there really nothing else these people could be doing? Even some of them? She fumbled in her bag and gave a quarter to a dirty little boy holding out a crumpled paper cup bearing the legend I Love New York. Where were this child’s parents? Things were more quiet across the street and when the light changed again she crossed and walked the next few blocks as fast as she could, keeping her body reined. She was near to Bedford and Commerce: Beatrice’s northeast corner was in sight. Caroline reached into her bag for a Valium and bit into it, retaining half for later. But she didn’t feel ready to go in. She remembered she’d meant to get hand cream. She turned back to the corner and walked towards the Health and Beauty Aids Store near the public swimming pool at Carmine Street.

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Chapter 20 Caroline in the Drug Store Caroline expected to find the drug store airconditioned but the place was stifling hot, and more humid than outside. Behind the counter an old GE QuietKool was being fixed. She found her way to the handcare shelf: once on a visit to the city after college she had bought herself some cheap perfume here. Cary still kept a bottle of Chanel No. 5 her mother had given her for her Sweet Sixteen, but which sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d never dared open. She had been afraid her mother would have thought the occasions she chose to wear it would have been too frivolous, that she would have been wasting it, that she should have saved it for even better occasions. That particular bottle was still evaporating slowly among her slips and hosiery

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even though in the past few months she had gone in for many more expensive personal luxuries. Caroline found the lotions. There were so many to choose from, especially among the cheapest brands. Sore hands tell of labor and self-denial; she must rid herself of such betrayal. She looked over the numerous selections in bottles, tubes, squeeze containers, plastic tubs, pump dispensers and glass jars. The jars were what she wanted although — or because — they were the most expensive, but a tube would be more practical in her purse. One oval white jar of lavender-brown cream had the especially alluring scent of deep chocolate; the label listed its contents as Egyptian turtle oil and Brazilian tapir colloids. She agreed to what was a considerable price, especially in this place, and thinking it wasn’t for decades she’d used any animal products but food — and felt the giddy rush she’d been experiencing frequently as she spent more money and resources on herself. She brought the fancy jar of cream to the cash register and smoothed some into her hands as she waited. She was surprised to find such a luxurious product in a run-down store. It would have been more appropriate in a boutique, although this was the West Village, and the clientele in this neighborhood was, to say the least, mixed. There was one person on line ahead of her, plus the clerk at the register, and a boy behind the counter fixing the air-conditioner. The boy’s eyes searched hers out. She felt them on her and tried to ignore him as she had ignored the men in the street, but this time she was trapped on line in his full view. She pretended to examine a display of magnifying glasses on the counter top, keeping her eyes off the many brands, colors and assortments of condoms,

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glow-in-the-dark and otherwise, under the glass. She lifted her eyes to the nearest lipstick rack, wondering if some other color would have been better than orange tonight, perhaps the same cherry-red as her glasses, thinking back to all those years she’d scorned make-up, musing about women’s emphasis of their lips, their minor genitalia. Lipstick, Jack had told her when he’d come home once with a bright red tube for her, was first used by Egyptian prostitutes to advertise those who gave blow jobs. She shrank as far as possible from the young mechanic, jerking her eyes around toward displays and posters, alighting her focus anywhere, certain he was still staring at her. She couldn’t help notice his hands, though, especially two things: the subtlety with which he touched the tiny objects, the screws and washers and tools he was holding, and the grime with which his hands had been ingrained. Several years’ dirt had worked into his fingerprints. What about the girls he enters with those hands; don’t they mind —. The thought aroused her. She was thirty-six now, did she mind at twenty? A lot of hippies then didn’t wash. Her own husband, among them. But there were not so many strange diseases then, a minor bacterial infection once in a while, maybe once trichomonas or chlamydia, periodic yeast, nothing like these viruses now, rampant herpes, and this new thing, AIDS. The boy looked South American, Mayan or Aztec, yellow-tan, well-boned and wiry. He wore a headphone radio while he worked, an antenna sticking up from the side of his head like a spaceman, cigarette dangling from his mouth, a Salem; the pack was folded into his T-shirt sleeve. He stared hard

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at Caroline to make her look at him. She finally met his eyes; the pull was just too great. He snorted at his success, blew blue smoke at her, raised his eyebrows, craned his neck, curled back his lips and finally resumed working, now that all was as it should be. His loathsomeness disturbed her but she refused to ponder it. There was no way to accept or dismiss these coarse encounters: women who tried to reply to such men with insulting remarks just played into their hands. The customer ahead of her on line was taking her sweet time. It was an old woman with silver necklaces, buying a cheap key chain, insisting on testing out the mechanism many times. Caroline couldn’t tell if the woman was black or white; possibly mixed, or Hispanic, or Mediterranean — why was it necessary to even think about race — she didn’t so much care what a person’s race was, but did feel a need to identify it — even more disturbing to her was if she couldn’t tell male from female, which happened periodically in this neighborhood. She was old, the withered crow ahead on line, disfigured, unhealthy, not at first glance the type to test things out. Cary studied her more closely: around her neck were not silver necklaces but rolled silver paper, crumpled aluminum foil. She wore a coat, in August. And a foul patina of sweat and filth. She reeked. This was a woman of the streets, a beggar, an outcast. Possibly someone’s mother! What was she doing in here. The old woman cackled to the clerk, “I’ll have to give you one of my singles, honey.” Caroline jumped back. The woman cawed again, “Well, dearie, I think I must have left my money home.”

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She turned away from the counter and peered into Caroline’s face, waiting. The woman was trying to get her to pay for her purchase! Well, she wouldn’t do it. The clerk raised her eyebrows, very tapered, well defined things. “Next.?!” Caroline counted out the exact change for her jar of cream, rubbing more of the luxuriant into her fingers and palms as the clerk rang up the sale. Then, overwhelmed by unexpected excitement, she handed the expensive jar to the beggar-woman as soon as it was paid for, and left the store. The woman and the clerk stared after her, but she did not meet their eyes; she heard the repairman laugh. “It’s not what she wants,” she heard him say to the clerk as they enjoyed the beggar’s disappointment and pother. Be grateful for what you get, Caroline thought, bitterly and smug — it was the adage she’d been raised on. But as she left the store the Valium and marijuana eased Caroline’s anxiety and whetted her expectations, producing immediate presence of mind and happy anticipation of the party. Many good friends would be there. And Jack. This party tonight was in his honor, in honor of her husband. She reached Beatrice’s corner again, this time from another direction and just as she did she saw Jack turn onto the street. He bounced along on his loose-jointed legs, cool and neat, smiling. Jack never put his hands in his pockets.. Watch Yourself, Watch Yourself, Jack. The voices in his head clanged their incessant clichés, challenging him through their mockery. What’d’ya Mean, Wha’d’ya Mean! Say The Fuck What You Mean! 151

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Cary saw Jack enter Beatrice’s courtyard wearing a beautiful white tropical suit and Panama hat, swinging his old cowhide briefcase in one hand and palming a joint in the other. Some day he’s going to get caught out on the street for this petty, almost antiquated offense, she worried. Especially with photographers following him again. She looked around, surprised to find no journalists with him or staked out in front of the building either. This was a private party; it had been kept quiet after all. Beatrice had promised it would be but Caroline hadn’t believed her. Cary was grateful, reminded of what yesterday’s interference by the press had been like when the U.N. made it official. She ran to catch up with him, heels clattering. She didn’t care if people saw her running now; she’d be with a man in a minute and any immodesty was acceptable on the arm of an escort. “Jack, Jack, it’s me, wait up —.” Jack stopped at the gate and walked back to the sidewalk for her, watching her legs as she ran. She knew her legs looked good to him, slender in their full view as they approached. She knew he loved her woman’s body. Caroline was glad they’d be able to enter together and so was he. Jack knew he was not often with his family, but perhaps his wife didn’t show as much enthusiasm for his successes as she should. When they were young she had had such crazy ideas, and even now all she considered were the dangers and disadvantages of his projects. She hadn’t been the least encouraging about the replies from space he told he’d received. But he loved her anyway, a love he never questioned nor bothered to express. “Good, good,” he said, grinning his abstracted smile, his melodic voice reassuring and calming her as it did everyone who heard it. 152

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“Smoke with me a minute before we go in.” She never doubted that Jack loved her, although he was so inattentive. But why he loved her she didn’t know. He was so intense and she so average, so given up to things, so hesitant. Smoking with one hand she slid the other down his pants and his smile broadened. She hadn’t done anything like that for a while. A hum of well-being emanated from him as they embraced. He sucked deeply in her mouth. They stepped behind the chimney. They could only have a moment in the yard, but both were pleased.

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Chapter 21 Jewel Enters Beatrice’s Party Alone Jewel maneuvered through the party alone. She wandered around feeling herself for the first time a young woman alone at a party. She was fifteen, and of unusual vintage. The house was jammed shoulder to shoulder with bodies, but in density or isolation, bald or fully maned, she understood that she was prey. There was some relief, however, in that many guests already knew her. In fact her entrance had caused for a time a trompe reception as guest of honor. Most of these people had known her as a child and others knew her through Beatrice’s own set of friends. People crowded her and pressed her with greetings. Jewel circled the room, her hairlessness her halo, backlit by Manhattan’s last sunset of the day, through the southwest corner windows of Greenwich Village. 154

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Jewel held a glass of ice water, talking here and there. Previously at grown-up parties she’d brought a book and read in a bedroom but this time she stayed around, shifting her body through the packed room. Her book had been left in her mother’s bag, anyway. She moved with studied nonchalance, trying to locate Beatrice without asking, answering questions about her hair, her school, her plans, her parents, apologizing for their lateness, playing the familiar role the friends-of-family placed her in, as damaged genius daughter of Saint Jack. It was a pleasant space, like a Mongolian yurt, with overlapping carpets and low chairs, deep alizarins and golds, little blue ceramic boxes, deep shadows, tiny lamps and many plants. Jewel had been in this house often. The walls were lined with eight thousand books in print and Braille, and usually every space was filled with active clutter, but today most of Beatrice’s work things were tucked away. Jewel walked around the desk idly reading the Tables of Contents in this month’s crop of publications: Last Sunday’s New York Times printed a harsh review of her new performance, Debacle, comparing it unfavorably to her early performances, particularly Oracle and Pinochle Variant, the card-trick show. ArtForum compared Beatrice’s recent Potomac Bridge Fountain unfavorably to two Biennale pieces she’d done in the 1960s; It’s a cliché to say critics unfailingly claim an artist’s current works inferior to early ones, Jewel kept reminding herself. She’d been particularly irritated by a recent Times review making that accusation of James Baldwin’s new book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. It should be time for a mid-career retrospective for Beatrice Stregasanta Madragiore at the Whitney, or even MoMA, 155

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certainly the New Museum, but no one was planning one. What kind of age was this? Jewel tried to make sense of her culture by analyzing what she saw in front of her. In museums, works of High Art are sold to buy low. In bookstores, literature is differentiated from fiction, and literature goes unpublished for pap. Jewel let her mind wander. She stepped from the desk to see the book spines on the shelves behind the piano. The piano music was nice, some Schubert, some ragtime. And someone had placed Guatemalan lilies around; many bouquets fanned lusciously from porcelain vases: knowing several of their names, she greeted them, Callas, Cartuchos, Alcatraces.... A heavy crystal ash tray fell thud. Jewel twisted at the sound. The people near it laughed. The opposite of “gravity,” Jewel thought, is “levity.” Language is impossible. The woman who dropped it, pushed the ash tray under the couch with her foot. What a joke, Jewel thought, to have lots of friends. And then, didn’t like but couldn’t block this next, In some ways I am like my mother. She turned her back to the room and resumed scrutinizing the shelves. The opposite of “ density,” her brain continued, is “rarity.” Most of the books there she knew, and many she’d borrowed and read. But here, look now here sideways on an eye level shelf was one she’d never seen, Present Past/Past Present by Eugéne Ionesco. She knew Ionesco’s plays, but this was subtitled A Personal Memoir. She opened it at random: June, 1967 Eighty million Arabs are encircling the Jews... If the Israelis are beaten they will be killed.... Everybody 156

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can pity them from the bottom of their hearts. The left...is willfully taking the wrong tack. It cannot admit that the Israelis were quarry.... People like killers. And if one feels sympathy for the victims it’s by way of thanking them for letting themselves be killed. Anti-Semitism is violently with us once again in the guise of anti-Zionism. Certain Jewish intellectuals spoiled by leftism...have been saying that the very presence of Jews in Palestine was an act of aggression against the Arabs. They perfidiously support the views of the Arabs, who will not be grateful to them for this. They are like the Jews who wanted to collaborate with the Nazis and were massacred. If to occupy a territory is to commit an act of aggression then everything is an aggression: the French are aggressors in Corsica, in Brittany, in Languedoc. The Algerians themselves are aggressors in Algeria, since they came from somewhere else. The whole European continent is occupied by ‘aggressors’ from Iran and Asia.... In reality the whole earth belongs to everyone, it belongs to whoever fructifies it, it belongs above all to those who ask only a little corner to live in without making war. The (Arab) position is untenable. It was born, indeed, of envy. Certain peoples live on hatred.... It alienates and dehumanizes those countries themselves.... [T]here are monstrous Jews who declare their solidarity with the Arab peoples...and not only anti-Israelis but antiJews because they sent threatening letters to Israel to those who judged Eichmann. Yes, these ‘intellectual’ Jews are really the sons of the Jews in Hitler’s time. Jewel snapped the book shut. These were subjects she couldn’t bear thinking about. And now the situation looked bad again. Perhaps her father would be able to do something at the U.N., although in international politics he’d have to minimize his Jewish 157

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roots. Jewel swooned, pressed physically to so many people in this heavy atmosphere. She caught herself on the piano, steadied by waves of smooth sound she hadn’t noticed before. A beautiful young man played rich, compelling melodies and subtle rhythms, odd original phrases and lulling passages. She hadn’t looked at him before. Now his familiar music gave way to something new. This pianist effected an even mood upon the crowd. The musician met Jewel’s gaze with foreign eyes, seductive. She glanced away from him, her eyes escaping in darts around the room. No one but this man had seen her falter. His music had helped her to come to. He played a steady beat to help restore her composure. She regarded him again as his fingers moved among the keys. He was looking at her in a healthy way. He wasn’t put off by her extraordinary face of scars and shaven head. Bashful, but attracted, she let him hold her eyes. One of Beatrice’s cats, the black one, Gilgul, lay curled on his lap as he played. There’s a white one, Dybbuk, somewhere. The cats never appeared together and Beatrice’s friends often joked that one was the other transformed. It was one of several transformation myths Beatrice cultivated. Where is she? The scent of Ayurvedic sandalwood and cannabis rose, as more people gathered in the little house. Jewel looked toward the lingering traces of color in the sky, trying to avoid the scrutiny of other guests as much as possible. Halley’s comet would be just rounding the eastern horizon now, although there would be too much light in the city to see it. The past and present forces were too great; Jewel needed air. The back garden, she remembered, and realized then that there was where she would find Beatrice. Jewel made her way through the kitchen and 158

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allowed the effusive catering boys to refresh her ice water, politely refusing their other suggestions, some exotic, some mundane, some base, all made as they gawked at her scarification. She wore it proudly, and stared them down, a small smile parting her lips. For the first time, she enjoyed such fascination and natural awe and didn’t mind gratifying it as perversion, just by lingering a heartbeat longer. Out the kitchen doorway she saw Beatrice sitting across the yard against the garden wall on a wide wicker rocking chair with high back and armrests. She wore the gauzy, white silk costume of a maharani. Her hair was center-parted, gathered at her nape and brought forward over one uncovered shoulder across her fluted bodice. Her narrow stick lay on the ground. A beautiful woman from Chile sat beside her on a Syrian reed stool. Pearl was pouring them wine. Jewel harbored some jealousy of Beatrice’s disciples, but the girl recognized the artist’s godchild and gave up her seat immediately. “Thank you,” Jewel said. Beatrice reached to kissed her welcome, but drew back at the touch of bald fuzz. She placed her wineglass on the ground beside the stick and palpated Jewel’s skull in both hands, cradling her head, remaining silent. Fervored by her own embarrassment, Jewel reached away her godmother’s hands, cool black kidskin over bone, the artist’s fingers. Beatrice recognized in Jewel a recent pulse. There had been a time in the past when she’d made love to her students, some of the girls, some boys, few now. Rarely, rarely now. And even then, in Rome, almost never in New York, only once in New York she could recall, thinking of this child’s parents, years ago, herself as catalytic agent in ménage. Jewel is grown now, Beatrice 159

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thought. “I felt your presence as you bolted from your mother’s car,” Beatrice said. Jewel regretted wasting so much time inside.“I projected a diversion to detain you,” laughed Beatrice, alluding to their private joke that Beatrice projected her family’s realities; it had made their triumvirate guardianship more logical when Jewel was young. It stemmed from an African children’s story Beatrice had read to her, about a sorcière who dreams scenes into other people’s lives. Jewel smiled, feeling safe enough. Sometimes Beatrice’s ruse as conjurer was so well-played it was almost credible. Certainly there were people in the room who believed she was supernatural, and she did nothing to discourage the idea. Jewel searched the artist’s famous face, looking into her serene expression. But disquietingly, this thought came, Is Beatrice’s urge to create and tamper so great that being a mere artist in the physical world isn’t enough? Does she need to pretend that her creativity extends to reality? That she can alter the structure of real time and space, just as she can configure them in art? That if something does not meet her ideals she can do it over? Was it a flaw of character or a charming pose to regularly deflect direct conversation? If Beatrice had imperfections Jewel wasn’t ready to see them. Jewel saw only an ethereal being, and was relieved. Her godmother’s unseeing eyes reassured Jewel of her own invisibility, insisted that her looks absolutely did not count. To Jewel this was the single fact that secured fidelity. Only sound, touch and aroma colored their communication thought to thought, and these were the abstract senses. Sight, thought Jewel, the 160

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concrete sense, the most contemptible, most superficial, most deceptive sense, the sense so inferior to the others in providing accurate inner meaning, the sense that obscures real truth with color and decoration, the sense so easily corrupted by flashy distractions. She stared into her godmother’s placid features and felt content. All her life Jewel had memorized this ageless visage, as Beatrice had monitored the changing chemistries of Jewel. But I don’t know her for herself, she thought. Close as we are, she is hidden. Nor was there any more in reference books or fanzines than that Beatrice been brought up by her grandmother in a rural area. It wasn’t known if she’d been born blind or even if it was incurable. She looked into her godmother’s eyes and wondered what Beatrice would see at that first second of sight if ever she could become sighted. She lay her head in her godmother’s lap and let the lithe black reading-adept fingers stroke her hair. I have known her all my life and grown up looking to her for refinement, Jewel thought. Surely this is the woman who has mothered me. Her real mother’s mothering steeped in hopeless sadness and frustration. She thought of the Americanization of both families, the lawful public capture of vast herds of their peoples. Finally, during adjacent decades of Mid-Twentieth Century, the human race had come to see itself a single tribe, if it would last. Her own grandmother had barely reached Jewel’s age when she’d been anointed by global history. Jewel acknowledged her spiritual descent from Beatrice as if the blackwoman were her father’s mate and twin. They rested, contemplating their intricate kinship. Beatrice raised her wineglass from the ground. 161

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“The artist is only a midwife,” she said, tipping it to Jewel to sip from. Jewel felt so content she almost accepted the wine, accepting with it Beatrice’s magical love as she knew her father had done. Their young romance had been another family tale, although rarely mentioned in recent years. Embarrassed at this secondary thought, she declined. “You know I never drink or smoke.” Guests around them murmured approval, and inched in. She kissed the glass and curled Beatrice’s fingers tighter around it. Her hand felt even more fragile than her own; this was never been true before. “Scandal,” Jewel heard in party conversation filtering through the yard. Few things caused scandal anymore. “Some day.” Beatrice said, with her usual air of inscrutable pronouncement. Jewel looked at both pairs of hands, perfectly groomed. She had buffed her own nails to glow. Beatrice’s narrow fingernails were long and oval, taupe and ivory, the nail beds edged in burgundy, white at the tips. Jewel’s style wasn’t fashion, but collage of force and fortune, bad luck and compensatory self-consciousness. Beatrice’s was bred and cultured, but it was her art and mystique which represented Beatrice. Her appearance and words were meant to cloak identity, revealing not a person, but their augury. “Material organizes of its own accord,” Jewel watched her say to Raymond Krislowitz, The New York Times’s appreciative critic of her personality and her art. More people were coming into the garden, and as both women were principals, neither could ignore the party 162

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much longer. Guests hovered closer, swirling ice and clinking glasses for their hostess’s attention. Jewel felt desperate. She wanted to keep her godmother to herself, to say something profound enough to keep her another moment. “I wish for amnesia,” Jewel said. Beatrice did not reply at once, although she was arrested by this statement. They sat in the pleasant backyard space, finally letting guests approach. They greeted them together, Jewel in much suspense. There are hardly any young men about, Beatrice noticed as she felt Jewel beseeching her eyes, sightless but otherwise normal-looking, heavy-lidded, prominent, never hidden by dark glasses. Jewel observed the cool, transparent being that was the artist, clear as a jellyfish, nothing superfluous to its tract but wafting antennae and tendrils, the thing and its environment nearly one, a sense with no occlusion to perception. She loved her desperately. I love her desperately. “Attune” (or “a tune”), Beatrice said in her preternatural voice. “Listen to yourself,” Jewel heard from elsewhere. She took the chance confluence of random phrases as fortuitous advice to forget, forget, forget. But without assistance could she hypnotize herself to forget? And would this be good advice? Jewel was born to science not to art, and now, helped by this blindwoman to see towards the future, she faced perhaps an oblique direction. Stop thinking about yourself. Look at something real. If she could, she might unlock the final secrets of creation, which is the scientific mandate after all.... 163

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Jewel must set her percipience upon discovering external realities. But she found it very hard to pull her mind off of itself, thereby...therefore..... She invariably trailed off. It would not do for Jewel, a nascent scientist, to “listen to yourself”; that’s for artists; Jewel must point her sensitometers to “elsewhere.” “There is a moon this afternoon,” she rhymed to Beatrice, timid to be speaking again, but praying to continue charming her. Strange, realized Beatrice as it dawned on her Jewel’s love was borderline flirtatious, young men are not attending me as usual. So Beatrice took the girl’s poetic offering. They turned their faces up together to a wan silver sliver almost hidden in the sparkling cobalt dusk settling over New York City’s southwest side as light finally faded past the Hudson on the last perfect evening of late summer. Is the point the purpose of the universe? Is the universe the meaning of the point? Light particles go somewhere, are reflected and absorbed as they travel. In space do they travel on forever? Do they congregate somewhere? Black absorbs light particles as completely as it is black, and once absorbed they are no longer light but heat and, eventually, all light must be absorbed as heat. Jewel’s mind outpaced her. Everything will grow cold. “What it all comes down to...,” A man somewhere explained something to someone. “1971,” Beatrice said, “one signal from one U.S. radio-telescope. Stop.” The man stopped short to listen. “And just recently again in 1982,” Beatrice continued, “Voyager. More SETI. Stop.” “What?” the art critic coughed as he moved nearer. 164

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Beatrice sat back into the big chair, silent. She didn’t like being asked to clarify. Especially to clarify orally positions she hadn’t developed in writing. “You plan to stop this yourself, Strega?” Krislowitz asked, teasing her with a middle-name nickname. “Of all the artists this era,” he said to her, “you’re the most a-political, but ordinarily pro-science. Now you want to stop the search for life in space?” Beatrice couldn’t see his amused look, but caught his inflection. She was unused to teasing, or to the slightest remonstrance. She took herself seriously in every role. “Many hands, Ray, many hands, many faces, many shades.” It was typical of her to offer a cryptic remark as clarification. She herself was confident she could eventually decode it if she wanted to, and others around her would pretend they already had, but not pursue the point. Krislowitz knew he wasn’t answered, but let it go: he tried never undermine the artists he supported. And he did think the position itself against SETI might be credible. But he also thought it inconsistent: First, because she herself manipulated known and unknown, expected and unexpected, such as in her Ici/Voici. and permutations of biological form, such as in Warp/ Weave/Wasps. Second, because one expected her to think progressively, like Jack and their friends. Maybe there’s a germ of an article here. “What do you really mean, Beatrice?” he asked flat out. Jewel sat up fast. Beatrice must know Jack’s secret plans — must mean she know Jack had the hope, perhaps capacity, to transmit and receive such signals, and she doesn’t like it. Jewel had never questioned this — such 165

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would be Jack’s prerogative, no? He was fundamentally a scientist; he had a right to explore wherever his mind led him, no? “No” is what Beatrice was making it a point to say. Did Beatrice expect that anyone could influenced his plans? Did she expect Jack Rubin would change his opinion if their friends told him Beatrice or anyone else held another? Maybe she didn’t: she hadn’t verbalized anything definite. It’s impossible to pin Beatrice down. Maybe her remark had nothing to do with her father: It can be misleading to interpret her offhand remarks. If she wants you to understand something, she’ ll write it. Several more guests pushed for an answer. Beatrice turned her face toward Pearl, signaling her to venture an oral paraphrase of what might be her professor’s written position. The girl was startled, but composed herself. “I think Madragiore believes that the will to subjugate is too great in human beings. And that technological advancement isn’t making us less brutal. The greater the disparities between cultures, the greater the cruelties. ‘Take me to your leader,’ brings enslavement and decimation. We primates are still too primitive to drop anchor on another planetful of life forms and natural splendor. And neither are we prepared for problems we might encounter.” Beatrice took another sip of wine, “Brava!” “You think this, too, Pearl?” Ray asked the acolyte to speak for herself, “or you think Beatrice is alone in disapproving of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life?” Pearl answered quickly, in her service, “I think it, and I think she thinks it, and if you think about it, I think you’ll think it, too.” The pressing crowd around them wasn’t sure whether to laugh at this as a serio-witty remark, or roll 166

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their eyes in schadenfreude at Pearl’s embarrassment, but Jewel suddenly understood something — Beatrice’s circle believed that humankind was too evil to boost into space with a fare-thee-well, though they aren’t above a bit of evil themselves. She doubted her father would ever concede their point, though. She craned her neck in hopes he’d finally gotten here. Daddy will show them his faith both in the essential goodness of humanity, particularly under his leadership, and in the natural engine of discovery to drive itself. Is Beatrice contemplating undermining Jack? Could she sabotage his plans? Would she? She was straining forward, her elaborate costume wrinkling over tiny breasts and humping over bony back. If so, more likely from envy or jealousy than from hypocritical political convictions: Ray Krislowitz was right that her objections were inconsistent with her own productions. “Beatrice Stregasanta Madragiorie and Jack Rubin both want to control the future,” he laughed. Is Beatrice concerned her influence on Earth would be diminished if Jack’s were to extend above. Surely, she doesn’t have the powers she pretends to, Jewel continued thinking, and blurted a fast rejoinder, “Everyone tries to control the future, Ray — art critics like you especially.” People laughed, but, “No,” said Pearl, trumping her, and easing Beatrice back properly in the rocker. “Art critics control the past. Artists read the future into it. Laughter rose. Not bad, thought Beatrice, signalling Pearl continue, if she could. “An artist reserves a place in the future by manipulating the present to secure their place in the 167

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past,” Pearl came through. Beatrice sat up and scribbled it quickly on a pad in her pocket. Krislowitz copied it, too. Beatrice took one last long, deep drink of wine, then stood, handing Jewel her half-empty wineglass. She took a few steps forward and greeted a group of new strangers without making introductions. They were speaking a language Jewel couldn’t identify. She remained seated on the low reed stool. Beatrice’s hems brushed by, unsoiled by the centuries-sooted, oftbloodied earth of city yards. Jewel trusted Jack more than Beatrice did, but both were fully aware that since the General Assembly did put him there, he really is in a position to control the world’s future. Would his management of not just the planet but the universe, be necessarily a bad thing, if, following the scenario out to its potential, his devices did succeed? Jack was charismatic, not coercive. Any world Daddy organized would be peaceful and happy. No? She knew her father wasn’t too peaceful and happy himself, but she had faith. Oh, bosh, she took a sip from the half-full wineglass. Beatrice turned back to Jewel and sat with her again to await the speech. She kissed her on the mouth, but with a point of tongue, disturbing yet arousing this pure child. Jewel loved Beatrice with her mind and heart, and for her sake tried to think rationally about her father’s hopes. She held Beatrice’s glass, but didn’t sip again. The chance of it ever happening — of Jack’s ever reaching intelligent life, communicating with it and winning its leadership — was so farfetched that in practical terms it wasn’t worth worrying about. Jewel was certain that, at very least, technology was not yet far enough advanced.

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Chapter 22 Jack and Caroline Enter the Garden Jack and Caroline entered the party and then the back garden, stirring up the crowd and generating excitement as they moved. Jewel startled at the sudden commotion and saw her father and mother together in the doorway. Colored lanterns had been lit at the onset of twilight. His deep-lined smiling face was flushed, his newly tamed hair still thick and rich, crackling with electricity. Jack looked especially tall and filled out from across the space. Jewel knew that as a youth Jack had gone underweight to avoid the Vietnam draft. Briefly she questioned her fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nobility and then put the question out of mind. He had her loyalty. Both he and her mother wore white. Cameras were flashing everywhere, shooting vertical fashion candids, horizontal news, and tipped170

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camera arty shots. What a striking couple they made. “Definitely a studied nonchalance,” Jewel overheard a woman cattily remark. To outsiders, Jewel was loyal. My family. She turned archly and recognized one of Caroline’s new Princeton friends putting down her parents. By now many reporters and photographers and more than one video unit ranged the yard. Press were flooding in, admitted for photo-ops 9 to 9:15 PM, no Q&A. Then out. A kid who’d wangled in took advantage of the flurry to approach Beatrice for an autograph, which she detested giving, but her plainclothes security quickly spun him around and out before he reached her. How good Jack must look up there, Beatrice thought. In youth, the artist and the activist had been rivals of intensity, had whipped each other into frenzies of impulsive grandiose statements, plans, commitments, resolutions. The bold letters they’d written had been manifestos of zeal only that era could produce. Jack was still equal to his task, but Beatrice tired easily and worried more. His powers might well be stronger than mine, now, she considered with irritation. He certainly had outstripped her in the news. And it did irk her that he let his wife have him for all the holidays, and recently even appear together on society pages, which he never used to permit. Here she was, the most famous artist in the world, in a lifelong affair with the most powerful man, and she had to stay mum? Well, whatever was done, she did it. Cary had been her student. She’d had good reason for making introductions at the time. “Speech, speech!” All their friends were calling and clapping. Jewel 171

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was standing and waving, her heart bursting with daddylove and pride. She and Beatrice joined in. “Speech, Jack, speech!” Someone had planned this party well. Everyone clapped in rhythm. Champagne was being poured. Jack reached his hand out for a flute, but before he could take it, the mayor of the City of New York, a longtime family friend, jumped up to announce him. “I introduce Jack Rubin,” said the mayor, “by quoting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ‘One can build the Empire State Building,’ he declared, ‘discipline the Prussian Army, elevate the State hierarchy above the throne of the Almighty, but one cannot get past the unaccountable spiritual superiority of certain people.’” He extended his right hand to shake Jack’s and pushed the microphone into Jack’s left, the hand-off of practiced politicians. Together they nudged Jack’s briefcase out of sight. You’re Going To Fall On Your Face. “Come with me to Rome this fall,” Beatrice whispered in Jewel’s ear as she arranged herself back down in her chair to hear the speech. Jewel knew if she said no, Beatrice might take Pearl instead. And she recognized this as a small sign of corruption in herself. A light breeze blew through the grounds. The length of the season was closing as her father prepared to address the crowd. Stop Now Before Someone Stops You. That night Jewel dreamed the Physics Dream.

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Chapter 23 Jack’s Speech: Homo Futurus in the Trans-Millennial Century “Dear friends,” Jack said, “dear friends, dear friends....” Immediately, the voices set upon him, taunting, challenging, yelling in his ears: You’re The Most Important Man On Earth. What Are You Going To Do. It’s Up To You To Fix The World. “...energies synchronize in harmony...” Jack said, “...that workers in our colony...individual pursuit of sustenance.... It’s Up To You To Fix Everything. “...bring into reality...planet in fit balance...habitat... hominids...dominant species set for continuation and preparedness...endurance...population.... You Are The New Messiah.

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It’s You Rode In On Halley’s Comet This Time. “...plagues, pestilence, famines, droughts.... What Are You Going To Do About It. “...set to fit in perfected state to engage other cosmic species, or do we engage them unprepared, and at the point of desperation, having failed to make a go of our own species within our own habitat. Do we launch out defeated by ourselves only to be defeated elsewhere, on another’s home territory?... Rambling. You Are Rambling. “...Particles...ourselves...others....” Ha Ha! You Can’t Do It. “...How can the peoples...can every individual...can we each take responsibility...can we each recognize each other as ourselves....” August 21, 1985: Jewel slid her notebook out of her pocket and wrote, My father is a radical idealist. A wave of uneasiness washed over Jack from the sea of faces. “Andrew Zimmerman Jones,” he called out, referring to a theorist whose ideas lined up with his own, which he didn’t know he had not yet presented clearly. Jones wasn’t familiar to anyone there, but hearing the name touched a collective nerve, and did not help his cause. Jack sensed he reached deep negative feelings, even taboos, in his audience. Maybe his friends just needed more household names. “Francis Crick! Biophysics and Consciousness. Crick’s devoted decades to how the brain forms consciousness. Roger Penrose, another physicist!” This crowd didn’t know how to respond. Just what was Jack getting at? Particles, ourselves and others? Jack dug himself in, tried to explain what he meant, explain what these iconoclastic scientists have done. “Roger Penrose considers consciousness a manifestation of quantum phenomena. He doesn’t think

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a brain could therefore ever be simulated by a computer. Ever.” Wait! This might be getting interesting. This might be something people could agree with! The room relaxed and made space for him to continue. So Jack began again, in a reassuring, academic tone, but still the words drawn low and long and slow, as from a prophet. “We are the Trans-Millennial Generation.” Jack said, looking every eye in the eye. “The significant feature of the Trans-Millennial Mid-Twentieth to Mid-Twentyfirst Century is that our species on our planet will have reached and pulled back from the brink of extinction.” The crowd raised its eyebrows. Interesting terminology, but surely an alarmist exaggeration, everyone thought. “By 2050, we will have engineered a new species from ourselves. And engineered Earth as sustainable habitat for it and what’s left of plants and animals, minerals, liquids and gasses.” Engineered? New species? The room contracted again. And Beatrice, too, rocked forward in her chair, concerned about what might come next. A new smile started slowly, the outer corners pulling out wide and high under Jack’s sagging cheeks, like a grimace, Jewel thought. “And have determined a communication protocol for intelligent life, located by then, as well.” Beatrice leaned even farther forward. She was not happy. Her white clothing glowed from her dark corner. Do not reach beyond your sphere, she’d once written in a letter to him. Jewel settled her back in her chair. Jack’s crowd was patient, but wary. You Are The Messiah Of The TransMillennial Century. 177

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His mouth was dry as paste. He pantomimed sipping from a glass, and a pretty young catering service girl poured him a tumbler of water. Everyone looked at each other with growing dread. Your Actions Will Determine The Course Of The Universe. He gulped, nearly spit-taking what he was about to say, as the voices dared him. Nobody Will Like Anything You Say. “Dear friends,” Jack softened his voice and started differently, “Full peace and tolerance and socialization is possible not by building a piecemeal bio-medical cyborg, doomed to failure in a continually degrading, insufficient habitat, still mired in hierarchies....” Forget About Old Ideas. What Have You Done To Save The World. “Human competition of any kind is a subterfuge by differing strains of DNA to succeed in replication and thwart all others. We are programmed by a gene for selfrecognition to interact with others as ‘same or not-same.’ We are programmed to assist family, the most powerful first, followed by DNA matches in descending order. And to destroy as much potential of others as possible. The Family Recognition Gene is the most aggressively controlling gene in the human pool. All other genes are regulated by it. Long disguised as junk, this gene for same-self-recognition has been isolated and replicated. Tell Them What You Have Actually Done. “I take this opportunity to announce that nevermore will people see anyone else as ‘the other.’ Everyone will work together, and know each other as a single family.” The pianist resumed his even mood, but apprehension filled the air. “The JRFR1 Family Recognition Gene release chip designed by the Rubin II Computer has been scheduled for implant in all newborn Earthlings.” 178

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The room stood still in mute silence. “Homo futurus will be their progeny,” he continued. “Homo futurus will recognize each other as themselves!” he boomed, fist raised exultantly. Everyone looked around, shocked to horror. “...all newborn Earthlings under U.N. guidelines will be implanted with the gene for recognizing others as themselves, as family.” Everyone had the same thought: Is Jack Rubin crazy? You Aren’t Worth Shit. “It’s a dominant gene, so all nextborn will recognize each other as close relatives....” Didn’t they understand! “Homo futurus will then naturally cooperate and love one another as family, conserve, share and replenish their resources, tolerate and enjoy their black sheep....” Jack was not getting the support he was used to. He tried to make himself stand taller and spread his smile wider. Unsteadiness was unfamiliar. Make cheerful eye contact with audience. He winked at the girl who’d brought him water, relieved to see her wink back. And even look at her watch. And cock her elbow! And eye the door. Jack’s confidence rose. He tried again to gain his friends’ enthusiasm for his plans. This was an intimate party. These are his firstline supporters. People who all love him. And don’t want reason not to. It’s just friends! “...immunized to have no castes or classes...no incentive, financial or creative or political, to best each other....” He sped on, “to do things willingly and happily as each has the talent....to appreciate each other as completely equal....” His voice boomed loud and exultantly, “to share and share alike!” But Jack’s 179

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audience was not applauding any of this. “Our species perfected in perpetuity!” They were cringing. What’s wrong?! He couldn’t understand what wasn’t understood. And Wildly Applauded. Ha Ha, You Fool. Beads of sweat gathered around his hairline. All his hairlines. He was starting to itch all over. The Only Reason You Do Anything Is To Top Your Father. Jack choked. No, no, no. He could not defend himself inside or out. You’ve Only Become You To Outdo Chaim. He was overcome with the bodily feeling of brutally swinging a metal pipe. And his head filled with pictures of hanging geometric stars. Now is no time for images! He’d better find the most minimal common denominator he could, and get the hell out of this speech. He retched. You Are A Fraud. The crowd wanted Jack to gracefully find a way to recant and leave the stage. Jack’s friends didn’t care if all he did was charm his way off. Everyone just wanted to go on drinking and congratulating each other for things. He slowly stepped a ways among them. Jack had had experience working a room, though never one as mercurial as this. They wouldn’t let him needle them. They wanted to love him. They wanted everything to seem normal again. Never was there anyone in greater need of misunderstanding. He tried a different point, one safer and more familiar. “...to do only what can do no harm.” There. One or two hands. Jack’s smile cracked. He’d take this narrow escape route, exaggerating his parting thanks for those. He motioned the catering girl over to take the mic, and acceded to her signifiers for

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later assignation. In the end, he got the resounding clap he longed for. For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow started up on the piano. The crowd accepted this familiar detour. Jack looked out over to Jewel, hoping for a good reaction. She was writing in her notebook: I have never seen my father back down before. And a rare moment of knowing eye contact passed between Caroline and Jewel. “Chance and proclivity, hope and greed”; they remembered Cary’s answer to what ruled the universe. More Champagne was poured around the room. Jack brought a glass to Caroline, and motioned Jewel come join them. Perhaps the crux of his intentions he’d now never make public. That I’ve engineered the ideal hominid from an intergalactic gene pool. He regretted having announced the genetic interventions now. Or even mentioning the space talks. Here tonight was just a little congratulations party by friends and family. No one recorded anything. The only copies of his documents and codes was in the old cowhide briefcase that never left his side. Beatrice’s sightless eyes pierced Jewel’s, and they kissed as she left to celebrate with her parents, “Yes,” Jewel whispered back. “I’ll go with you to Rome.”

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Wish for Amnesia Section 2 Chapter 24: Jewel Dreams The Physics Dream

Chapter 24 Jewel Dreams The Physics Dream Before the dream began there was no dream. There was no image, only blackness. The dream began with a dot, in the center, not a dot, but a location, a single location in absolute emptiness. It wavered. The location, having no counterpoint, was imprecise, unstable, and began to alternate between locatable and not, to appear and disappear and pulse existent, non-existent; or perhaps it was not the same point reappearing, but short-lived separate points borning and dying, replacing each other by almost identical points in almost the same location, but, because they were individual, different, and in different locations as well.

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Soon the force of this existence/non-existence created around it a field of energy within which the moving point exploded in an equation to equal the universe. Shooting out from center, the radii were time. Upon the expanding circumference lay distance, factored time. What came to seem like gravity was merely an illusion as balls of matter rolled toward each other across the surface of this uneven sphere, the effect of simultaneous propulsion and deceleration, causing matter to yaw backward, forward, sideways, up and down. This rate of violent expansion was called “zero” and it spawned the calculation of all other rates. Matter too dense after a while for continued propulsion, slowed up, stopped moving and fell back as black holes while the rest of the universe passed by. Whenever fragments collided, new universes burst inside the old. Many such separate formations bubbled in space, filmy, but lumpy like potatoes. All bubbles finally burst. Tissues of burst bubbles crashing began processes anew. Escaping the center again they rushed outward, meeting those careening toward them escaping universes beyond, accelerating as if falling down on Earth. The acceleration of time was no illusion in Jewel’s physics dream.

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SECTION THREE Rome

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Chapter 25 Beatrice and Jewel Walk Along the Tiber Sun and shade. Sun and shade. Warm and cool, hot and cool oscillated over the faces of Jewel and Beatrice walking between the rows of formally planted and evenly spaced trees along the promenade of the Tiber. Crosspatterns of afternoon light cut through thin, moist, crystal, pleasant air. Rome on this day after Christmas was more than perfect for the artist and the child. Under trees they were a couple in love, secluded, contained, enclosed in secret freedom from the prying public sky. Between the bars of shadow, bars of sun exposed, and thus imprisoned, them. Such is light that tells the secrets darkness keeps, making lovers more at liberty constrained than when released. They walked with arms encircling each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s waists, discretely nuzzling to speak. After months of 185

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close living, the bodies of Jewel and Beatrice brushed together with proprietary sense. They walked along the river slowly. Jewel carried Beatrice’s white stick for her, shouldering it like a rifle. Jewel’s hair was growing in reddish, fuzzy; it grazed against Beatrice’s cheek like a beard, and Beatrice’s long, silvering, black, perfumed strands glanced against Jewel’s face like satin. Their holiday gifts to each other yesterday confessed their physical desires: opium from Jewel to Beatrice, and a rare Malaysian potion in return. Rome, ancient Rome, the Eternal City, symbol of a dawning age, territory of the meeting of the great religious systems: the heart of Christianity, clash of pagan gods, a city resting upon archeologies before the word, upon societies which did not yet know each other as relations, not yet know themselves to be a single beast. Jewel and Beatrice walked the classical white path along the Tiber in late 1985, at the last trailing end of humanism drawing away, stealing away to a close. Soon, as Beatrice tired easily, they stopped to sit on a white stone bench where the river vented a breeze through supple poplar trees, sweet and fresh. Seraphic children played nearby: two little girls and a boy. Jewel loosened the wide, black hood of Beatrice’s cloak and laid it flat along the back of the seat and forward over her shoulders like a shawl. She took Beatrice’s small hands between her own and folded the four together in her lap. The years, Jewel remembered from Yeats but did not quote aloud, like great black oxen tread the world. And then from Keats, What a power has white simplicity. “Ballet degli alberi,” Jewel whispered her own words, about the tree patterns, instead. Beatrice turned toward her. Balletto, she corrected mentally, but kissed Jewel on her cheek at the nice conceit. They fully sensed their mutual meanings and longings, their symbolic mother/daughterhood, their at-long186

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last uncontainable attraction. Finally acknowledging contact, each consciously yearned for open embrace. They imagined their limbs around each other, thin chests hardpressed, ears rubbing, hands palm open on the other’s slender ribs and spine and fragile pelvis, narrow mons. But each woman withheld herself and kept deliberately back. Jewel never initiated momentum and Beatrice uncharacteristically remained cautiously in check, curiously, she noted herself, almost against my will. But each knew their time as lovers drew close. They sat together on the ancient veined and patterned marble path beside the river. For Jewel the unstated promise of lovemaking held out hope for a spiritual and physical dimension to her life. She was not a happy hostage to her intellectual awareness and scientific curiosity, her paradoxical imagination, literary hypersensitivity, emotional straightjacket. No aphrodisiac or philter could have whetted Jewel’s impatience any further. But for Beatrice the prospect of their inevitable consummation was discolored by chagrin and vanity and resignation. Was she no longer alluring? She had a limited pantheon of lovers now. Were there no good young men for her to choose from anymore? Occasionally Jewel was so unthinking as to make reference to her age. Couldn’t Jewel see she had no age, she was eternal, like the city, like all great artists are. Was one year past forty-five her mortal turning point? For Jack this year was like a rocket ship, but would taking his daughter to bed be too harsh an equalizer? Lovers can be useful in extra, external ways. It’s complicated and consuming to begin a new affair. What should be the real question? The issue should be — did she love the girl for herself? For the first time in her life Beatrice questioned her personal motives, and faltered. For the first time she did not know instinctively what to do. That she might become corrupt in her 187

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maturity was not impossible. “Scala,” Beatrice finally replied aloud. “I’m so happy to be useful to you,” Jewel said, making her beloved more comfortable on the bench. “Light my pipe, please, Julie,” Beatrice asked, her voice very low and sweet. Jewel lit Beatrice’s old clay hash pipe, and for the first time drew in her own breath. Jewel and Beatrice smoked together in the cooling air, anticipating their bodies’ finer warmings. The effect of the drug, first on Jewel, then Beatrice, was both subtle and profound. Subtle, in that aside from a light euphoria, a perceptual intensification and a sense of unity with the river, their conscious minds noticed no effect; but profound, because unconsciously each transformed herself into the other’s metaphor. Each became for herself what the other wished she were; each played and believed her role. Beatrice was Jewel’s suitor and her inspiration and her model, her goddess, her protector and seducer. But Beatrice was still not yet totally resolved. There was that clearer question: ought she do it? For Beatrice, lovers were her couriers, her vehicles, her living media; they were the intermediaries between her powers and the world, her messengers. She accepted lovers if she had a mission for them, a use she knew they could fulfill. But in their discharge of her intentions, many suffered grave consequence, particularly when things went awry. Hasn’t this kid been through enough? Jewel felt the wind suddenly chill and said, “Let’s walk back now. You must be tired.” Beatrice turned her face away, irritated, annoyed with Jewel for being so insistently oversolicitous. In Rome, Jewel treated her like an aged invalid. Sometimes her students got too close, and Jewel was much more than a student. Maybe she had best leave the girl alone, or maybe, she debated a tack not far from the truth, she

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might recast this innocent as perpetrator, and thereby shed responsibility. She felt Jewel’s adolescent arm around her shoulders, the cloak around them both, her white stick in her own hand now. She tapped it against the ground in front of them. “All right, Julie,” Beatrice said in gentle compromise, “we’ll go. But not yet all the way back.” Jewel agreed, though Beatrice really was just being stubborn: she truly was as weary as Jewel thought. They walked into a patch of sun and then stood still. Beatrice did seem more frail in Rome than in New York, even next to Jewel who was so thin herself. The light was better, warmer, brighter, but it did not point up in Beatrice any warmth or brightness; it instead revealed a sultry inner darkness, something rotten, not quite well. But this aspect of the impression was not accurately perceived by Jewel, or was suppressed, or was so indistinctly registered as to immediately flee. They stood in sunlight between the trees and planned their next few steps.

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Chapter 26 A Taxi Driver, Toto A taxi driver, Toto, watched them from his cab. He had been following these two Americans off and on since heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d spotted them in Rome, The Black Madonna and Raggedy Ann: the blind, black goddess of esthetic wisdom, inward-peering witch, the world-renowned oracle who taught at the American art school, and her nurse, the fuzzy-headed, scarfaced daughter of the famous genetic anthropologist, Dr. Jack Rubin, current Secretary-General of the United Nations. Quite a pair. Many oddballs and celebrities came to Rome. He made it a point to pick up as many as possible. He wanted to add to his autograph collection and have some fun. He often saw pictures of these ladies in the Roman tabloids.

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Just now he had no passengers and would try to get them. Toto maneuvered his car in near their bench and waited to be noticed. He would offer them a ride. It was getting late in the day, he thought, checking his watch. He wore a complex but inexpensive Korean expansionband wristwatch with many buttons and dials, cheap, but accurate to a quarter of a second: 4:07:03 PM. He’d suggest they ascend the hills of Rome to watch the sunset. Perhaps All’Aventino, or perhaps Gianicolo. He could promise warmer sun there, too. It was a mild December, but even so, the blindwoman looked cold. The Gianicolo, for sure, the Lover’s Lane. Toto shut his off-duty sign and crept along the curb next to the signorine curiose, following behind them several lengths. He lit a cigarette, opening one of the three or four daily newspapers he habitually bought for the cab, and waited, watching the two strange females. Of course, he thought, in Italian, patting his autograph book, Dr. Rubin would really be the coup. When the women resumed walking, Toto inched along the curb until they saw him. By the time they faced each other and agreed to hail the cab he was upon them like a gondolier. “Signorine,” he said, leaning out the passenger side window, “welcome to my taxi. I will take you wherever you wish, The Gianicolo, perhaps. We must hurry to catch il tramonto bellissimo, the beautiful sunset.” They stood and looked at him. Neither answered. What a perfect idea, Jewel thought. The pleasant effects of the opiated hash were renewed on a second wave. “I have seen you fotografie in newspaper,” Toto

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continued, taking off his cap and slapping it against the dashboard two or three times, his eyes darting from one face to the other. In real life their faces were spectacular. He flicked his cigarette to the sidewalk and stretched to stare at Jewel. Rent in sections, she wore an expression of exaggerated perplexity, the ruined muscles and skin paralyzed in distorted place as if her face had been slashed and pulled into an “X” by giant claws. Toto could hardly contain himself. He leapt out of the cab, tossing his cap onto the seat, unlatching and holding wide the back door. He proposed a reasonable flat rate he was sure they’d accept. But now as he indicated that he knew them, Jewel felt an instantaneous physical repulsion and reversed herself. She stepped away from the open Fiat. She curdled at the sleazy way he looked at them, and how he exaggerated the English vowels and distorted the grammar, and she detested his hoarse and rolling, insinuating, nasal voice. Jewel had been hearing the Italian language for months, and loving the sound of every musical syllable, but now from Toto’s mouth it sounded so sordid she couldn’t stand it. To Beatrice he spoke in Italian, freezing Jewel still more. She feared the darker nature of his character. But Beatrice could not have been more wholly pleased. She’d take the cabby’s suggestion of a mountain drive; it would be a diversion from Jewel’s inveigling attentions. She was leery of the entanglement they’d set the stage for and glad for any reason to postpone it. When Jewel hesitated, Beatrice put her arms around her to allay misgivings but bargained to win by anteing feigned acknowledgment of their unspoken promise.

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With this deliberate misunderstanding spawned in her expectations and fecundated by the Eastern herbs, Jewel succumbed and shook her doubts away. She took her lover’s hand and said “OK.” “Andiamo,” Beatrice instructed the cabbie, pleased by this man’s undisguised solicitation, as she enticed his eyes off Jewel onto herself. They got in the back of the cab. Beatrice re-lit her pipe, offering it to Jewel who shared it for the second time, now as preliminary to the thrill of an excursion with her lover, and to Toto, who to both their surprise, declined. He carefully put the car in gear and drove. The finely cured hashish infused Jewel’s virgin lungs, rekindling her awareness of Beatrice’s warmth next to her, and of the scene they played, riding up the ancient Roman hills to watch the sunset on this still, autumnal afternoon. The drive was peaceful and the driver did not speak. Jewel breathed more of the fantastic smoke and sought life’s solace in her mentor’s face, that unmarked leather screen. But those normally placid features assumed unseemly cast as the cab climbed higher on the light. Jewel fought for extra alertness against the lulling drug, but her will in this new contest did not gain the upper hand. Toto drove the rocky road and strained to be alert to every nuance in the back. His history as criminal and ruffian, pimp and vagabond schematized to recognize and understand them, to place these women in the limited categories he knew. He observed them in the mirror as they smoked, the girl and the artist, with equal interest. When he’d first espied them it had been Jewel who’d caught his eye: young and peculiar, a little maiden

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like a boy, valuable forse for possible ransom. Toto lived by cunning, not by plan, so jogged with every twist of opportunity. And Beatrice stimulated him. Toto was taken by Beatrice’s freedom, her presence, her lack of fear or timidity or reticence, her ease of decision. Sometimes passengers did behave in his taxi as though they were in private, sometimes disgustingly so, but Beatrice was possessed of an aura of intrinsic grace in her seclusion. Her arboreal movements enchanted him. He sensed in her magnetism the power to divert his life from its puny fated course and redirect it. Her blindness dazzled him, and his vivid impressions were heightened by her color and maturity. He was ageless himself, handsome, street-bred, large and sly. Beatrice played up to his excitement as she nestled and whispered with Jewel. Toto swerved as a car came wide around a turn, swinging dangerously downhill in the opposite direction. “Affanculo,” he loudly cursed, gesturing out the window. He was a cautious driver. He hugged the right shoulder against the mountain wall, steering and braking with concern, knowing he was not paying enough attention to the road, but he could not keep his eyes out of the rear-view mirror. He patted his knee as he drove, hand ready near the clutch. He patted his autograph book, too. Should he turn the radio on — no. The autograph book traveled on the seat beside him and he replaced it two or three times a year as it filled. Collecting was a passionate hobby for Toto and he spared no expense. Each book was made-to-order with pastel, clay-coated, linen pages edged in gold, and bound in

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exotic mammal and reptile skins. He selected the skins himself as part payment for his role delivering through Rome smuggled pelts and flesh and plumage, primitive, rare and sometimes living natural products on their way to secret destinations beyond the law, many in private menageries, which harbored especially wanton lust for jungle plunder. To Toto every volume was an emblem of his personal chieftainship and superiority. In some way he believed the soul of each slain animal passed through to his because he carried such a relic of its body. The present volume was bound in the iridescent lemon green skin from a four-month old male Costa Rican palm alligator. Each volume was kept in its original, creamy beige box, which boxes, although never the books, absorbed slight blots from handling. The fine books themselves never showed wear. Toto cared for them with special skin bleaches and creams and they retained forever, despite the harsh conditions under which he archived them in his damp living quarters, the heartbreaking quality of infancy. Also on his shelves, as a curious adjunct to the essential collection, Toto maintained several volumes of forgeries. His research brought him knowledge of famous people and their signatures so encyclopedic he perfected a talent for replication even beyond forgery. Not only could he reproduce authentic variations of any signature whether or not he had a replica to copy, he could momentarily become the person. He could draw the schema into his fingertips long enough to assume the personality and sign. Totoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clever hands flinched and gripped the steering wheel tighter. He quickly crossed himself. He imagined the presentation of his book to these women. He would 196

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approach Beatrice first. Rarely would an individual deny they were identified or refuse to sign, and under such a circumstance, if attempts by Toto failed to tease or trick them out of the lie, the passenger invaryingly complied after only the mildest threats. There had been very few personages in the years of his collecting who’d persisted in denying their identities until death. Toto imagined the look of the women’s signatures. Because of her disfigurement, news photos of Jewel were hard to interpret but from those he’d seen, now confirmed by the ghastly flesh itself, the face was too scarred to be a reliable indication of her character. Toto believed that a face and a signature were personality made manifest. He believed they were the selfsame unit measured by analogous scales and that in these two self-generated pictograms identity was coded. Lacking a proper face, the remaining icon of Jewel’s individuality would be her signature, and such a signature would be doubly valuable therefore. The only signal his imagination received from Jewel’s face about her autograph, and that only weakly, was that she might print, or the letters might be unconnected — but that face was unreliable — a mask of misidentity atwin to the lie of Dorian Gray. Beatrice was another story. Beatrice’s picture had appeared in Rome papers for years and her signature as an artist was also famous enough to be bought and sold on pieces of enduring paper for fantastic rates, although usually with a picture attached. His prior attempts to collect it had been foiled by her students. But Toto was patient, Beatrice was a regular fixture of the city, he’d known his opportunity would arrive some day. Every nuance of her written name was inscribed in Toto’s mind, elastically rewritten for circumstance of meeting. 197

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Toto imagined the opening capital “B” would not be a “B” so much as a heart with a tapered right ventricle, the beginning and end of the single stroke meeting below the center of the cleavage in a sharp and elegant point. The “e” would begin after a breath its upwardly curving course, its body leading with direction but no pressure into the back shoulder of the “a”, the line to stop and be restarted there looping like a nesting egg to soon run down and up the upslope of the “t.” The shaft of the “t” would rise sharply, its peak matched in elevation to the “B” but its base raised along the hillocks of advancing letters. The crossing of the “t” would not occur until the word “Beatrice” was assembled and then at mid-stem from “a” to “r.” The mesa of the “r” would be the line most horizontal to the paper, its downward slope veering steeply up again into the “i”, a brisk crisp letter immediately dotted, the dot curling off to begin the “c” as if “c-e” were a flying “w.” “Madragiore” would begin with a drop of the baseline to that of the “B” and swiftly scale to sharp twin peaks, the second ascendant delicate and light. Beatrice had fallen asleep in Jewel’s arms. Toto eyed them in the mirror, tipping his chin, raising his eyebrows, expanding his eyes wide and weaving his head back and forth several times a second like a snake. Jewel scrutinized the concentration his face reflected in his rear-view mirror. The late stages of smoked opiate visited her with their calling cards of apprehension and distrust. She checked his name and picture on the photolicense hanging from the fare-box. “Degliavolo, Ernesto.” Deliberately she interrupted his thoughts. “Signore,” Jewel said. “After the sunset I’d like you to drive us back down to our pensione. We live at

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Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia, quindici.” “La Signorina please give me address when you want-a to leave,” Toto cut in, not listening. He never wrote more than one destination at a time in his log. People often changed their minds. He didn’t like to erase or cross things out. He would only acknowledge one thing at a time, and thereby almost never made mistakes. It was essential, he thought, to keep control of all moment-to-moment events and immediate matters and not clutter his mind with notes for the future, memories to pile up and insert amidst what has not yet happened, events and plans and directions that could, and probably would, change before their timed timed in. Jewel slung herself back into the sun-cracked steerhide seat. Beatrice stirred against her godchild as the taxi lurched up the mountain. She dozed to the sound of gears changing and fresh air hissing through partially open windows, and to aromas of the terrain change as they left the river and the city, and drove along the wildshrubbed mountainside toward a drier, warmer peak. She nestled close to Jewel, who was happy Beatrice slept in her arms, but that was all. Jewel deliberately strained to avoid eye contact with Toto in the mirror, regretting the drive, and wishing at least she’d sat where she could have evaded her own reflected scars, not directly behind the driver as she was. Beatrice awakened slowly, swaying with the car. She felt a rise in herself of winds of the future as if by this rumbling macchina she would be transported unexpected length, a stretch unpredicted by the segments of her life already lived. Beatrice knew she was on an adventure capable of changing her perceptions profoundly, a presentiment which would prove true

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within the hour, and of restructuring her very nature, which would prove true within the day. Is there/what is the correlation between the future and a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s expectation?

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Chapter 27 Toto, Beatrice and Jewel on the Gianicolo at Sunset The Gianicolo was deserted, scrubby, the grass worn down by cars and people come and gone, trash and litter everywhere. The air was dry and oppressively hot. A small, ancient temple stank of urine. They were lucky to be alone; on such a holiday week the place was usually filled with tourists. And Jewel had high hopes for the view. Toto proudly presented it as if it were his own. “Che splendido. Che bello, che bello,” Toto spun himself out of the cab and gallantly opened Beatrice’s door. Jewel was left to hurry after them. Annoyed, she caught up and passed them, racing to the edge of the sacred hilltop to see its historic power released. Toto cautiously brought Beatrice toward the brink to appreciate the sunset at its fullest. 201

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The sky was brilliant yellow, dense as fluid, seen as if they stood on a rise at the bottom of a jar of liquid yellow air. Rings of other colors floated out on distant bands above neighboring hills over pools of pink and blue. Jewel approached the blazing gasses until her retinas scorched, and as she blinked, she saw through the intense glare, Beatrice facing the sun as if it were an ocean, her silhouette absorbing the heat of the light. And in hypervigilant squinting periphery, Jewel caught the cabby start toward the artist with that bane of her famous career, an autograph book. It was Jewel’s job to prevent this. She intercepted with the first distracting thing her mind could offer, a quote from Death in Venice appropriate to the moment: “The sun beguiles our attention from things of the intellect to fix on things of the senses.” Immediately as the sound of the quotation was transmitted through the radiation, the mountaintop was pierced by a wail and shriek streaming from Beatrice at the farthest, shrillest note of her vocal range, her white stick raised high, whipping and whirling in the air. Beatrice’s body appeared to momentarily detonate and burst. In a flash, particles of crystal, glass, mirror and vapor rearranged themselves in mid-air for a hundredth of a second. Beatrice had exploded and reformed. Jewel disbelieved what she saw. She was certain this must have been a trick of the light, surely not an explosion, though Beatrice did at that instant fall to the ground unconscious. Toto and Jewel both ran to revive her but Jewel pushed the stranger back so that she reached her first, and Toto ceremoniously deferred. He returned to the cab to replace his treasured book into

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its soiled linen box, and push the box into his knapsack. Whatever it might have been a momentino ago, it was not now the time to mark this page. But other than for the autograph he had no concern about Beatrice’s collapse. In his experience, women were prone to fainting and best not taken seriously. As long as he’d come back to the cab, though, he might as well bring the women his thermos of cold coffee. Jewel lifted her godmother, not solid in her arms. She held a sack of twigs, a bag of bones as weightless as a bird’s, a form no heavier than a large sheet of paper. Jewel laid the figure on the trodden grass alive and breathing but not lucid, her face shaded as well as possible between two ragged bushes. Jewel sat on the ground beside her, peering into Beatrice’s expressionless face, tight skin hanging back from her thin brow ridge and straight nose. Beatrice’s lips were slack, showing little teeth, still very white, like baby teeth. Jewel was filled with grief. She fanned Beatrice with her hands, blowing on her eyes and forehead, smoothing her long, silky hair. Toto returned with the thermos and placed a few drops of coffee on Beatrice’s parted lips with his fingers. She awoke — and upon revival Beatrice had received the sense of sight. “Madre Dio. Madre Dio!” Toto jumped up clutching and crossing himself, dancing around the bushes over Beatrice. Jewel fell back, and stumbled to right herself. There was no doubt her godmother’s eyes were beginning to see. Beatrice did not move for several minutes. At first she did not interpret the patterns she received.

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Subtle emotion, her usual antenna, had been drowned by sensation as if a sensate person had been stricken senseless. She became half-sighted psychically. But recognizing this instant as the beginning of something new, the artist knew to not apply old measure. Toto helped her stand, then stepped back to see what sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d do. She stood still, eager to savor her first impression and to monitor her first reactions. She restrained herself from yielding to the brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shortsighted habit of organizing visions. Instead, Beatrice kept her discipline and remained aloof enough to register as consciously as possible the sense itself, to allow this unexpected intrusion its intrinsically abstract descriptive power, and to receive its double signals in their real, unorganized dimensions, directly into memory with no recasting or distortion by interloping vestiges of precedent or prejudice or expectation or assumption that clog synaptic routes. Her two eyes regarded the wide-angle scene. The hilltop vista appeared as two chasms filled with stalagmites in pairs that folded toward her feet, then away, diminishing in size, then twirling out concave, each twin identically placed on separate curling segments projected on re-intersecting transparent screens. All elements recrossed like the fanning seeds in the heads of overlapping jellied sunflowers, each identically placed on the arc of its base, and overlaid upon the other in misregistration. In double image, focussed clearly at only one point at a time, no whole could be caught during any one duration. A solid thing was not locatable where either image fell, but somewhere in between. Solids changed contour as she moved. Depths of field shifted in each eye

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independently. Configurations regrouped in alternate double exposures. Warm colored forms upon a single plane with cool jumped cool as cool receded. There were so many of them and they blurred together. Beatrice pulled up the cowl of her cloak, and arranged the hood over her brows to shield her eyes. As the newly visible world asserted contiguity, disparate locations and properties entered and exited as her attention alighted and took off. Any vertex of brightness attracted both eyes briefly, but as soon as she landed there, the eyes were called away by unclosed lines and quasi-geometric shapes, repeated colors or pattern, parallelity, or text, even if printed on a scrap of garbage or in any language. Toto watched the transformations of the artist’s face, and the suspended reactions of Jewel, sizing up the situation. Beatrice stood still. She watched and listened. Oscillating pictures were accompanied by psychedelic sounds: Unfamiliar, unwelcome, unrelenting words and noises, evoking memories, meanings, thoughts and sketchy plans drowned out the silent personal directives she’d always followed. Newly invading streams of visual information flowed into her non-stop like tickertape, not pausing for her comprehension, its communicability lost, every snatch of meaning obfuscated by the next. Translucent rotating visions re-emerged with multi-track accompaniment of unrelated audiations out of sync. She closed her eyes and opened them repeatedly: blinking cut and pasted back the sights and phantom sounds. She raised her arms to protest against the spectacle. Beatrice’s hands fluttered huge before her eyes, and when she held them up again to examine them more closely, one

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appeared within the other as if broken and reset akimbo. The rest of her body, however, was not in the diorama. She herself remained invisible in front of it. Invisible, she thought she was when blind, but why not in the picture now? Likewise, what was behind her was unseen. When blind, her senses were quadridirectional. Now she was trapped in a black hole. All that lay forward had just now been filled with only what presents itself in just one time and place. All that lay behind her was opaque. The in front and in back, the places where she was and she was not in fore and aft were now no longer unified. When blind, her mind could be in any time or any place. But now they were no longer in her mind, but outside her body. Beatrice felt that this addition had subtracted much. What must she do to restore herself the sibyl she had been. She saw the waning sun caught in Jewel’s orange hair and mistook the child for a pillar of light. But soon she comprehended. Immediately, she thrust a bony finger toward the scarface, scowling fiercely at the cringing child. Jewel and Beatrice looked at each other for the first time in their lives and uncontrollable words sprurt out the artist’s raging brain. “You are not beautiful,” Beatrice shouted. “You are not beautiful. Not beautiful, not beautiful!” Jewel was mortified. In frozen fear she watched her godmother look at her. From its tranquil beginnings, Beatrice’s delicate face had become a mask of coarse contempt, more ugly than the damaged and original face of Jewel which had provoked it. The code with which the blindwoman had heretofore identified the invisible, was broken in the beam of sight. She beheld a monster.

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And to her own shame, Jewel felt no joy in her godmother’s miracle. It had betrayed her and made real her greatest fear: Beatrice could see her as her mother had: defective, ugly, substandard, ruined, repellent. Jewel gazed into the transfigured face of Beatrice and measured by its distortion, the magnitude of her loss. To confirm, Beatrice ran her fingers along the child’s scars as she had done so many times impartially before. “You are not beautiful,” she said again. Jewel searched her displeased face. Beatrice had lost her beatific gaze. Caustic thoughts bombarded her. Jewel clearly understood: the mistress of disguise herself could no longer penetrate her godchild’s. “I’m sorry,” Jewel said, overcome by weeping. She hurled herself back to the taxi to cry alone. Toto had not been displeased by this new slant. He was used to women crying. To his mind, women cried all the time and it meant nothing. Occasionally he deliberately made women cry, although he was glad that this particular display was spontaneous. Perhaps it might make him desirable to Beatrice in Jewel’s stead: the sensual nature of the women’s relationship hadn’t eluded him. Toto moved in on Beatrice, his memory still burning with Jewel’s face as it broke to cry. He lit a cigarette with a wax-stick match, cupping his hands. He relished his own depravity. “You view the sunset,” Toto said heartily, solicitously, to Beatrice. “La ragazza will come around.” He flicked the match toward the retreating girl, minimizing her, and blew this cigarette’s first full breath of smoke out through his nose, tucking the soft pack into the pocket of his clean white T-shirt. He smoked

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a cheap Italian brand, unfiltered. He led Beatrice to sit on a cracked marble bench over the crest of the hill and watch the sky filtrate on the city below. Suspended blue-green and violet molecules filled the valley beneath them and entered their four separate eyes from different angles, each apparatus sighting down only those shafts leaking into their private keyhole theaters. Both brains believed they saw orange strands separate out from yellow, and pink from orange, and purple from pink, blue from purple, gray from blue, each color projected on the miniaturized white marble and tangerine-colored stucco walls of Trastevere beneath the hill. Toto named the colors for her in Italian, and recalled the paintings of his countrymen who brought them to life. “A portrait artist is the greatest artist,” Toto said, gazing at the landscape. “I must see myself,” Beatrice shouted. She hurried to the taxi and twisted down the two outer side-view mirrors Toto had attached to the door for extra safety. A two-inch diameter circular convex fisheye was glued to the lower half of a flat vertical oblong. Beatrice saw in this double device rays reflected from her face and body divide and duplicate as different figures. Both were hit by the sun as it reappeared in the mirrors from beneath the horizon, angled against the slope of the hill to a higher level than otherwise could be seen, because without the angled mirrors it had already set. Two suns resounded from the segments of glass as if from two 93 million mile cascading check marks. The circular mirror returned to Beatrice’s eye a miniscule curving version of herself as a hornet in a field of shaped lightning. This was the first view she’d ever

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had of herself, and optically inexperienced, Beatrice accepted it as objective, interpreting the tiny mirage as her physical manifestation no matter that it did not correspond to what she’d seen of the bodies of Toto or Jewel nor to what was already visible unreflected: her lower body and her hands. These she interpreted as extensions for propulsion and communication, like cars and telephones, not part of her real body, which she did not think to corroborate by touch. She peered at the double side-view mirror from a foot away, considering the tiny fairy she thought she saw, then approached it more closely. Only now was her face alone framed in the flat mirror, the convex disk turned black by her clothing. People had rendered linguistic drawings of her beauty, but standing in front of the sun, blackskinned as any upon the Earth, she could not discern a single feature but her shape. The four white highlights glinting from her sclerae made no sense. Toto looked on but didn’t think the situation through and turn the car or find a flashlight or serve to cast any light upon her. Standing right there, Beatrice clearly heard Jewel’s muffled crying inside the car, but she did not call to her. Instead she turned her reeling vision on the man. Rugged, hardy, handsome, charming, powerful, solid, sensual, boorish, limited: her eyes formed runaway opinions of their own. The outer skin of his lips stretched over bulging pillows, soft and moving as they changed from one obscene shape to another. Heavy, dumb, insolent sloping eyes were close-set under thick, arched eyebrows. But Beatrice hadn’t enough experience with faces to read character there, or possibly was pleased by the questionable character she read, for in this scoundrel

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Beatrice thought she’d found a magician who could serve her well. She attributed her miracle to him. But Toto sustained no power to work miracles; he customarily credited fate’s entry to his column. Drawing a last drag on the butt of his cigarette and stomping it to the ground, he came to face Beatrice more squarely. She believed this driver was meant to serve her and looked at him as best she could. Toto longed to finally present her with his book. He envisioned removing the tender, plump volume from its ivory box and balancing the supple, living, rounded square out on his palm like an offering. But he could not summon the impulse to pull it again from his knapsack and hand it to her while she was still in the throes of such personal upheaval. He worried he risked failure; she might decline and possibly reject him altogether. The first signature of Beatrice Stregasanta Madragiore immediately after having become sighted would be a most prized specimen. Even morso because he’d lost the opportunity for her final autograph when blind: those in existence had become more valuable because that door was closed. And should she revert to blindness, this sighted signature would have yet greater value. But Toto knew that the presentation of his book at inopportune moments made it difficult and sometimes nasty to collect. He and Beatrice stood immobile in each other’s gaze. “I have the idea,” Toto said, blinking free. He knocked loudly on the car window to signal Jewel it was time to stop her silly crying. “The stars come soon. Let me take you for the evening to my beautiful villagio, Ostia, on the beach. I have-a fine telescope there. We can see the comet.”

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Jewel sat up in the car. Could this be true? She’d heard him say he had a telescope. She wanted to go see it. Halley’s comet now at the end of 1985 might be the biggest celestial event of her life. She listened to the conversation outside the car, hoping Beatrice would say yes. But Beatrice must be exhausted, she paused to think with gnawing compassion. Would Beatrice want her along anymore? Maybe she should put a scarf or veil over her face. Maybe she should finally give in to surgery. What if they decided to drop her at the pensione on their way through town? Surely Beatrice should not roam around tonight with a stranger. She must be tired and weak. At least she should eat something. She must be near the end of her strength. “Maybe Beatrice should see a doctor?” Jewel called timidly, not lowering her window, but concerned enough for her godmother to sacrifice the little pride she still had left. Toto and Beatrice laughed derisively.

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Chapter 28 Toto, Beatrice and Jewel Drive to Ostia They drove the ancient road at twilight to Ostia, facing west at sea level toward a second sunset, passing Toto’s thermos of cold, sweet, bitter, thick, gritty espresso, taking sips. Women were so easy to maneuver. “We follow the sun?” Beatrice asked, but then, when it finally set below the lowest horizon, and colors finally faded, she still hadn’t grasped the billiard nature of the phenomenon. “I’m losing my sight again.” Toto switched on his headlights and the domelight inside the cab, to Beatrice’s surprise and pleasure. Her vision was settling down and alerting her to the content of events. She admired Toto’s driving skills and asked him questions about the car. Beatrice sat in front with

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him. Jewel sat alone in the back. When a fly buzzed in and landed on the dashboard, Toto killed it instantly with a quick swat of his newspaper. “I admire insects,” Beatrice said. “Shit-eaters,” spat Toto. “Most highly evolved social systems on the planet,” she said. “Ants, bees, termites, wasps —. All the workers are female. A few males, just for mating, then they die. One queen, although she can spawn others if she wants, but makes them leave the nest,” Jewel thought she could take part, but they ignored her. Instead, Toto told a complemental tale, The Rape Of The Sabine Women, known both to Beatrice and Jewel, but both thought the retelling would be worth relistening to. In this legend, Romulus founded the city of Rome where a she-wolf found him and his twin brother, Remus. After slaying his twin, Romulus populated the city by freeing neighboring prisons into it, but there were no women. These new Romans invited their neighbors, the Sabines, to come with their wives to a banquet, then abducted the wives. When the Sabines regrouped to attack Rome and reclaim their wives, the women preferred to stay with the Roman men. Or so the story goes, Jewel sniggered, as told by a Roman. Probably plenty wanted to return to their families. Many young prostitutes lined the road. Toto waved and honked and laughed as he drove past them, all known to him. Toto stopped at a dusty market to buy groceries while Jewel and Beatrice waited in the car. At a lower altitude, the evening here was muggy. A dozen teenage girls and children came near the cab, some to follow Toto, some to

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gawk at his ladies. Jewel turned her face away from her window full of little girls staring and pointing to her scars. Two bigger boys swaggered over, pausing their amusing game torturing a nest of vespe. Jewel and Beatrice were silent with each other. When Toto returned, Beatrice handed him money for the food. Then she rolled down her window to give a child a thousand-lire note. “Go home, go home now, little one,” Beatrice said in Italian as Toto put the car in gear. “A casa ora va.” Toto drove off carefully as more children surrounded them. The questions of reality are too vast, Jewel thought as they pulled away, the answers only temporary and insufficient, too dependent on miserable unsatisfactory replies to earlier easier questions. If there ever was a foundation of understanding between individuals, it was built on quicksand. How does the present happen; was there no way one’s will could improvise a happy ending? Jewel despaired. She did not approach these thoughts to marvel, but to truly answer them, to break the codes of reality, the acknowledged mandate of science. But her advanced scientific education would not begin for several years, and she didn’t believe in supernatural determinants.

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NO WIRES!!!!!!

Chapter 29 In Ostia Toto lived in an old fishing shack past the back bay of the northern cove of Ostia on a desolate point of the farthest scalloped peninsula on the last width of isthmic shore before the cliffs. South from his shack was beachfront more desirable for lido or development, and to the north lay beach at low tide only. At high tide the surf reached tall on the cliffs and pitted them with caves and rugged juttings. This ribbon of low tide sand was all that remained of the broad, master beaches of ancient times. Totoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s beach itself was hardly ever more than twenty feet at best. Many a time his shack was flooded and it listed far to lee. It was no more than a timbered shanty, bleached and peeling. There had once been whole colonies of

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shacks and sheds along the bays and coves of the long peninsula and although some of the other stretches had one or two still standing, this was the last inhabited cabin so far north. Toto led the women around back. Under the most downsloping corner of the sunken roof stood a rain barrel partially full. Toto drank from a tin cup hanging by a dirty string from the horned scalp of a dwarf-ibex hammered to a shingle by a rusty nail five centuries old that he’d once found on the ground and thought would do. “Drink,” he said, pushing the dented cup at them. Beatrice took it first and drank and returned it to him. He took another turn, dipped and refilled the cup and offered it to Jewel. She accepted, repelling her repulsion, eager to see the telescope. But Toto picked up on her brief hesitation. It excited his animal instincts, reinforced by his animal relics, and erroneously suggested a prurient motive for Jewel’s interest in his erogenous instrument. He turned to look straight at her as she took the filthy cup, and let her know he knew she gauged him. He gestured at her briefly with his lips like a moo or kiss as he turned away to go unlock the house. Jewel rinsed her mouth with the water and wanted to spit, but this refined child had never spit in anything but a bathroom sink. She let the metallic mouthful trickle down her throat, not because she was parched, which she was, but priggishly because she did not want to appear coarse in front of one coarser — he’d turned away but might turn back and see. She forced herself to swallow, chagrined to realize, though, that she was holding herself to high ideals only because she thought Toto’s lower. Nothing Jewel might do did not test the purity of her own

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integrity, and find it lacking. Toto backed out the weathered door, down the rickety steps, with a large Celestron telescope. The fat barrel was mounted on a strange altazimuth and tripod, homemade from lead pipes and carried over his shoulder like a bazooka. About thirty paces south was an acclivity of clumped grasses abutting stunted pines, just enough raised from the beach to serve as a little platform. The women followed him, standing apart from one another, not speaking as he eased the assembly into place. Low fan palms faced inward from the curve of the land swelling the sand and protected it from breeze, making the location warm and still. Waxy sand flowers grew low along the ground. Jewel noticed Toto did not trample them. In this oasis, he set the apparatus. Jewel stood apart from but within easy reach of Beatrice, who had never turned to face her since the mountain. Toto positioned his tube of lenses toward the southwest into a sky aglow with deepening teal. Venus had just come into view. The sky promised to be clear for some time. Toto bent carefully to the eyepiece and located Halleyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s comet with no difficulty, adjusting the focus with exactitude, clockwise and counter-clockwise, clockwise and counter-clockwise again but less so, and then a third time, even less. A gecko-bound notepad and raw ebony lead dangled from a string tied to its base. Toto looked at his intricate Korean watch and recorded the time of his sighting: 7:1 2:1 2 PM. As he lifted his brawny arm he passed his hand, palm open, lingering over Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s back, dragging his middle finger slowly across her shoulder blades, feeling her thin body stiffen beneath her light clothes as he offered his position to her. He guided her

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to the equipment, his hand still on the back of her floral shift, but he freed her once she was in place. He enjoyed her shudder as she was released. He was disappointed in this preliminary test of her for easy consensuality, though: he’d taken her acceptance of his drinking water as acquiescence. He did not like women who teased, even though aroused by frightened girls, no matter they usually proved troublesome in the end. He brushed her aside with the back of his hand and took another look through the scope, replaying the focus a hair’s breadth back and forth, and recorded the time to the nearest second once more: 7:1 4:01 PM, and degree of altitude. Jewel observed him. The precision of his focusing called to mind the conservatism of his driving, and she wondered at this complex brute. “I will get the food,” he announced, turning back to the cab for the wines and antipasti they’d bought. Toto made her nervous. But at last she could look through the lens! Within seconds she located the dancing smear. To finally see the comet was a shock of such violent pleasure she withdrew immediately. Jewel had a terror of happiness. She switched places with Beatrice, looking down at the ground, noticing the Adromischus cristatus plants. The plants were stumpy and crinkle-edged, ranging in color from gray-green to purple, and in a small patch extending through that range so two were bright magenta. Jewel thought how a completely red strain or race might be artificially bred. “Grazie tante,” said Beatrice, sliding past Jewel to take her turn, their fragrances welling so familiar to them both. Jewel was aroused. She thought she sensed from Beatrice a renewed impulse toward her, a second chance. Perhaps under the open sky Beatrice had

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reconsidered and forgiven her deformity. Beatrice had never been a trivial person. Their love had pre-dated both their transformations. What difference could it make to Beatrice what her lover looked like? How could she have an esthetic regarding new experience? Beatrice extended a tentative hand to her as their bodies touched. Jewel wouldn’t hold her lapsed love against her; it had only been a test of their fidelity, and Beatrice had come back. Perhaps they might lie together in the beach flowers, even if they hadn’t on the mountain top, drink wine and watch the stars. She would like to drink wine tonight with Beatrice; her first experience with hashish hadn’t been bad, not so intoxicating as she’d imagined. Her memory mitigated her fluctuating emotions. Jewel’s mind raced as she lingered, changing places with the artist before the long white tube, touching Beatrice lightly as Toto had touched her. He was away. He was not the important one here, he was just their guide, a servant. But did Beatrice truly mean to rekindle their love? Yes or no the outcome would take courage. She glanced quickly at Beatrice’s flickering eyes. “My child,” Beatrice said in her occult way, emphasizing the word “my”, but still not looking at her. Toto called something. He was standing by the cab. Jewel didn’t catch it, but heard Beatrice call back, “I will project a diversion.” What? This caught Jewel off guard. As usual, there was no telling what Beatrice meant, but this was different. This was their special story-game. Jewel wondered, as she never had before, was this just a pose with her, or could it possibly be true after all? She must observe her more closely for evidence either way. Jewel was both a devout

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enthusiast of fiction, and a scientist willing to consider the possible reality of every revelation. “My child,” repeated Beatrice, reaching to her. Never had her godmother’s fingers felt so cold. Apprehension welled again in Jewel and tears came she didn’t want seen. Jewel didn’t acknowledge the advance. She’d encouraged it, and almost took it, but it wasn’t big enough for Jewel to know it honest. She looked again at the ground and walked toward the ocean. Beatrice stared after her, which she liked, but that was all. At the water’s edge Jewel lowered her shift, not to taunt her temptress but to put her renewed sincerity to a final test. She would reveal to Beatrice the full extent of her completely malformed, naked body; if it should provoke new abhorrence she must know now. Certain of Beatrice’s eyes on her excoriated flesh, Jewel stepped into the warm, dusky sea. Returning from the car, Toto saw Jewel disrobing at the shoreline and was sure that this display was meant for him. Adjusting his crotch, he approached the nearest woman. “Drink from the bottle,” he said to Beatrice, twisting out the cork with a single jerk of his T-shaped screw, his eyes still on the skinny girl wading straight into the water. “I don’t have no glass.” He stepped in front of Beatrice and stroked his devise, refocusing it less than a thirtieth of a degree, and wrote down another time: 7:29:27 PM. Ocean, Jewel thought as she plunged into the breaking surf, its chop hushing her, flooding her with relief. “You see?” Toto asked Beatrice if she could see the

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comet through the telescope, but those words meant several things to her. “See?” she replied, or maybe, “Si.” Toto was satisfied. Beatrice was disturbed about her godchild but pleased to be alone with this strong man. He brought his arm around her, pulling her light body back again, making as if to instruct her. She looked down the tube but didn’t think to point it toward Jewel. As Toto explained things, she looked distractedly into space and cemented other issues on her mind: there must be no communication with other worlds. She must do what she could to kill Jack’s plans. She repeated this vow silently as she marveled aloud at the comet she pretended to see for Toto’s sake. Her powers were not limitless — timeless and international, yes, but decidedly Earthbound. Her abilities were conterminated by this sphere, and she well knew it. Toto spread an old army blanket on the sand and sat where he could watch both women. He sucked deep swigs from the bottle, finished it and opened another. Beatrice came towards him. Toto passed her the wine, wiping the bottle with his forearm, lifting it to her as she stood beside the blanket. She watched for Jewel until the faintest sky light quit. Topaz filled the air. Stars blinked singly into azure night. Toto relieved himself against the rocks, and later into the water, and again in steaming patterns on the cooling sand. Beatrice lit her pipe again, and this time Toto took it. The sea and sand and sky spread out before her attached parabola-like to her eyes. The view protruded from her eyeballs like a plate in the lips of Ubangi women, the shape of a horizontal ellipse. All portions of the vista were visible at once, subsurface at the rim, stretched to

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the horizon and dropping off the far edge. Aware of every pucker in the blue-black monochrome, she could barely make out the little ripple that was Jewel. The view rolled up; her cornea became a wall on which the picture was pinned. Toto removed his white T-shirt and lay back, ostentatiously pulling off his jeans. They’d been pretty hard to come by, and he wanted to make sure she knew he owned a pair. Grinning up at Beatrice naked, he tore the first piece of bread from the long loaf he’d bought, and wadded a handful into his mouth. “I went to school of the Sisters,” he told her. “What did you learn?” she asked. “You are sexy, but you remind me them.” “Oh? All or one in particular?” “Si, una. She look like a cat.” “I have a cat in New York. A girl is staying at my place to take care of it.” “How the cat look?” “All black, right now.” Toto didn’t know what she meant. There had been a tribe of feral cats among his dunes for years, that he’d made use of. “Allora, this cat incolore?” He meant it as a joke. Beatrice stared at him for a minute. Offhand remarks by others were her I Ching. “What you do now?” he continued when she didn’t answer, motioning her to lie down with him, tugging at her cape. It slid off her shoulders and he draped it over them. “Well,” she tried to answer; what could she say? She wasn’t sure. What will I do now? She would never teach again. She wouldn’t make

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more art. “With sight,” she said, “I am no longer the center, but a point on an edge. I am no more transparent but opaque.” Would Toto even pretend to understand? He did not have a subtle mind. She’d taken all his measure from the first. What magic she’d thought he might possess was only what she’d credited him for because she was with him when the magic came to her. Toto was not the best of muses, but he was here and he would do. She turned her body into him and tenting the long, loose black cape around them both, they ate and drank, catching glimpses of the child far out. I’m trapped like a fly in a universe of sticky particles, Beatrice thought. They adhere to me physically and leak into my inner body through the tiny open pinholes of my eyes, violating the sanctity of all my passageways, their penetration interfering with my vision of the world. They project unwanted outside light into my protected crevasses, exposing them and bleaching me away. The image of his Sisters and her cats stayed with her as she considered a reply. “I’ll start a new life,” she said. “I’ll begin again as wholly opposite.” Jewel had swum out beyond their view. The sky was black now. Toto didn’t really know or care what Beatrice meant. He slowly furled back her cloak.“I’m worried about Jewel,” she said. Before making love, Toto encouraged her in the presumption that Jewel just wished to be alone. He embellished the half-truth of some fishing shacks where Jewel could find shelter should she swim back to another point on shore. And as they settled in to sleep sometime much later, they saw in a sheen of a phosphorescence,

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Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ragged red hair as she drifted toward the northern cove. Toto pointed out to Beatrice how pleasant the evening was. She watched the glowing tide intensify and insisted that he do go for her at dawn. She drew her cape over them on the blanket, and they slept.

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Chapter 30 Jewel Swims Out As much as it was the nature of a lovely evening ocean to generously offer peace and tranquility to all lucky enough to be bathing at that hour, Jewel could not abandon herself to this warm, twilight swim. The soothing sea, its swelling, rhythmic, overlapping crescents breaking behind her on the grainy beach, did not assuage her angst. She’d entered the water unsure of Beatrice’s reaction to her body and not knowing if she’d be loved or hated. It had been a mistake to relinquish the pose of docility practiced so well for so long, mistake to cede control of herself to anyone, even Beatrice. Jewel swam in profound sadness, in slow, deep, regular, rolling strokes and measured breaths until the light was gone. Light is a trick of the brain to describe the result of moving particles in the matter-energy exchange, or heat, 226

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and what is heat but motion, and what is motion but vector oblique to the Big Bang, Jewel tried to figure as she pulled herself along the water on her back, her face toward the Milky Way. All is E. We do not “see,” Jewel knew for sure, for seeing implies distance, which would be magic. We are absolutely connected by physical strands to all the objects we pretend are elsewhere. I see the universe as completely dark. It is a spongy void containing still and volatile sculptures interconnected by streaming filaments of dashing photons, which, when they strike a living eye, burn imagined sensoriations denoting the attributes of their far-off origins into its brain. She stopped swimming to look back, hoping she’d see Beatrice on the shore, perhaps waving or beckoning her to return, or even better, sailing out to meet her. Jewel saw nothing but water. She’d never swum in an unconfined space before. This was indeed Shakespeare’s “unparted ocean.” She banged her fist on the water to see the ripples disperse evenly, to see God faithfully illustrate the principle that Huygen recognized. Science answers theology’s questions, she thought, as she shared these waters and this sky with all thinkers before and after her. She was out far. The air was cooler than the water. She treaded and searched the beachward seascape but could barely see the shack. There was a faint dome-glow inland from lights still on in the city of Rome, very far off. She turned away, swam a restful breast stroke a quarter mile farther into the Mediterranean Sea, then stopped again. Toto’s roof had disappeared. She listened, hoping to hear Beatrice call. She heard her head throb loudly. She floated on her back, thin arms and legs stretched far apart like crossed twigs. The sky had filled with millions of tiny, sharp stars. The moon had not yet risen, if it would. Jewel thought of the date and knew that it 227

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would not. She found the constellation of Orion, his body stretched directly over her, the Gemini pair looking on, and the other winter constellations of the Northern Hemisphere, at their brightest this night of the no-moon New Moon: Great Dipper, Great Bear, Little Dipper, Cassiopeia’s Chair and the six stars of the glorious Pleiades. She found the planets Jupiter and Venus, and the slightly reddish Saturn, and then the single stars Polaris and Mizar, the bright Capella, red Aldebaran, magnificent Sirius, and to test herself she sought The Lost One, the star the ancient Arabs called “Proof”, because to see it proved keen vision. Even without a telescope she could make out the comet, very low, about to set. She was sorry she hadn’t spent more time behind Toto’s lens. She tried to focus on the trailing “y” of Halley’s but it was visible only as she looked away. This phenomenon was called “phi,” she recalled, and due to one’s blindspot, the insensate point where the optic nerve leaves the eye for the brain. Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum, her mind wandered, the curious name of the idol to which children were sacrificed in ancient Phoenicia, and buried in pretty urns, twenty thousand of which have been excavated. Societies that sacrifice their innocents to leaders’ lusts all do so in the names of gods. An oxymoronic sensation of humiliating pride roused her: At the time Phoenicians were sacrificing children, their Hebrew neighbors were led by Solomon, who beseeched God to make him wise. Not rich,powerful, rutty. But wise. Jewel searched the sky, hearing Shelley’s voice say “ebon vault.” Poetry didn’t help. Nothing could put God back in Heaven. Any god that might have been, had come and gone, subsumed by its own creation. Otherwise it would have to stand outside the universe it made and closed. The presidium of science is internal. Scientific laws drive from within its system. Each part of the system 228

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affects the others. This was the radical truth of Father Abraham: that the system itself is a singularity. But he did not smash the final idol, she thought. The concept of God as an overarching set of immutable principles was within Jewel’s purview, but not as a personification. God, as worshipped, is another idol, she thought. God is the Idol of Science. Jewel lay rigid, facing west, the earth turning under her, floating her backward out of sight of Halley’s smudge as it finally set. These thoughts were too much for her. She was exhausted. She must return to shore; the swell had heralded a tidal shift. She’d rest another minute in the starry sky and sea, as gradually calming waters mirrored the spangles above, and set her adrift. Gradually the purling waters ebbed. I can envision time, she thought, searching the glimmering sky. “Submerge yourself,” the sea sounds said. “let your own luke currents lull you under.” Jewel was instructed not to resist, to relax and let herself sink. She listened carefully, compelled but unconvinced. Aggressive water sylfs forced her to gulp the brine, dive under, “You are not beautiful, Life’s a bitter disappointment.” But softer, deeper, loving voices, reassuring daddyvoices, children’s voices, voices of friends who cared for her but she’d abandoned, even her mother’s voice, called her to ignore life’s awes and dreads, be grateful her situations weren’t worse, live for the sake of other lives lost, for tortured prisoners, slave laborers, abused innocents, youth-robbed miners, starving peasants, foot-bound girls, abandoned addicts’ babies, horrid lives and gruesome deaths by the millions —. But visions of unfortunates did not make Jewel more highly prize her life. On the contrary: it was more impossible to bear. She deliberately gulped salt water to flood her sinuses and burn her throat. She dove under the surface, came up 229

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sputtering and forced her body down again. The water was cold and black, full of pointy little glares. “I want to forget everything I know,” she cried aloud. But instead, she remembered even more, and as usual with Jewel, not only from her life, but from her reading: “The unexamined life is not worth living”; how many times had she come across that unexamined quote? She held her breath against its arrogant, elitist shallowness; its insidious path down Devil’s Leap Lane. Clearly, the opposite is what’s true: only the unexamined, uncomplicated, unquestioned life is simple and cheap enough to be worth living; the price of the examined life is much too high. People who were sure of themselves, never questioning assumptions no matter how stupid, were the happiest; their lives cost little to live and were well worth it; they already knew what to do and what to say they think — oh, “ignorance is bliss”, now that’s the truer truth. Not the rigors of the overly examined life, which spins the fibrous agonies to ever finer filaments of examination until examination of the enterprise of enterprise, and then the worth of worth. Obviously, there could be only one final solution: Jewel Rubin’s life was not worth the pain of living it. She plunged below, but bobbed up coughing. Oh why had she given up her catatonic posture of forbearance. “Your grandparents’ genes must reach shore.” Still angered by her unextinguished life, she thrust herself forward and spit. But this time, those few brain cells misery grudged her did not succumb to disheartening swell of tide or tug of undertow. They buoyed her up. “Go on,” the kindest instruction came. “You know your purpose now.” She did, and heard the break of waves in two directions. A sandbar, a ship or an object must be nearby. She swam again to find the second breaking tide, but 230

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did not find an ocean land in fifty strokes when a plank of driftwood banged into her. It was as welcome as a ship. A sleek yacht sailed up to her out of the blackness, outfitted in silver. Jewel heard the shallow laps against the little craft. Each fitting caught the starlight in platinum-tipped streaks and points, and threw them out around her in the water. She grabbed for it clambered on. The lines of the ship were strung with tiny gold charms strewing petals and pennies of reflection to lead her aboard. Splinters pierced her hands and knees and bony pelvis-points as she scraped herself aboard the wood, but she had no choice. From the bridge, two elderly figures beckoned her dropping a braided rope ladder. As she climbed she saw the vessel’s name in script along its taffrail: Stella Maris. It sank and twisted, but if she paddled and stayed flat on her stomach, she could keep afloat. On board a fragile old man in white and his twin sister greeted and caressed her welcome, crooning in unison, “You will sleep with us together in the warm, perfumed bed of incestuous love.” Jewel was falling asleep! She must wake up or drown. Swim back to shore. The sea was undergoing a change in tide; the pull of the unseen moon might assist her. Time would tell. The sky was lit more densely from below and an oily fog had surfaced on the seaward horizon. Jewel was chilled through. Her thin, numb body shivered and jerked in the water. Straining to look back toward the beach, still unable to locate Toto’s cabin, she noticed that the little glow of Rome had slid many degrees south. She’d drifted with the current too far north. Best swim to the nearest point of shore, she told herself, and walk back overland. This was only common sense, but trusting this mistake would come close to costing Jewel her life just when she’d planned to bank it. She tried to swim but was too weak for even a loose side stroke. Her arms and legs twitched and cramped; she was afraid her teeth would crack, they chattered so. Even an elementary backstroke 231

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was impossible. I’ve changed my mind too late. But as her heart tore, tears welled to mix their salt water with the sea. Her body rattled, loosened, reviving to steer the plank, keep it from hitching up and down and twisting. Her eyes burned; water was painful in her lungs and she fought nausea and thirst. She was cold above the surface of the water, and longed to stay beneath, but if she only held the beam she was too weak: she’d have to ride it. The situation was becoming more urgent. She must relax her mind against these physical demands, she put out a call for any thought to meliorate cognition. x How like my mother I am after all, the thought came, how hopelessly perturbed and out of control. What did she once hear someone remark about Caroline — that she could manipulate her hysteria — was that it? Jewel paddled and breathed, paddled and breathed, trying to fight down awareness of her puny efforts against the tons of water. What would my mother do if she thought I was drowning. Probably she’ d push me under. Yet with a thought like that, black-humorous, sarcastic, false, she knew she had regained the will to live. It had been her mother after all who’d taught her how to swim, and they went swimming often and enthusiastically. My mother inflates her emotions, though, as I try to dispel my own. She stroked and stroked, piloting her insubstantial raft, pulling her thoughts away from her body, hauling them anywhere. They landed on the memory of a black and white photograph of Beatrice holding her as a newborn. The photograph still stood on the mantle in Princeton. Beatrice’s face is gleaming, demonically proud. The baby is washed out in overexposure or underprinting, a detailless white blob of glowing light. Jewel understood she’d been under her godmother’s influence since birth. Recently she’d found a packet of zealous letters Beatrice and her father had written in the 1960s. Today such fervent earnestness would fall on ears 232

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as laughable and ludicrous. Thus had been the language of the times, Jewel knew, “The Sixties.” Their letters had shown Beatrice differently to Jewel, more alive, younger, and with no bitterness. Beatrice was unmistakably bitter now; Jewel had been ignoring this new aspect of her godmother: an edge of spite, a will to spoil, to alter, to purposefully ruin. Hadn’t she even wanted Jack to discontinue his experiments, she as much as said so in the garden at the party, when she’d invited her to Rome so unexpectedly. “Someday I will lure you to Rome,” she had written in those letters. But she’d written that to Jack, not to Jewel. Did those letters still have meaning now? Other phrases from the letters came to mind. Jewel had never considered Beatrice to be unbalanced or lacking in serenity before. Jewel’s teeth clacked uncontrollably. Her arms and neck and back and shoulders ached. Why bother work so hard to save herself? Why had she decided not to drown? She had a purpose but had forgotten it. Was it fated happen anyway? Her power to reason was becoming less clear with every effort. She breathed in deep, blew out forceful bubbles to summon as much focus as she could. She re-aimed her intellect toward meaning and selfcommunication, away from sensation and perception and despair. The night had become foggy, oleaginous. She steadied her physiology for maximum endurance, releasing whatever chemical resources it could manufacture and girded for the harsh environment. She tried to keep herself awake, hand-paddling toward land she couldn’t see. What had Jack once said? He’d made a lot of promises. If he followed his new tangent, she didn’t know if he’d be keeping any. On this note, Jewel’s consciousness failed. She closed her eyes and climbed aboard the boat of the silvery twins.

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Chapter 31 Exhausted and Exposed Exhausted and exposed, unconscious, floated by the drifting berth, Jewel did at last reach shore. A narrow ledge of pebbled beach fronted a steep bank of sandstone cliffs. Her barely living body paused at the waterline where the tide pushed her partway up the incline toward a niche. She rolled into this shallow cave higher up and slightly drier, the sand there slowly giving off the last of its collected heat of day. She lay on a needle of land blanketed by an abrasive surf washing over her naked lap like Lucy on the first day of our age. The atmosphere was filling in. The scape was charged with night mist, ceil occluded, too overcast by now for stars; there was no moon. There

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were no boats, no buoys, no lights on sea or land of any kind. There were no ships, no birds, no flotsam, jetsam, seaweed, trash. There were hardly any shells. Her single piece of driftwood would retreat on the next tide out. There was no visibility and no reflection. There was no outline, no change in tone on any side. There was no scale or distance. If Jewel had been awake she would have witnessed as a sight of nature the impenetrable pearly haze of blindness, land exhaling from the shore. Light and heat, light and heat, were all, and both were null. As night ticked on, the wind blew over Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s frail body on the ledge, the sea eroding her tenuous headland. A stick of wood had barely saved her from the water and her life had come to this. Against her battered frame, the sea and land breathed out upon each other as day and night changed places in the sky, and land exhaled its final breath. Jewel lay on the meager curving shelf and slept throughout the starless hours unharmed by surf or any creature alive or spiritual until the dawn.

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Chapter 32 Incident at the Northern Cove Toto found her in the first pastel of daylight. He found her as he thought he might, motionless and coppery, a thin, naked child thrust downward and forward, pulled underwater by the strong undertow, legs invisible underbeach, half-buried at tideline by incoming sand and water, short tufting orange hair fluffing like a young anemone. He could not rescue her at first so stricken was he by this image. It did not occur to him to think that she was dead although she looked it. Her face hung toward the sand and only her head and neck and part of one shoulder and underdeveloped breast, part of her back and side, were visible and as yet unburied. She was stuck on a slant like an old bronze tombstone in an apse against the cliffs. Toto was alone with the trapped and sleeping girl. 236

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Carefully he excavated her body from the many hours accumulation of beachdrawn sand. And, since Jewel was still unconscious, Toto took his opportunity and he raped her. A drop of slime announced him and would have been evidence of his crime if anyone had retrieved and differentiated it from other natural deposits. Naked, Jewel awoke as she was hoisted off the beach by a Neanderthal she did not recognize, and carried on his shoulder to a drier place. He rubbed her with a towel from his knapsack, and wrapped her in a cat-fur blanket. He built a fire with a few dry lengths of tight-rolled giornali he’d brought, and fed her bread dipped in cold stale coffee from his thermos. But with this minimal comprehension of her circumstance, came to Jewel an uncertain awareness that although she was in some way familiar with the objects in the area around her she had no words for them; not that she acknowledged lacking words: she didn’t miss them. Who or where she was she also did not know or question. Jewel Rubin had sensation, emotion, intellect and imagination, but no memory, libido, will, animus, or ego-intacta. Such all, her self, her present life, began now with the moment she was lifted off the beach. Toto searched her face and stroked her. The brute seemed gentle, she thought without words. She had no recollection of the rape. Who or where she was she had no clue. She did not understand the broken languages in which he spoke to her, nor even recognize his sounds as English or Italian or as language. Her thoughts did not arrive to her as words or concepts, but as feelings. “You have come so close to death,” Toto led her to believe. “I rescue you.” Jewel did not understand, but nodded gratitude. When the tide was fully out, Toto knotted his furs around her and helped her along the beach back to his cabin. 237

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Chapter 33 Toto and Jewel Return to the Shack A s they returned to Toto’s oceanfront he saw first

that Beatrice had not remained asleep on the sand where he’d left her, and the cab was gone, too. Toto carried Jewel into the house, galled to find Beatrice away. She had shaken and folded his army blanket neatly and slid it just inside the door but there was no note. No. Attendete. Here it is, one of his gray linen writing paper sticking out of a chink in the wall. He placed Jewel down between two unsturdy chairs pushed together, to leave alone for a moment, tossing the blanket onto her still folded, and grabbed Beatrice’s note. What’s black and white and re(a)d all over? What the fuck was that? The oldest inglese riddle in

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the world? Even Toto knew the answers — both answers, the clean-clever and the dirty-sacrilegious. Why did she leave, he wanted to know, and where’ d this pretentious bitch go. He regretted having shown her how the car works. Could someone learn to drive that quickly? He was annoyed. He was ready to get their adventure over with soon; it was morning already, time to get the book signed and take the girls home. He stepped back outside the cabin and squinted at the glaring sky. Perhaps Beatrice had driven back to the food market, he thought. Women had done such things before. Some had even gone out to whore on the road for an hour or two while he slept, and brought him back the money. He went to get some water from the rain barrel. He wouldn’t give the riddle any further thought. Jewel heard Toto go around behind the cabin to its lowest corner. She was coming to. Her eyes opened inside a lopsided shack. She was lying down along a pair of mismatched wooden chairs. She was in an unpainted room of weathered wood, pushed over, tilted. Shims and props were wedged between every slat and board. Wind whizzed through the place loudly. All manner of old and new carpentry attested to the hovel’s constantly being set to rights. Crude furniture was nailed in place to keep it from sliding, and chair legs sawn to different levels for more near-to-horizontal seats. A plank table sloped askew fifteen degrees. One leg of Jewel’s chair was propped up on a book, hardbound. Jewel could make out only a capital “W” in its title as she leaned to look at it. She didn’t understand the symbol or the object. Illogical perspectives were created by the angular construction. She had a searing headache. Siren-like sounds wailed

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in her ears. She suffered from exposure, exhaustion, dehydration, fatigue, shock and amnesia. Her head spun as she bent. She buckled. The room diminished to press around her like a corncrib, drawing in like a locker or suitcase, carapace or Venus fly trap. Toto came back inside, crouching and ducking under the sagging crosstimbers, and saw Jewel keeling over stiffly to the floor. He had brought her a half-cup of water from the barrel. He splashed some in her face and brought her to again. The end of the dirty string was still attached to the tin handle and floated in the drink. She took it gladly. He had torn through the cord to bring it. Toto lifted Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head, sat her up and helped her sip. The water restored her slightly and she accepted more, not recognizing the cup in her memory and having no esthetic regarding its cleanliness. But she did understand she had been permitted to drink as much as she wanted, and felt grateful to this man again. He opened the coarse blanket over her, wrapped it around, and tucked it in. Jewel was becoming accustomed to feeling beholden to this person. She lowered her eyes and bowed her head to thank him. He gave her bread. He helped her drink some wine. He cut an apple for her and broke up a piece of chocolate. She took a bite of each. He peeled an orange and put sections in her mouth, slowly, one by one. She was grateful for what was fed her and he mopped her face as the fruit and drink dribbled down her cheeks and chin. He kept a folded handkerchief in his pants pocket, this individual of contradictions. Jewel sniffed it as he patted her face: it smelled of sea and smoke and semen and herself. She raised her eyes and saw across the sloping

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room a sagging loft where Toto slept, an open eaves like Heidi’s, accessible by climbing four slats up the wall. “You go sleep there if-a you want,” he gestured. Jewel understood and tried to rise. He helped her in his old, rough, gallant way, and Jewel felt thankful again as he guided her climb. Obeisance was becoming her normal response. The blanket was clumsy. Her legs and hands were raw and sore. She paused, very weak. As she rested on the second rung her eyes were raised above the level of the upper loft. That tiny sloping attic room was an amazing feat of carpentry. A well-built set of two dozen true-to-horizontal shelves were nailed across the steeply raking longest wall. The shelves were set about five inches apart but all of different lengths and depths and angles, each board cut individually to match the skew of the wall at every point of intersection. But although each shelf met the wall at a different angles on both x and y and z axes, and was a varying width along its entire length, they communicated into the room as an even set, within one-eighth degree. And Jewel saw on those shelves row after row of almost identical cream linen boxes. They scared her, their line-up and color. They were like teeth, tombstones, piano keys or a catacomb of sorted bones. They were totemic, ritual, archetypal: she had only primitive references. Afraid, clinging to the makeshift ladder, she inched upward to the pallet, hauling her blanket-wrapped body over the top. She looked back at him wild-eyed and he followed up the ladder to calm her down. He didn’t want her freaking out on him. Aided by Toto, Jewel crawled onto the creaking platform. High stacks of newspapers, biographies and other

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printed materials were piled along the edges of the loft. She feared the construction would topple from the weight of this load and collapse into the room below. She followed Toto’s lead onto the mattress, crawling. He soothed her childlike body into his bed thinking it was fortunate, after all, that Beatrice was away. He’d have this broken cherry again. He pulled off the rough blanket and covered her with smoother pelts of local wolf and fox fur, good for Decembers here. For an hour he carefully removed her splinters by hand between his dirty nails, and licked the livid gashes. He petted her face and head. He petted her body. Toto’s touch was not unpleasant, but since he did not press himself she did not think to yield. He would get her again, but first she must sign. Toto opened several boxes for her, slowly at first so she’d become less wary of them. But Jewel did not understand why he was proffering the animalhide, pastelpaged, zippered books. He wasn’t just showing them to her, he was expecting a response, but she couldn’t figure out what. Erased from Jewel’s mind was the volume she’d seen in Toto’s hand the moment of Beatrice’s miracle on The Gianicolo. Toto spread the tissue paper in another box, and opened that volume to random creamy pages. Jewel took in the energetic lines he proudly pointed out. As he tapped on several pages, extolling one in particular, waves of nausea overcame her. She retched with horror at all the signatures. They reached out of the pages like dying arms from a mass grave. The scrawling lines compressed, condensed, rising, falling, looping, slashing, pointing, pounding, all wild to name themselves as quick as possible before the end would come. She knew these

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squirms meant people’s lifetimes. The most reductivist thing they could leave of themselves was this thin broken line, their existential output at one single time, place, health and mood, more so than any photograph. “You sign,” he said, offering Jewel a Paris-yellow page in a tender volume and a Staedtler-Noris 4B pencil from a jelly jar. Years ago he’d owned a pair of exquisitely inlaid gold fountain pens: one he’d passed along for a bribe to a sailor, which then went missing, but pencils were more conducive to his yield. Soft graphite disclosed depth of emotion. All Toto’s pencils were whittled sharp, many to short shafts, but he had no need for erasers. Toto almost never made mistakes, neither in his life, nor in the forgeries he perfected. Drawn by his own hand were signatures which he, at one time only a semi-literate Roman punk, laboriously researched from libraries and special collections and then committed to memory not only the handwritings of history’s most illustrious persons in every field, but also every published detail of their life and work. The idea of fame impassioned him and the mention of any eminent name sparked a unique-for-each schematic, which he imparted to himself. Hearing, speaking or here especially in the autograph book, owning, a famous name, gave him a portion of the real celebrity’s own identity and power. nd if he were famous himself, if he had a chance to make big decisions — what would he do? Why does the idea of celebrity hold such fascination? What would he do if he were, let’s say, politically famous — supposing he were to become, per esempio, Dr. Rubin? Jewel cringed at the book. Toto quickly offered her another page, this next one like peach ice cream. She didn’t know what he wanted her to do, but was distressed

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to know she displeased him. Toto held the book in his left hand and circled his right to mime writing. “Scrivi, scrivi ,” he coaxed patiently, stroking her hair. She touched the soft cover, made from the skin of a striped-tail quoll, a rare marsupial, as she tried to repeat Toto’s pawing gesture, thinking it was meant to mimic the death-throes of the terrified creature. Her own bare shoulders shivered under the wolf and fox fur, but she was warming up. Toto’s bed smelled ripe and sweet like a jungle nest. He spread her two hands open flat and reverently placed the book into them, closely observing her contorted face as he anticipated her letter forms. Usually Toto could predict elements of a subject’s handwriting by looking at their face. But Jewel’s sample was impossible to foresee because her scarred face was a false indicator — although again he did have the impression she might print. The pencil he held by its point straight up and down to hand her, but she didn’t take it, her hands still in the gesture of supplication he had fashioned, the open book in them cradled stiffly. Toto wadded his jacket under his head against the wall and lounged back to consider the situation. This girl here had not spoken since he’d found her. Her eyes were crazed. She’d been in a bad state since he’d dug her out at the cove. Toto interpreted their circumstances all too well, but tried again; he crooned to her, explained, cajoled, repeated. “Sign you name,” he said, flexing his hand over the open page and hoping against his own assessment that she would finally get the point. He sagged back, sighing, resigned for the time being. Jewel’s blank expression and flaccid posture didn’t change. Although he preferred to disbelieve the 244

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evidence, he understood it: this ruined girl huddling in his bed couldn’t give him what he wanted most. He was too late. Her mind was gone. He slapped her, but it didn’t help: all she could do was lower her eyes and weep. You are Jewel Rubin, he almost told her. Write it down! Write it here, he wanted to force her. He’d forced many notables to give their signatures unwillingly, but never yet unwittingly. His self-made code of ethics demanded that each valid signature be made by a signator who knew who they were. He sat on the corner of the mattress and cupped his hands to light a cigarette. OK, he thought, another one we’ ll leave for now. He could always try to help Jewel find her memory later if he wanted. She looked at Toto smoking. She’d seen him make a fire on the beach. He’d hardly tossed enough sand on it when they’d left, to put it out. All this wood and paper made his sleeping loft a tinder box. She was at his mercy. He shook the match out and tossed it over the edge of the platform. There was no ash tray. Blinking, he drew in gulps of smoke and tapped the ashes onto the scorch-marked ledge of a shelf where there was already a heap of old butts. Fire didn’t worry him. Lightning had once struck this house, so according to Ostia tradition it was protected. It would be better to keep her identity from her: otherwise she could make claims against him so he’d have to kill her. But even if Jewel’s own parents stood there naming her with love, she wouldn’t have been able to respond. She stared at the soft-skinned book still open in her hands. Who was she? Where did she belong in this vale of written names? Not that she even knew these twisted lines to be names — or even what names were — although she did understand the lines meant people and she did

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know what people were. But she had no home among them. She lowered her head in a now customary way and handed back his property. Toto would show her something. He kneeled among the stacks and searched through the newspaper piles. He scanned the front pages of a few, selected one, and opened it straight to Jewel’s captioned picture. Her father was also in the shot, seen trying to shield Jewel from the camera but not fast enough. Toto placed his cigarette on the edge of the shelf, cantilevering the burning end. With his thick thumb, he covered Jewel’s name in the caption and with his other hand pointed back and forth between her and the page, gripping and flapping his own cheek, unmistakably gesturing that this newsphoto was taken of herself. At last something clicked! Jewel pulled the paper under a large crack in the roof from which daylight entered the eaves, and looked at the tabloid more closely. The words meant nothing so she ignored them. The photo was smeary-inked and contrasty with no detail in either the highlights or shadows, and the newsprint was too thin and absorbent for good reproduction, but still these were faces of specific individuals. The one Toto showed her bore no resemblance to any she could recognize, yet she knew he meant this was a picture of herself. Jewel knew she was uncertain of her identity but she did know what a face was, didn’t she? Wouldn’t she know from inside herself if she looked that hideous on the surface? She had an inner idea of her looks: she believed she had fresh, round eyes and long, thick, curly, auburn hair. She touched her head. Her hair was short and rough. Perplexed, she fingered her features. Rather than reassure her, the dents and grooves

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corroborated the picture. “I come back,” Toto said, pushing his palms against the air in front of her to tell her “spetti.” He climbed down to find a mirror, and returned to hand her his two-sided shaving glass, the mirror recalling Beatrice to him, gone a long time now. He scratched his chin. He hadn’t shaved since yesterday morning. Perhaps Beatrice had driven all the way back to Rome. Damn that he didn’t listen when the girl started telling him the address of their pensione yesterday in the cab. Even though he had seen Beatrice around the city for years he’d never known where she lived, although he did know where the art school was; should he try to go there somehow? “Where you live?” Toto asked, grinding out his cigarette on the bookcase. Jewel stared uncomprehendingly at the unnatural being in the magnifying mirror and didn’t answer. A parallel event between Toto and Beatrice overheard by Jewel on the Gianicolo only fourteen hours before was not consciously recalled by either of them, but had its effect on both. There was no phone in the cote but a walk to one wouldn’t be far when she was strong enough. She let him take the mirror back. She sat up in bed swaddled in his soft furs and rough blankets. She couldn’t have been more stupefied. She responded to him with obsequious terror, interpreting from the mirror and the photograph that she was a loathsome freak and he was her protector. He brought her back to bed and tucked her in, unsuccumbed to pity or emotion; he didn’t seem to even notice her panic, and his sexual desires had subsided into restless boredom. As soon as Jewel could walk he’d take

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her with him to the telephone and then return to wait for Beatrice. If Beatrice didn’t come back, he could always have his network trace the cab. When she’d slept a while, she gained some strength. Jewel reached for the mirror again, but Toto kept it from her. He found her cotton dress and knee socks on the sand, dry enough, so he dressed her, lending her a hooded blue windbreaker from his own closet, too; too large, but good enough. Whom would he telephone? He’d telephone Jack Rubin.

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Chapter 34 Telephone Call to Princeton It was 8 AM in Princeton when the U.N. patched the call to Rubin through. Jack wasn’t fully awake; he’d been working until dawn.“I am Roma taxi man,” said Toto. “I have you daughter. She look confuse, maybe sick, maybe drug.” What was this? Jack pulled himself together. A terrorist plot? A loner’s opportunism? Was his baby really in trouble? Did some organization get wind of his new work and want to blow it? Were evil forces plotting sabotage? He must find out as much as he could. He must prepare himself to respond quickly, make instant decisions. Jack snapped to his steady self. He put his smile on.

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“Thank you very much for calling, sir,” Jack flattered. “Can you tell me any more?” He kept his voice modulated. He had to stay under control. Things were happening here he hadn’t expected. “You no want publicity, very famous, I see many times newspaper.” Cagey, the man was cagey. The man was definitely after something. But did he have Jewel? Was Jewel in danger? Jack had no mixed feelings about his responsibilities toward his daughter. Once before he had almost lost her in a power play. There was no time to think about that. Jewel will bear those scars forever; what the hell’s going on now in Rome. “My daughter’s name is Jewel. You probably know that,” Jack said, buying time, keeping calm, trying to gauge the authenticity of the caller. His objective was to get information, not to give it, but he offered her name in trade. Let’s see how Toto would meet the ante. “Daughter face unusual.” True, Jack thought, but that didn’t prove the caller had her. His daughter’s face was occasional gossip page stuff. And he said himself he’s seen the photographs I couldn’t keep her out of. Or at any rate, he said he’s seen photographs of me — so probably of Jewel, too. “What’s wrong with her? How sick is she?” Jack tried to stave impatience from his voice. “I call the papa.” “Yes, sir. You were right to call me.” Jack took a deep breath. This was going to take patience. Give the Italian lots of leeway. Let him say what’s on his mind. Be sure to make him feel secure and on equal terms, maybe better. Let him feel superior, let

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him lead the way, make him feel that things are going well. Jack must ensure there be no rash escalation by this caller, who, Jack’s computer screen was telling him, has been presenting himself disingenuously as a Good Samaritan. Jack was just elected world’s biggest diplomat: His first great crisis couldn’t be more personal. His little girl was very likely in this stranger’s hands. There’s too much silence on the line. The caller wasn’t talking. “Would you like my permission to take her to a hospital? I’ll pay for it, of course. I have insurance, I mean I don’t have insurance,” realizing he must go incognito, “but I will pay for her. You can have the hospital phone me when you get there.” Maybe he wants money, Jack thought. “I’ll pay for your time as well, if you tell me how much. I’ll pay you whatever you think is reasonable for taking care of her, and whatever you think your time is worth. You tell me what you want, sir. Lire for your fee and for reward. You are at very least her driver and her guide.” Would the Italian understand his diplomatic language? Would he understand “as well” and “very least?” Jack better not get trapped. Although anticipating something like this all his life, he wasn’t prepared. He wasn’t used to solving any of life’s practical problems, even minor ones, and this wasn’t minor. His computer could translate his words to Italian, and even to the Roman dialect of Toto’s native Trastevere. But, suddenly, Jack did not trust the Rubin II to make his own mind known, nor to understand the other. But Toto made Jack’s mind up for him.

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“Niente. You come.” “What’s your name, sir? Where are you?” Jack cautioned himself that this call might be a hoax, or extortion, terrorism, kidnapping — Stop talking. Let him do the talking, he warned himself, noticing that he wasn’t being bothered by outside voices. His head was clear. He could hear his inner voice, and read the screen. He saw that the caller had links to the underworld. The Rubin II had automatically been activated by the phone. Graphs and information appeared on Jack’s display screen in four quadrants. Waiting to form his own opinions first, Jack had resisted it, but now he studied the monitor intently, each quadrant running data from a different vantage and at a different scale. Toto was considering the situation, too. At first he was tempted by Jack’s offer of money, but Jewel was in such a bad state that the risks were too great. He did not want to repeat his years in prison. Dr. Rubin’s autograph would be enough. And if Toto were lucky, maybe Jack could re-animate his daughter, and if Jewel knew where Beatrice was, he could still hope for all three names. “Allo, allo?” In the upper left of the screen, a moving line represented Toto’s voice. In the lower left was a modulating linear pattern with interpretation of his voice-revealed personality characteristics: Motivated, quixotic, detailed, sadistic, treacherous, exacting, original, criminal... The upper right indicated his name and address, occupational, financial, legal, medical and public records, food preferences, buying patterns and other information as accurately as it knew: Belialo Rudolfo Ernesto Enfoco. 252

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Via di S. Francesco a Ripa, 137 Trastevere, Roma, Italia The lower right displayed three digital photographs in full face and profiles, surprisingly different left and right. But Jack could see on the screen confirmation of at least some of the caller’s claims: he really was a taxi driver from Rome. The computer even displayed his medallion number: CHI-AVE-PGS 22-38-109-150-158-208-241-261262. Many petty offenses, smuggling, forgery, violations of endangered species acts... No known terrorist connections beyond the usual links this computer routinely assumed for its own reasons. No known kidnapping, no dangerous political ties. “No hospital. Papa. You come. I bring daughter a Aeroporto DaVinci. 6 PM is the plane arrive from New York, TWA.” As a cab driver he might already be familiar with the major airline schedules, which maybe might be further evidence of his claim; Jack couldn’t tell. This was taking a while, but Jack’s satellite link should pinpoint the guy’s exact location any second. “May I speak to her?” Jack asked. “Is she with you?” Jack was sure the caller would say no to both. Even if he had Jewel it was unlikely she was with him near the phone. Jack could have an agent in Rome pick up Enfoco almost immediately but didn’t want it known his daughter was in trouble there. A message popped onto the screen to say that the phone call came from outside a roadhouse in Ostia and that the nearest security point was a Guardia dell’Informazione along the same road. He could easily press a few buttons and give coded instructions to have

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this bastard in handcuffs within three minutes. What more could happen to his precious baby? Jack had never faced his regrets. that he never gave her as much of himself as he should, never gave her the love she should have, shunned her when she needed him most. He should have let her have plastic surgery after the accident, not insisted on her right to forgo it. Jewel had looked to him to make up her mind. No. He would not alert the local authorities, not even ambulance: any kind of message that got through from him to Italian stations could suddenly show up on any newswire in the world. There’d be too much publicity. He couldn’t allow Jewel to be hounded by press, always hungry for any hint of salacious trouble. The least he could do was keep Jewel’s new tragedy, whatever it might be, out of the papers. He must do as he was now asked to do, though it might be the Devil who asks him to do it: he must go to Rome himself — oh, if only he were certain the caller told the truth. Foolproof lie detecting capabilities were still only on the drawing board for the upcoming Rubin III. “Would you tell me your name?” Jack asked, hoping he would, and that it would match the computer’s identification. “’Spetta,” Toto answered. “Wait.” At each of Toto’s words the monitor offered more interpretation of his character: ...insightful, scholarly, methodical, lustful, certain, cavalier, impulsive, habitual, gratuitous, obsessive, precise, sensual, diabolical, cautious, lascivious, imaginative... How much good and bad one personality can project, Jack thought. Perhaps the truth was just as he was saying: 254

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Jewel got into his cab sick and the driver knew who she was and called her father, perfectly possible. Toto helped Jewel to the phone. “Talk.” He passed her the receiver, moving his right hand open and closed near his face, opening his mouth and miming speech. “Uhnnn,” Jewel murmured, huddling inside his oversized blue jacket. This was the first sound she made since he found her. Jack’s computer immediately recognized the faint moan of his teenage daughter. Far more information about Jewel Rubin than about the now-named Belialo was in its data bank. The Rubin II Computer was so familiar with this child’s voice under different circumstances it could quickly interpret her physical and psychic conditions, and again it confirmed the caller’s statement: Jewel did seem quite ill. Jack pressed the mute-button on the phone and rasped to Caroline to come in from the bedroom quick enough to watch the detailed read-out on their daughter. “My god,” she gasped, as Jack turned the receiver sideways against his ear to share. “Where are you, baby?” she hollered into it. Jack pulled the phone away back to himself. “Jewel, Jewel, how are you?” He kept his voice low. Jewel panicked at the human sounds unexpectedly entering her ear through the device Toto held to it. “What about Beatrice?” Caroline wanted Jack to ask, but he motioned her away and turned his back. “Jewel?” Jack repeated into the phone. The complicated overseas connection between wayside phone booth and private supercomputer was

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becoming erratic. Toto came back on the garbled line. “She no can talk nothing. Six o’clock I bring to TWA. You come.” ...impetuous, compulsive, sardonic, dangerous... “What’s your name, tell me your name, please, sir,” Jack begged for confirmation of his read-out, but the caller had hung up. It would have been one more thing at least, with which to gauge his honesty. Jack did not know how much to trust him, or even if this man were acting alone. It’s true he hadn’t mentioned “expenses” or “reward,” and declined them when Jack offered, but neither would he give his own name when he was asked. He definitely had Jewel with him, though. That’s a fact. Jack replaced the receiver on the hook. “What about Beatrice?” Caroline asked impatiently as he just stood there with his hand on the quiet phone, staring into the now blank monitor. “Where is she while Jewel is getting sick? She’s the adult in all this. She’s the one who accepted responsibility.” Ever quick to assign blame, Caroline was sure Beatrice had made some monstrous blunder, but in assuming this she ignored the well-known facts — Beatrice engaged students to assist her, never the other way outside of class. It was Jewel who’d been invited to help Beatrice. Her in loco parentis only went so far. And besides, perhaps Beatrice were in dire straits herself: the only thing known for certain was that she was missing. Nevertheless, Jack had considered asking the caller about Beatrice, too, had even phrased a leading question in his mind, Was Jewel with anyone else when you found her? “But if this were a plot,” as he replaced the computer phone headset and reasoned carefully to Caroline, his

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finger beating time in the air, “the perpetrators might not know about Beatrice, so maybe she’s already bringing help. “We don’t want her endangered,” Jack continued. “Questioning Enfoco more deeply could lead to trouble.” “Well, then have the U.N. notify the Rome police. They could begin surveillance on him, or on the cab, or —.” “I’ll go for Jewel myself,” he said smiling, peering down at her. God, she had gotten prim in the last few years — and outlandish, too. Prim inside and outlandish out. She looked pretty good. Confused. He liked her best when she was uncertain of herself. When she wasn’t sounding off on her big philosophies, all her nothings. He could tolerate his daughter’s metaphysical thinking if she didn’t bother him with it too much, but his wife’s was pie-eyed. Caroline thought of asking to go to Rome with him — after all Jewel was her daughter, too, and she had nothing planned for the day but a swim and an exercise class. Her lips formed a characteristic tight line — if she didn’t keep these plans, she’d be asked by her friends why she cancelled, etc., etc. and she just couldn’t discuss her daughter with these people —. Jack would probably say no anyway. Sometimes she felt like killing him. She met his stern expression with a defiant righteousness, but retreated. It wouldn’t do to start an argument. But her mind shouted silently at him. She was surprised he was asserting himself in what was essentially a family matter, even though it might prove grave. Usually, he left the girl to her. He ignored everything unrelated to his work, or to what she thought

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of as, worrisome as they were to her, “his hobbies over the garage.” Jack stood still a moment and compared this new twist in Jewel’s life with the accident when she was twelve. There was a difference. The accident had already happened by the time he’d heard of it. With this event in Rome there was a chance to personally affect the outcome. He had never thought that sitting up with Jewel at that time might have made any difference in her life. This time he might be in time to do her good. He was more than lured to Rome, he was compelled. The computer verified there were still openings aboard and assigned a place to Jack, by his choice a window seat behind the exit in Economy Class, nonsmoking. The computer couldn’t tell him why Toto specified that flight. Traveling in secrecy, Jack coded himself under false identification, and, as he planned to work onboard but could not risk detection, he packed only the most pressing of United Nations business and that which could not be traced as such and to which his validating signatures had not yet been affixed. He took his private work with those extra-terrestrials with whom he was in closest communication. He had been expecting an emissary from a federation of technological bio-forms living on a certain group of colonized surfaces he’d found. All of these forms communicated through binary code, many through implanted devices. All used radio waves as well. His satellite linkages were extensive. He packed the hand-scan long range remote control for the Rubin II. He was certain that his documents and this device would be useless should they fall into evil hands

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because everything was coded through recognition of his finger-touch and signature alone. It wasn’t believed that anyone could replicate a hand-scan. Personality wasn’t duplicable through finger-touch alone, or so he thought. So he’d go in cognito. He didn’t want the inconvenience of guards and anti-publicity teams. He hoped this lack of security wouldn’t be at his child’s expense, but he was excited to be off on an adventure. He broadened his smile to Caroline. He’d have fifteen minutes to take her back to bed before leaving. He motioned toward the bedroom and she assented. They would hurt each other slightly; it would be a little rough this morning in preparation for what was bound to be an eventful day. She was a pretty good sport, his wife, and appreciated sex as much as he did, once he got her going.

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Chapter 35 Caroline at Computer I Caroline slept late after Jack left. At noon, she turned herself out of bed and sat down at Jack’s console. She used it from time to time to practice word processing, but never a tellurian search like she wanted to try. She typed in Beatrice’s name. The screen filled immediately with multitudes of data, all of it fantastic and historic, lines and lines of it spilling out on a field of IBM charcoalgray, centuries of information rapidly clacking one bright green letter at a time. There couldn’t have been different blindwomen with the same triple name. Caroline called up more information and was provided with long lists of supernatural accomplishments. Was all this true? What was real and what was fiction on

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this machine? Had Jack always known these things about Beatrice? Or was it a joke? A game? Are Jack and Beatrice playing one of those new computer games? The spectacles of time and space Beatrice produced for the stage couldn’t have any basis in fact, could they? How did this program operate? Caroline played with it a while until it froze her out. The blocky green cursor blinked on and off, waiting for her to type. She typed the name of her old friend, Letty: L-E-T-IC-I-A S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z-W-E-I-S-S. The screen provided information: she’d gotten a job in the advertising department of an eye-shadow company, had a hobby making paper, and was paying mortgages on a house she’d renovated in New Jersey and a time-share in Europe, but recently came into money and bought the company. She was divorced and belonged to a religious cult involving smoke and mirrors, dolls and antique books. No details were given. Cary didn’t hold with cults. She had no patience with that girl. She typed Beatrice’s name again. Every keystroke introduced chaotic, random elements. New windows popped up by surprise. In the game, if it was a game, there were two overlapping playing fields: one closed but changeable, designated Beatrice’s, and one uncharted, Jack’s. His areas could be mapped, but once defined, the borders were unalterable. Most of his territory was still unexplored. But according to the history-log, Jack had been outsmarting her. And from the looks of the board, Jack was in motion on her turf, and vulnerable. Or was it not a game? If it wasn’t a game it was a record of real events. Beatrice could control all of Jack’s movements unless he

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advanced to the next stage. Cary saw that even she could enter the field and potentially destroy him from this keyboard, by herself or live proxy on the ground. Who would I get to be my proxy? What she saw on the monitor must be a game, she believed. But Jewel and Jack were in Beatriceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s real territory now. Caroline didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t suspect any more than common knowledge.

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Chapter 36 DaVinci Airport Leonardo DaVinci Airport was crowded this Christmas week with visiting Christians and beggars streaming into the holy city from all over the world. Clergy in particular, always numerous in Rome, were especially in evidence on this December 27 th. Toto tried to conceal himself and Jewel by sitting naturally in the waiting area, holding up a copy of Corriere Illustrato. In seats directly facing them, a flock of albino nuns endured a long delayed departure. Clad in white habits, transparent-skinned women of every age and continent fluttered around the terminal. The visiting groups were recently in the news and Toto was familiar with their story. He sat with Jewel and told

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her all about them, pretending she could understand, and since he knew that she could not, anyway, he spoke Italian. He spoke casually, wanting her to appear normal to everyone who saw them, except for her face, which he kept from being noticed by tying the hood of the big blue windbreaker tight and held the newspaper high. He hoped she wouldn’t be recognized. The last thing he wanted was to attract attention. He fussed to hide her face, and explained to her about the nuns, because talking to her would be less likely to attract strangers than not. “Catholic families giving birth to albino females gave away their blessed daughters to this order of Holy White Sisters. They have convents all over the world.” Jewel didn’t have the slightest idea what Toto was saying, but she could not take her eyes off the albinos, and those sitting straight across returned her open stare over the top edge of the newspaper. One leaned forward and petted her bony knee through her light shift. Smiling, the nun glanced at her guardian but they didn’t exchange words. No one attempted to speak to his pathetic charge. Toto adjusted the jacket collar higher on her face, and continued his explanation. “Throughout the world,” he told her, “the order is known for its contribution to church literature.” The scholarly sisters had recently completed a project amending every pronoun referring to God in every holy book, reissuing them with the single letter ‘E’ serving as the pronoun-symbol for God like the ‘I’ serves for self. In simple terms, they’d substituted ‘E’ for ‘He’.” Or even ‘She,’” he added to himself with discomfort he wouldn’t scrutinize. “Allora,” he continued. “Instead of ‘He created the Heavens and the Earth,’ ‘E created the Heavens and the Earth.’” 264

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Jewel recognized this God-letter, “E”. A memory from the ocean flooded back to her. She understood nothing else, but she understood that unified field. Across the way the White Mother was gazing directly into her eyes. Toto took Jewel’s hand to further explicate the complex cosmic brilliance of their simple textual amendment. To Jewel, the capital “E” was the only god she could believe in. God was possible now that it was “E.” Her heart raced to contemplate the matter-energy exchange locked inside this singular understanding of God. The arriving flight from New York was announced. Toto saw the Holy White Mother Superior staring at Jewel, her orbits large and symmetrical, the page-white skin of her face and hands unlined and luminous. It was not possible to tell her age or origin. Just as the loudspeaker cackled, Toto realized he should ask the saintly apparition for her autograph; how could it slip his mind! He grabbed at his knapsack for the book and fingered his pockets for a pencil, but when he finally jumped up to present them to Her Holiness, she was no longer sitting there. There she was a moment later, right after he’d put the book away again. She was making a hurried approach from the rear of the terminal toward her restless group, indicating that their flight was ready to board. They gathered their white parcels and belongings, and stood to fasten their white hooded cloaks. They ran to meet their Superior, engulfing her in preparatory chatter. There was no opportunity to ask her to sign now, Toto fumed to himself. But he’d been doing this long enough to know that the best marks often took time. She was due

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back at Easter, he had read, he’d get her then. The TWA flight arrived, that was the important thing. He must concentrate on finding Rubin. Toto gripped Jewel’s hand and as they rose to meet his plane, they saw the White Mother striding toward them. Then they heard a popping sound blast behind her. A din of voices buzzed and quickly swarmed to the place she’d left. A crowd ran through the waiting area into the passage. There was a great commotion near the gates. Throngs of people left their seats to join the swell, although no one could answer “cos’e ’cesso” as they rushed past Toto and Jewel. The white nuns alone were uninterested in the fracas as they greeted their Holy Leader on her return. Even the albino convent school girls and novices continued to assemble their bundles undistracted, following the measured instructions of their Superior. In pairs, the sisterhood fell in line behind her and filed unconcernedly through the pressing mass.

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Chapter 37 Jack Lands A tall, bulky man wearing thick glasses, a fake mustache, a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap and a wooden smile, Jack Rubin, disembarked slowly down the ramp, clutching his old leather briefcase, scanning the large area for signs of his daughter accompanied by someone resembling Toto’s computer pictures, or possibly Toto alone. The plane had made him tense and he was glad to have landed. Jack never liked even cars. Images of Jewel’s ravaged face had appeared before him the whole flight, and he felt so sorry. Emotions arose against his wife; he could not have abided Caroline with him today. He was glad she hadn’t asked to come; he always ignored her hints if she didn’t ask directly. He wanted, this time at last, to

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claim Jewel as his own, make up for the years they lost. He’d always silently — unfairly or not — blamed Caroline for the accident. He wasn’t ever able to look directly at the child afterward. Beatrice had taken over his share of Jewel’s nurturing, and that had been fine with him. He had told Jewel he stood by her but never did. And as for Cary, he still loved her in spite of everything, but only for her comradeship in sex, without more reason. Their marriage, their family, was held together by perplexing forces, he thought, the same forces that kept me away from my parents and probably cause other bad luck. His attitudes toward the forces of nature, supernature, coincidence and fate had become pragmatic. He sought only to avoid run-ins; he only engaged one moment at a time no matter how it got to him, or how he got to it. Rumination like this had been rare for Jack for many years. He didn’t reflect on his life or consider it in fatalistic, wishful, truly human terms, regrets or shouldacouldas. He stretched his neck to search the crowd as other passengers pushed past him on the ramp, eager to deplane. He politely adjusted his briefcase to make room for them. So far, no Jewel. He’d hoped Enfoco would bring her to meet the plane. Jewel, his beautiful baby, his little scientist, his lamblike queen of children’s literary quizzes. He remembered the games she’d try to play when he came home, her sleeping in front of the door till he walked in. He remembered her beautiful face and long auburn curls. Where had that perfect child gone? And what happened to her this time? He rubbed his hands together. They’d gotten cold. He’d been tortured with

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worry all day. He could hardly do his paperwork during the flight. And just where was Jewel’s protector, Beatrice, after all? He could swear he scented her somewhere. She and Jewel were supposed to be looking out for each other. What kind of sorcery was this now — ? Let It Go! Let It Be! Just Where Do You Come Off! The shock of the voices pierced his brain. They had left him alone for a while; let him just talk to himself. He pulsed his hands, trying to relax as he observed the corridor leading to the waiting area. The building had a huge expanse of glass. Late afternoon Mediterranean sun blazed low in the December sky. Through the southern windows, Jack saw the glimmer of a shiny, silver hand gun carried by someone on the terminal floor, but he did not accurately interpret this reflection. He saw the flash, but misread it. He thought he saw what he’d been hoping for for months: the anticipated visitors from space. He squinted again at the window; he’d been hoping they’d get here before the year was out. They’d been en route for quite some time. It did not matter that he was in Europe now, because he’d rigged his pocket remote to receive their signals anywhere. The flash on the window was over. It hadn’t been their vehicle, but a flicker off somebody’s weapon. He hadn’t really expected them to land at a major airport, anyway. Although, why not? Jack stood still. The other passengers and crew had passed. Workmen gestured politely that they had to move the ramp. He reluctantly inched down, straining to see as much as he could of the teeming hub filling as more

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people streamed into the corridor. He couldn’t keep from noticing how imperfect almost everybody was. He couldn’t help thinking it. Jewel wouldn’t be the only one, although more extremely so. Beatrice had called him a snob once, a hypocrite; she’d said he “ had so much respect for life but no respect for anyone living.” She accused him of — wha’ d she call it — “messianic megalomania.” She had been jealous then. It was just before the accident. His thoughts played him a few clichés. As a younger man he had “Really Been Under Her Spell.” Lately he’d been “Going His Own Way.” Jack was happy to realize this was his own voice in his head he heard. He’d been noticing the changes voices were taking recently, but wasn’t sure what they meant. He made a mental note to think about it “When Things Get Back to Normal.” Jack leaned over the hand-rail, looking anxiously about for Jewel, searching in grid patterns back and forth in front of him, under pressure to get all the way down off the ramp. He wanted to oblige the airport workers; he was careful to never worsen anyone’s work. Someone was blocking his way at the foot of the incline, though. A heavyset woman was standing there wearing a sandwich board advertisement. The ad displayed a black and white photograph of a model’s face divided in half by light and shadow. Momentarily he contemplated its message, its promise of physical improvement, idealized beauty. The idea that bad could become good, ugliness beauty, up down, black white. Jack’s mind was overtired, wandering. Homo futurus might not be human, he recalled first writing in a letter to Beatrice in his youth. He thought of this now every time he contemplated perfection.

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He laughed out loud as he thought of his projects nearing completion. He could swear he scented her just by thinking about her. In her art she endlessly redesigned and reconstructed every project as it neared conclusion. She could start every one over from the beginning again, or from any other place; or add, subtract, change any element; but he could not. Jack knew he could operate only within external realities he did not create, and which were not illusions and could not back up. Yet, for all of that, he recognized his power and responsibility. Jack grinned broadly, knowing he and he alone possessed all the genetic keys of Earthlings and of other life as well. He smiled and patted his cowhide briefcase full of U.N. papers. If there’s any engineering to be done — and not just on this planet but throughout the cosmos — it would proceed to his specifications, standards, criteria and values. It was not for nothing his own genes had been spared. Where’s Toto? He’d have to find a public meeting point and wait for the cabby to come to him; he’d rather not have him paged because Enfoco didn’t know he knew his name. Standing here daydreaming isn’t getting us anywhere. He chuckled again, talking to himself, as he finished the ramp in a strut. A concealed assassin took aim and fired, and escaped before the bullet blast was heard.

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Section 3 Chapter 38: Toto Locates Jack

Chapter 38 Toto Locates Jack “You stay here,” Toto said to Jewel, splaying his fingers wide and pumping his hands flat up and down near the seats. She had just stood up and immediately he pushed her down again. “Stay put. I come right back. I see what is the problem there.” Jewel was too dazed and frightened not to respond to his signals with anything but bobbing and nodding. She meekly turned to sit again as Toto left to investigate. But as soon as his back was turned the Holy White Mother Superior took Jewel’s weak, pale hand into her even smaller, whiter one, and spirited her away with the order. The crowd parted to make room for the white sisters walking double file toward the gate and onto their waiting

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plane. As they came through the most advanced guard of the crowd, the nuns saw Jack Rubin lying in pain on the gray terrazzo, soaking in a pool of blood, surrounded by airport security. Responsibility for examining his briefcase was entrusted to no one who read well in any language, so its contents were reported as insignificant crank religious tracts. He was carrying false papers and in disguise, and therefore unidentified. He was near death but not yet dead. He summoned enough resources to stay alive until he saw his child. He saw in front of him his cherished daughter Jewel among white angels. He tried to call to her, choking on the blood and vomit in his throat, “Jew’l, Jew’l —.” “He’s speaking. He’s trying to speak!” someone cried, and the call was picked up in many languages. “He’s trying to name his assassin,” someone else tried to guess. “He’s saying the Jews are responsible,” said a missionary dryly, one of the many who frequent the airports. The evangelist crossed himself, even though such a gesture was not within the rituals of his sect, but as a salute of solidarity with the Holy White Mother Superior, who was passing at that moment with her charges. Jewel paused to look at the man beseeching her crazily from the floor. The Mother prodded Jewel on, away from her dying father’s plea. A thread of Jack’s blood stained the white hem of her garment. Toto saw the flash of red as he shoved his way forward through the crowd, uneased by clerical privilege, muscling in, asserting his raw masculinity to gain whatever advantage he could to reach them.

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Toto alone among the bystanders recognized Jack Rubin on the ground. And the nuns had Jewel, he saw. Jack was still alive, the most famous person Toto had ever encountered. Think fast. “Scrivi, scrivi,” Toto yelled, tearing one of the soiled boxes from his backpack, grappling out a pencil. Frantically, he pushed an open page toward the bleeding figure on the floor. “Write you name here!” A hush fell over the crowd as Toto put the pencil in Jack’s hand. What Jack tried to write was what he’d tried to say, calling for his daughter. “J-E-W-” he wrote, but could not manage the last two letters before he failed. Murmurs of conjecture rippled through the onlookers. “Is that his name?” people asked. The police assumed the victim did identify himself in answer to that question put to him. The crowd assumed he identified his assailant. The word was explained in different ways by everyone who heard or saw or learned of it but the evidence was gone. Debating their remarks had distracted them. Toto had quickly retrieved his autograph book and slipped out along the side of the crowd, nimbly purloining Jack’s briefcase, too, as he vanished. As Toto left the terminal he glanced from habit toward the taxi lot. His own cab, driverless, unlocked, was parked among the others. Si, this was one of the logical places for Beatrice to have come, he thought, although just why, he didn’t know. He couldn’t stay to look for her; he’d catch her again sometime in Rome. He was eager to get to the briefcase. In that old cowhide bag would be major documents of world policy. Toto was the only one who

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knew the dead man on the floor, and until that identity was established, he could amend or approve these papers as he saw fit, easily affix Jack Rubin’s signature, and mail them to the General Assembly or anywhere on Earth. Why he wanted to do this or what the results might be, he neither knew nor cared. This was Toto’s chance to try out the power he craved, meaningless, undeserved, destructive, the sinfulness of his wanton deeds making their outcomes even sweeter. He knew he’d have to remain covert awhile. His grab for the bag had been an inspiration, but it was done out in the open and someone might remember seeing him if he surfaced too soon. Toto laughed, thinking this: was his inspiration planted by God or by the Devil? He had no worry he might ever make an error: The concept of “mistake” didn’t exist for him. He never used erasers, never changed his mind. Toto fully trusted that his impulses had been well enough educated by experience no matter what outrage he committed. If there ever was consequence, it happened after he’d be long gone; only the acts themselves mattered, and the emotional highs they were good for. Maybe he would kneel in prayer before he forged Jack’s documents, he reasoned: then whatever thing he’d do would be the work of God. Unless, of course, the Devil taps the wire; there’s never any way to know who answers prayers. The world was always new, he figured. Nothing ends basta come è. Everything goes round and round. He slid into the familiar cab, adjusting the rearview mirror on a scene of pandemonium behind him. He flipped on the police scanner: on the airport floor behind him eighteen people were just killed and over a hundred wounded by Palestinian grenades and submachine

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guns at the TWA and El-Al ticket counters here and simultaneously in Vienna. That event, obliterating Jack’s, would hit the papers and the history books. He noticed Beatrice’s white stick left on the seat since that day on the Gianicolo, only yesterday. No, it wasn’t the stick, it was a broken twig from a palo santo bush, just budding. He’d keep it for good luck. He opened Jack’s briefcase, rough and worn inside and out. I could make this hide light and soft again, he thought, remembering the restoratives and dilute bleaches he kept for skins and leathers at his shack. He found Jack’s pocket remote, which his talented fingers itched to mastermind, and tossed it in the glove compartment. A valuable old fountain pen he thought he’d lost, rolled out. The key was in the car, so he started it up.

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Section 3 Chapter 39: In the Air

Chapter 39 In the Air In the air The Holy White Mother Superior was teaching Jewel to pray, clasping in her hands a personal token, the amulet she always carried, an ancient brass key from the front door lock of her grandmother’s old Pennsylvania farmhouse. “E,” Jewel said. In her womb, new life was stirring.

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Chapter 40 Caroline at Computer II Caroline sat at the computer, punching up the names of Beatrice, Jack and Jewel. From long ago she recalled a memory deeply suppressed. Beatrice had been present at Jewelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conception. A visit to her teacher one afternoon in New York had turned into an orgy. Beatrice had perched over Caroline and Jack and directed their performance, as if Beatrice herself had been responsible for the pregnancy. Cary fished a matchbook from her kimono pocket. There was a roach folded inside. She lit it and went back to the keyboard, worried about her daughter. Everyone is potentially a messiah, she typed, glad Jack wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t around to berate her for over- simplification

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and simplistic thinking. She was a simple person. She simply wanted things to be put in simple terms. Every parent must raise their children to Lead us all to Peace On Earth, One messiah is not enough for A planet humming with the harmony of a hive, Key of B Flat. She deleted the text and dragged on the marijuana again. Too simplistic, he’ d be right. We could say it but no one could agree on what it meant, how to enact it. How to get from here to there. It could be a poem, maybe, but not a political position, not a historical solution by a person of leadership. Few would follow, few could agree to — especially if it meant submit to — the equality it postulated. Jack would laugh at her for thinking again, if he saw this. He had good ideas of his own now, anyway. So she didn’t want to leave it on the screen for him to see. What’s the key? Delete? Escape? OK. Shut Down. Don’t Save.

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Section 3 Chapter 41: From the Skies over Italy

Chapter 41 From the Skies over Italy From the skies over Italy, the convent plane flew through the airspace of many lands. Jewel and the nuns looking down could see many transport lines leading to encampments emitting billowing, rancorous smoke. “Savior,” the Holy White Mother Superior said, her palm on Jewel’s belly, as the shadow of the plane crossed a load of captives disgorging before the gates of a muddy stockade. The buzz of the plane overhead caused a momentary distraction of the guards’ attention, and a few teenagers managed to escape.

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Acknowledgements

I heartily thank all of you who have helped this novel out of its dark drawer!

Zines which published chapters: James Beech, editor of Wood Coin Magazine, published my story Haunted House, which is Chapters 14-15-16 “Caroline and Jewel Drive to the Country”, “Incident at the Abandoned Farmhouse” and “Jewel’s Notebook” in different form, as a single unit. Venues which exhibited some of these images while the book was in recent development: Galerie Glass (Berlin), Visual Voice Gallery (Montreal), Studio Baustelle (Berlin), eMediaLoft (NYC), The Center for Book Arts (NYC), Smith & Jones Gallery (Bklyn). Great souls who published and curated my related work the past year while publication was under completion, and great psyches, whose conversations were essential to the final clarification of my ideas: Stefan Stux, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Peter Grzybowski, Heather Powell, Jonathan Morpurgo, Shalom Neuman, Maddy Rosenberg, Rebecca Cunningham, Katie Peyton, Ron Kolm, Alex Campos and CT Rhodes. Friends who gave me places to work on this book in isolation during its middle years: Eric Hauben, Bob Schuler, Sam & Selma Creston, Leon & Mollie Rosenthal and the Martha Washington Hotel. Friends who took me photographing through the magic places that show up on these pages: Anne Marsh, DJ RoBeat, Klaus Eisenlohr. Organizations and friends who provided support, advice, encouragement and occasional technical expertise and institutional access: Balarat Gold Mine, for accepting my press pass in lieu of entrance fee in exchange for this happy credit; Museum of Natural History, for inviting me through the vast collection and setting me up to photograph the juciest wasp. Mark Lewental, at The College of Staten Island Library, who cheerfully converted the early typewritten drafts via Optical Character Recognition to editable, digital format. David Sagan of Cornell and Pietr Huis of Sydney, physicist friends who listened to my images and pointed me to their science. Film-makers CoOp, Printed Matter, Central Booking, eMediaLoft and VampAndTramp, which represent my work in various media. And very special thanks: TO early readers: AD Coleman, Ray Andrews, George Doolittle, Barbara Stuhlmann, Bill Creston, Gilbert Rosenthal; TO Literary Agent 1989-92 Gunther Stuhlmann; TO publishers of my offset artists’ books: Joan Lyons and Nathan Lyons of Visual Studies Workshop Press; and TO the indefatigable publisher of this one, Joseph A.W. Quintela.

Technical Notes Wish for Amnesia was first drafted between 1981-1985, raiding materials from my Journals, whatever I was reading at the time, and contemporaneous news and shots from my ongoing 35mm Surrealist Photography, as with my four previously published books, but in the form of a novel. When my literary agent Gunther Stuhlmann first circulated the manuscript 1990 and 1991 drafts, we hadn’t thought about including images. These photographs between the chapters of the novel now are from, unless otherwise noted, full-frame, uncropped, unmanipulated 35mm negatives shot during this recent decade (2005-2015) of heavy travel as I toured with my work in performance and image-text media, not contemporaneously with the writing. I have used Olympus OM-1 cameras and lenses since 1973. One day, in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2007, one of my roommates in the Puppet Hostel, where we were staying above the Puppet Theater, broke her key off in our lock, locking my camera in the locker inside. Rather than waste any time, I bought an amateur digital Canon 187, and have continued to use both systems, still always full-frame, but lately with a little allowance for more perfection within. You can tell which originated as analog and which digital on the photo title list: The negative file numbers are month-year-roll number-frame, and the digital file numbers are four digits.

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APPENDICES

Photographs and Other Images p. front cover 1. Pinned Tarantula Hawk Wasp (Pepsis Formosa), 12-14-1-12. NYC, 2014 p. front cover 2. Red Rubber Name Stamp from Uncle Mike When I was Eight p.14. Gas Chamber / Bogus Shower Room, Sachsenhausen, 6-09-2. Berlin, 2009 p.17. Railroad Clock Tower from Car, 1-05-21-23. Clarion County, IN, 2005 p.15. Two White Statues at Night, with Klaus, Berlin, 9338. Berlin, 2009 p.32. Umbrella on Floor of Howard Greenberg Gallery, 3-05-4-5. NYC, 2005 p.38. Two Hanging Shirts through Windows, High, 9-09-3-34. London, 2009 p.40. Light Like Airplane over Bldg Entrances w/Lampshadow, 8-08-1-27. Wales, 2008 p.46. Slide in Twilight Playground, Berlin, 6-09-5-28. Berlin, 2009 p.55. Mother’s Death: Halftone Version from Homo Futurus , 7-84-4-31. Franklin Square, NY, 1984 p.58. Two Little Girls, Carmine St Pool, 3-78-4-17. NYC, 1978 p.67. Anchored Flying Doll, 3-05-4-22. NYC, 2005 p.79. Figure in Window from Bar off Rue Ste-Catherine, 11-12-8-4. Montreal, 2012 p.87. Pointy Doll in Coffin Bed, 3-05-4-24. NYC, 2005 p.91. Little Doll in Doorway, o3-05-4-25. NYC, 2005 p.92. Two Dolls on Dostoyevsky’s Bench, o6-07-12-33. Starya Russa, Russia, 2005 p.94-1. I-90 from Car: Triangular Tree Composition, 1-85-4-15. NY to FL, 1985 p.94-2. I-90 from Car: Composition with Median and Road, 7-84-4-17. NY to FL, 1984

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p.105. Indiana House with One Tree on Stormy Hill, 1-05-2-11. Clarion County, IN, 2005 p.115. Barbara Rosenthal Journal Volume 47: Mon, April 29, 2002, Open Double Page. p.122. Peasant-bound Scrapbook, 6-07-20-40. St. Petersburg, Russia, 2007 p.124. Little Red House in Focus on Drive North of Beijing, 6-06-26-3. Hairu, China, 2006 p.134. View West on 57th St outside NY Gallery Bldg w/Karen, Full Moon, 0136. NYC, 2010 p.146. White Mirror Woman Doll, xx/xx/xxx/xxx. USA?, 1985-1995? p.154. Prague Interior, Vaulted Red and Yellow Ceiling, 0618. Prague, CZ, 2009 p.169. Wine Glass Shadow in flat on Danziger Strasse, 2191. Berlin, 2011 p.170. Lights around the Edges and Green Moon, 8-09-6-27. Paris, 2009 p.169. My Guide in the Gold Mine, 10-13-x-19. Ballarat, Australia, 2013 p.174. Rob at Abandoned Soviet Base, 2-13-8-5. Zossen, Germany, 2013 p.182. Circle Square Z Vaulted Ceiling & Three Roosting Birds, 8-09-2-1. Paris, 2009 p.185. Pos Neg Trees & Yellow Light on Drive from Beijing, 6-06-26-12. Hairu, China, 2006 p.190. Two Tree Guardians, Vertical, 7-09-4-1. Remerschen, Luxembourg, 2009 p.201. Temple of Athena w/Classmates & Kodak Label, 1-69-51-12. Paestum, Italy, 1969 p.212. Sunburst in Wedge Landscape, Purple Sky, 10-13-xxx-1.,Hinterlands, Australia, 2013 p.215. Green-Brown Shack Wagon, 3-13-3-1. Berlin, 2013 p.216. Shacks Along the Jitney Drive, 1-06-1-10. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 2006 p.226. Ghost Ship in the Noosa River, 8683. Noosaville, Australia, 2013 p.234. Two Gulls in a Clouding Blue Sky on Beach w/Anne, 7948. Melbourne, 2013 p.236. Six Wheat Stalks, Sun Streaks and Clouds, 7-07-2-25. Turko, Finland, 2007 p.238. Studio Ceiling where the Neon Broke, iPod4-0678. NYC, 2014 p.249. Bio-luminescent Creatures, Circle and Map, Mus of Natural History, 5-12-1-28. NYC, 2012 p.260. Lamp in Window on Torstrasse, 9342. Berlin, 2009 p.263. Sunrise Framed in Plane Window, Approaching Melbourne, 8763, Melbourne 2013 p.267. Green God, 8215. Sidney, Australia, 2013 p.272. Black and White Shirts in Window, Slanted, xx/xx/xxx/xxx. NYC?, 2000-2014? p.278-1. Airplane Sunrise Clouds NY to Montreal I, 0915. Montreal, 2011 p. 278-2. Airplane Sunrise Clouds NY to Montreal II, 0924. Montreal, 2011 p.280. Orange Arc Interior with Head, 0051. Prague, CZ, 2010 p.282-1. Doll in Montreal Ethnographic Museum, 11-12-1-11. Montreal, 2012 p.282-2. Two of Three Red-lit Lined Figures, 0889. Melbourne, 2013 p.284. Figure in Hat with Book and Candle from Magic Doorway, 10-89-4-29. NYC 1989 p.286-1. Basketball Earth, Cropped, 9798. Paris, 2009 p.286-2. Model of Future Earth, Cropped, 7903. Melbourne, 2013 p. back cover 1. Author photo by Davis Mersereau, NYC, April 2012

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Magic Realism / Political Fiction Wish for Amnesia

The son of Holocaust survivors develops a Messianic Complex. ABOUT this book, WISH FOR AMNESIA “The cheekiest tongue-in-cheek writing to come out of any author about the Jewish experience, the Artworld experience, or any other experience of human beings in ‘this Trans-Millennial Century.’” — CT Rhodes, Director, eMediaLoft.org, NYC

“Very readable, very funny, and very visual. I think it would make a great grade-B genre film classic.” — A.D. Coleman, Photography and Culture Critic, NYC “Terrific!” — Gunther Stuhlmann, Editor, Diary of Anais Nin

ABOUT other books by BARBARA ROSENTHAL SOUL & PSYCHE “reveals a mysterious, tiny, distorted universe” — CT Rhodes, Director, eMediaLoft.org // “[A]ll sorts of interesting other meanings.” — Buzz Spector // “Personal, if not autobiographical, each product reflecting her mentality at the time it was made.” — Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes. HOMO FUTURUS “a philosophical perception of art and humankind.” — Bill Creston // “could be thought of as “Clues to Ourselves.” — Judith Hoffberg, Umbrella // “processing the raw experience of life” — Laurie Schneider, Score SENSATIONS “I love the book Sensations, am putting it alongside John Cage’s and Alison Knowles’ and Philip Corner’s on my shelf of what’s next in art, what’s now in good American minds.” — Carol Bergé // “Life as fiction.” — A.R. Parker, The Photo Letter. CLUES TO MYSELF “A sophisticated textbook for searching artists.” — A.R. Parker, PhotoCommuniqué // “a well-spring for the intellect and the emotions.” — Don Russell, WPA. “The paradox is to share the ultimately private...” — George Myers, Jr., Introduction to Modern Times. “Evocative visions.” — Shelley Rice, The Franklin Furnace Flue.

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