THE JULES VERNE STEAM BALLOON

KING OF PRUSSIA I IN D MAJOR, K.575

Summer morning, awake a tick before the clock’s ring, the work of bird-charm and circadian wheels, Hugo Tvemunding, assistant Classics master and gym instructor at NFS Grundtvig, Troop Commander of Spejderkorps 235, and doctoral candidate in Theology, sat bolt upright in bed to yawn and stretch.

—The Great Walrus, said Mariana beside him, her eyes still closed, is on the loose, grumping all rivals away from his rocks. His walruser is reared up like a gander trying to see over the hedge, but first we must say our prayers.

Hugo recited the prayer to the creator of being that he’d said every morning since he was a very little boy, a prayer composed by his pastor father.

—Amen, said Mariana. Franklin has slept through it all.

—Have not, Franklin said. Amen too. Tickle me and I’ll bite.

—My rocks, said Hugo. Franklin for all his contribution to the dialogue is still asleep.

—Long hairy feet on the floor, said Mariana, who wore a shirt of Hugo’s for a nightgown, square pink-toed feet on the floor, shapely girl’s feet on the floor, plop, slap, and gracefully silent. Who lost a Band-Aid in the bed? Your T-shirt fits Franklin like a potato sack on a weasel.

HOLLYHOCKS

Hugo’s run before breakfast was along a macadam road through pinewoods with an undergrowth of fern and laurel. He freed himself with every stride of the residue of dreams, of warm lethargies that had nested in his muscles, of anxieties that had made trash in his mind. He spoke to rabbits hopping across the road, to a cheeky fox doing a little dance in a clearing. The light was silver, early, cold. He had dreamed of his mother standing beside hollyhocks 222 coleus. Idiotically, he had said, They’re dead, aren’t they? She’d said, with her usual placid composure, Why no, dear, they’re not dead. And indeed nothing could have been more alive than these dream hollyhocks and coleus, so crisply beautiful in the accurate light of the dream. And his mother’s kindly ghost was like a blessing. She wore her apron, as for housework, and her voice was as sweet as springwater. White latticework of the back porch door behind her. A perfectly temperate summer day. Why no, dear, they’re not dead at all.

CABIN WITH SKYLIGHT

Stables once, Hugo’s room was designed and appointed by a drawing master who, having made it into a Danish Modern oblong of continuous space with a skylight, left to take a position elsewhere. Bed and worktable under the skylight, bookcases, chairs beyond, toward the kitchen area, which had a small barn window over the sink and cabinets. On the walls were a large photograph of Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer, a Mondriaan of the severest geometric period, a Paul Klee angel grinning about some sacred mischief, a photograph of Brancusi’s Torso d’un jeune homme, and three paintings by Hugo: Mariana naked, slouched reading in a chair, a still life of meadow flowers in a coffee mug, and a large painting that had once been of the Bicycle Rider, repainted with Tom Agernkop as model.

GARDEN

The colors in the dream where his mother stood placidly in her coverall, print cotton polka-dot gloves, and straw hat were those of photographs in The Country Garden and House and Family: early greens, soft browns, reticent blues in sharp silvery focus.

WATER

—This is Franklin the Rabbit Who Invented Electricity, Hugo said to Rutger, Kim, Asgar, Tom, and Anders in the showers.

—We’ve run six kilometres, Franklin said. Oof! These wolfcub mystery knots you did my laces in, Hugo, won’t come loose.

Hugo! Knowing eyes found laughing eyes.

—Let me, Rutger said kneeling.

Franklin, looking hard at Kim and Anders under a shower together, soaping each other, wiggled his fingers at his ears and ruckled like a dove.

—They like each other, Skipper, Hugo said.

WHEAT

—He wasn’t out to set himself up through signs and wonders, Hugo said to his Sunday School class. He was not concerned about who he was. That showed in everything he did. And from moment to moment he was the people he suffered with, whom he could comfort or cure or free. Most of these were people estranged from themselves by pain or deformity. People who are out of their minds are no good to anybody else, and Yeshua’s idea of us is that first of all we are someone who can help another.

EYES BLUE WITH FATE

—A nipper, Mariana sighed, locked herself in the laundry room and no amount of cajoling or instructions about the latch did anything but make her howl the louder, so I had to climb onto the roof and jimmy open a window the size of a handkerchief and plead with the little demon to listen while I showed her how to let herself out, and another nipper stuck modelling clay up his nose and turned blue, and another had hiccups for an hour, and another was passing around color Polaroids of her big brother doing it with his girl on the sunroom floor, and another barfed on the vocabulary cards. So I’ve had it and want love, sympathy, and sour cream pineapple pancakes for supper.

She was holding an ice cube to Franklin’s knee, which was skinned bloody. His silkflop thatch had leaftrash and twigs in it. A smutch of mud saddled his nose. The seat of his pants was piped with clay. They had all converged at the bus stop, Franklin from the soccer field, Mariana off the bus, and Hugo from class, going home.

While Mariana set up a field hospital to deal with Franklin, Hugo, out of his jeans, exiguous briefs taxed by a randy flex, said that he would provide love, Franklin sympathy, and Mariana sour cream pineapple pancakes.

—Iodine, Mariana ordered, and fill the sink with hot soapy water, skin Franklin of his pants and underpants and put the one in the other.

—The two in the other, Franklin said. Hugo is hanging out like the donkey in the zoo.

—Better still, Mariana said, strip the lout and stand him in the sink, soap him up, and pour potfuls of water over his head.

—Family life is wonderfully exciting, Hugo said lifting Franklin into the sink.

—You know Pascal? Franklin asked.

—I know Pascal, Hugo said. He is the apple of Holger Sigurjonsson’s eye, as everybody from the kitchen staff to the headmaster knows.

—He, Franklin said around the washcloth, lost one of his shoes. So I told him to throw the other away. What good is one shoe? They tease him real pitiful about hr. Sigurjonsson, so we beat up Otto with the weasel eyes. He was picking on Pascal. I heard him.

—I didn’t know, Hugo said, that you were friends with Pascal.

—I am now, Franklin said. After we beat up Otto.

—Well yes, Hugo said, let’s hear about that.

—I booted him in the butt, Franklin said, hard. He called Pascal a name, and Pascal just took it. I was behind them both, you see, and here was Otto’s butt for the kicking. That’s when he tried to pin me, and I did my knee there.

—I’m not listening, Mariana said, I’m not hearing a word of this.

—So, Franklin said, Pascal got in it then. He pushed Otto on his shoulder while hooking his ankle: laid him flat. Then we both jumped on him. Hr. Sigurjonsson’s showed Pascal how to defend himself.

YESHUA IN THE WHEAT

—Goose grass, Hugo said, found with knotweed in hard poor soil cinder paths. Old meadows are thick with it, an archaic wheat from which the horse-riding plunderers made bread and foddered their shaggy Shetlands. It came to Eleusis, Joseph Gaertner thought, by way of India. That’s why he named it Eleusine indica. Crabgrass and crowfoot are of the same family. The florets are ashlared thick along the spikes, see? And there’s no awn.

—Grass, Franklin said, is just grass.

—Here, said Mariana, is where we get Hugo’s handsome blond cross-eyed stare. Meaning I hear it but I don’t believe it. The pathfinders never get it, only us, and the occasional Grundtvigger.

Franklin calm and unheeding. What Mariana says is what Mariana says. Nothing to do with him until she starts shouting.

—Emmer of the prophets embedded in the clay of Ugaritic pots under the botanist’s microscope is like implicit information in a text. It came along, like Franklin underfoot, of itself.

—Now I’m grass, Franklin said.

ACORN IN ITS CUP

To get to the bus stop where Mariana with shining eyes and bright smile arrived at afternoon’s end, Hugo damp from his second gym class, his book bag charged with Latin and Greek exercises to correct, had but to cross the soccer field and amble along two blocks of guardedly prosperous houses with colorful gardens behind low front walls. If he let the class go ten minutes early and skipped a shower, he had time to walk to the bus stop by way of the meadow beyond the wood where he could sit under a favorite oak, elbows on knees, and have a rich moment of calm and anticipation. The river shone at the other side of the meadow, if the light was right. Here passages of the thesis on Yeshua took form and texture, the day disclosed patterns, abrasions healed, letters were opened and read.

Papa’s hollyhocks. Papa’s reading, the lectures and concerts he had been to. A note on a Hebrew word.

Aakjaer Minor had begun a cataleptic syndrome that was as yet more comic than serious. He hugged people and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, let go. In the locker room he’d seen Golo Hansen embarrassed and helpless in Alexander Aakjaer’s grasp. I don’t want to hurt him, Golo had wailed to Hugo. He grabs people like this, his eyes go blank, and he won’t turn loose. Hugo had said, quit trying to pull him loose. Just stand cool. He got me the other day, Asgar said, and two people couldn’t pry him off. It’s mental. He doesn’t know what you’re talking about when it’s over. Hugo had studied the unfocussed eyes, the sweaty back of the neck, cold wrists, locked knees and elbows. Gently he’d guided Golo out of Alexander’s gripping arms, hoisted the suddenly slack Alexander onto his shoulders and carried him to the infirmary where he said to Nurse that Aakjaer Minor had had a dizzy spell in gym and only needed to lie still for a while. Nurse nevertheless stuck a thermometer in Alexander’s mouth and took his pulse, seeing nothing interesting in either.

JONAS

The pompion or million creeps upon the ground if nothing be by it whereon it may take hold and climb with very great ribbed rough and prickly branches whereon are set large rough leaves cut in on the edges with deep gashes and dented besides, with many claspers also, which wind about everything they meet. The flowers are great and large, hollow and yellow, divided at the brim into five parts, at the bottom of which grows the fruit sometimes of the bigness of a man’s body and oftentimes less, in some ribbed or bunched, in others plain and either long or round, green or yellow. The seed is great flat and white, lying in the middle of the watery pulp. The root is of the bigness of a man’s thumb, dispersed underground with many small fibers. They are boiled in fair water and salt, or in powdered beef broth, sometimes in milk, and so eaten, or else buttered. The seed, as well as of cowcumbers and melons, are cooling, and serve for emulsions in the like manner as almond milks, for those troubled with the stone.

BLUE PUP TENT

In the ferns beyond birches, Hugo slowed, running in place, and hollered ho!

—Whoever you are, he sang in stentorian buffo, I come in peace.

Silence. Brilliant early morning light.

—Ho! from the pup tent.

—I’ll go away, Hugo said, if you want me to. This is school property. Grundtviggers are you? Tvemunding here, having a run before breakfast.

A head, bare shoulders, an ironic sleepy grin. Anders. Out of the tent on knuckles and toes, mother naked.

—Morning, he said.

Through the birches, behind Anders, Quark on a silver wolf loping.

—Kim and I, Anders said.

Kim looked out, blond hair over eyes. He crawled out monkey-nimble. A hug from Anders.

RIVER

The divestment of Franklin in the meadow by the river. Mariana flourished an imaginary trumpet.

—The grasses, Hugo said, go from Tolland Man’s gruel of flaxseed and goosegrass to Roman porridge, which was linseed roasted with barley and coriander, pounded in a mortar, salted, boiled, and served in a bowl to Horace dining with Virgil. Columella fancied it, and Pliny mentions the toothsomeness of rustic Tuscan porridge on a winter morning. Meadow with goats to gaze at as he ate.

—Like us, Mariana said, bleating and folding Franklin’s togs.

—There were Iron Age grape pips at Donja Dolina.

—Bet they ate frogs too, Mariana said, and green lizards.

—People upstream in a boat, Franklin said. Voices carry over water. It’s Master Sigurjonsson and Pascal without a stitch.

—Ho, said Mariana.

—Pascal I mean, Franklin said, climbing Hugo to stand on his shoulders. Hr. Ess has on a cap, wristwatch, and little triangle underpants like Hugo’s.

—Swim out, Hugo said, and climb aboard.

OLD MIRRORS FLECKED AND TARNISHED

On a long walk that took him near the Nordkalsten seawall and warehouses, Hugo had seen the Bicycle Rider hefting his bike up the stone steps, swinging onto it in the road. Their eyes met, with no recognition in the Rider’s, though he was already a day student at NFS Grundtvig but not yet someone Hugo had tried to be friendly toward. His jeans were unzipped, the pod of his dingy briefs pouching through. His eyes had been dead, as when Hugo had last seen them in the police morgue.

ASTERS AND ZINNIAS

Papa in a folding hammock chair by his hollyhocks, straw boater over his eyes.

—Hugo’s theology, he said, is of course his need to undo me. Not by cracking my head on a dusty road in Greece, but as an intelligent child takes its toys apart to see what makes them go. Ridiculous, but there you are.

—Papa, Hugo said, I know what makes you go. And the machinery is too fine for my fingers. I hope I’m something like.

—Peas in a pod, Mariana said, if you know what to look for. You have the same sense of house, of space, of time. You eat alike. I didn’t know how to take a walk until Hugo annexed me. Or how a room can be the whole world.

—It’s awful, Franklin said, but it’s fun.

—Tell me, Pastor Tvemunding said from under his hat, holding out an arm to invite Franklin over.

Franklin came, got hugged, and climbed astride.

—Papa, Hugo said, keeps his hat over his eyes so as not to look at Franklin snake naked.

—How modern I’m willing to be, Pastor Tvemunding said, is, I see, still a matter for doubt.

—Notice everything, Franklin said. Know where everything comes from, a hundred years back.

ANEMONE

—Matter, the physicists seem to be saying, was not stuff before creation: critical tensions in nothingness, the universal emptiness, became so energetic that they blew up.

—Critical tensions? Papa asked.

—Force, Hugo said. The only thing the physicists can reach back to is a great force present in all matter and space.

—Well then, Papa said, scattering leaves with his stick, there’s God. As they see Him.

—If, Hugo said, man in God’s image was Adam, God in man’s image was Yeshua. If matter was not stuff before creation, then God can be a pattern of energy rather than an oxygen breather and processor of carbohydrates. That we are in His image then means that He is and we are animations of the same energy system. Except, perhaps, His anima occupies the whole sea of neutrinos that’s boundless but limited, and we each occupy bodies only, energy systems that are limited but boundless, exchanging love and conversation, procreating both bodies and minds. God’s procreation is continuous, ours occasional. Yeshua is an occasional aspect of a continuity.

BREAKFAST

Franklin. Hair carrot and brass. Irides seagreen, pupils hyacinth. Pathfinder brogans, collapsed socks. Lots of practical irony and cautious reticence, the hippety-hop who invented electricity. Love me some geography, he says to the mush bowl, because a map is a jigsaw puzzle. What I like is where the driblet islands make a trail at the south poke of things, left behind, all on a drift to the west. And to the north, crumbly islands. Love islands. Show him the inland island in France, bounded by four rivers. Plains islands bounded by mountains. A country, then, he opines, is a lot of people pretending they’re an island, because they all speak the same language. Well, sometimes. Or because they have a common interest, like the Swiss. There is no place without time, no time without place. So, says Franklin, knuckling his nose, you can’t say where without saying when. The Mediterranean when it had seals in it. Holland before tulips. Everything wanders, he says. Land, people, animals, trees.

OUT FROM JOPPA

Two ways, Hugo said, and Papa cocked his head to listen. Like John, as in eleven Matthaeus, neither eating nor drinking, and the opinion of the public is that you are owned and operated by a devil, or like Yeshua, eating and drinking, and the people say here’s a glutton and a drunkard, the friend of tax collectors and sinners. And, Papa said, that’s yet another logion where the sign of Jonas is the pivot. The vine is to be judged by its gourd.

DOVE

By wholeness of being.

FIG

Neutrino here, Hugo said, our Franklin, is as yet all luck. Whenever the angel rings the silver run in a sound of trumpets, he thrusts his sickle in, the wheat topples in a golden rush, the chaff dances in the air, and the harvest song is the only one his red tongue knows morning noon and night. Whereas those of us who shave and pay taxes always seem to get in line at the post office behind an Oriental trying to mail a live chicken to Sri Lanka. Look at McTaggart the English master. He loses his car habitually in the parking lot. That his disciples in Transcendental Meditation and Buddhist raising of the consciousness are all feebleminded hankerers who will clot around any mountebank he does not notice. He walks across flower beds puffing the beauties of nature to one of his morons. He was the only one of the faculty the Bicycle Rider esteemed and thought a bright teacher. To blow like a dead leaf in the wind, irresponsible, irresponsive. Which beautiful teaching, Mariana said, laid the Bicycle Rider out on the slab at the police morgue.

MONKEYS AND PARROTS

If, Mariana read to Franklin lying on the carpet and rolling a soccer ball inchmeal from crotch to chin, the forest were darker it did not seem to be more silent. They could hear a kind of buzzing in the treetops, a vague noise coming from the branches. Looking upwards, the three men could see indistinctly something like a great platform stretched out some forty meters above the ground. There must be at that height a tremendous entanglement of branches without any cranny through which the daylight could pierce. A thatched roof would not have been more lightproof. This explained the darkness that prevailed beneath the trees. Where they had camped that night the nature of the ground had changed greatly. No more intermingled branches or brambles, no more of those thorns that had kept them from leaving the footpath. A scanty grass, like a prairie that neither rain nor spring ever watered. The trees, at intervals from seven to ten meters, resembled pillars supporting some colossal edifice, and their branches must cover an area of several thousand hectares. There were masses of African sycamores whose trunks were formed of a number of stems firmly united toward the ground, bob bobs.

—Baobabs, Hugo said from his desk, a majestic great graygreen tree that huddles its trunks like celery.

—Bob bobs, read Mariana, recognizable by the gourdlike shape of their bole, with a circumference of seven to ten metres and surmounted by an enormous mass of hanging branches. There were silk cotton trees with their trunks opening into a series of hollows big enough for a man to hide in. Mahogany trees with trunks a metre and a half in diameter from which might have been excavated dugout canoes from five to seven metres long.

—Ho, Hugo said, Zuntz on the centurion with Jules Verne from across the room has filled me with lovingkindness, expecially as Monsieur Verne’s expositor has had her hand in her knickers from the beginning of the chapter.

—Can I help it if I’m a sweet person? she said.

—When, Franklin said twirling the soccer ball on his chin, I get to my peter, it jumps. See? Chin to peter, peter to chin.

—Phenomenal! Hugo said. I’ll bet if you went to the baker’s, by way of the kiosk for an evening paper, you might find a half dozen strawberry-jam cakes with custard topping that we can have with coffee, which I’ll make, as Mariana is not going to be able to walk or see straight after our expression, or expressions, of mutual esteem.

BLUE SUMMER SKY

Hugo under his oak at the meadow’s edge saw the oval shadow of the hot-air balloon sliding toward him before he looked up and saw the balloon itself, a gaudy upside-down pear shape the oiled silk of which was zoned in bands: the equatorial one was a rusty persimmon, a Mongol color, and around it were the figures of the zodiac copied from the mosaic floor of Bet Alpha Synagogue in Byzantine Israel, archaic but supple of line. The band above was bells and pomegranates in orange and blue, the one below was egg-and-dart Hellenistic. The basket was of wicker and belonged to the protomachine age, for a propeller that seemed to be made of four cricket bats was turned by a fanbelt connected to a brass cylinder leaking steam vapor. There was a wooden rudder, and levers at the taffrail. Three ten-year-old boys were the crew, as happy as grigs at their work bringing the balloon down right in front of Hugo, who stood and gaped, at a loss to account for anything he was seeing. The boys were dressed in nautical Scandinavian togs, with long scarves around their necks, as if the air from which they’d descended was very cold. One boy manipulated a lever that seemed to bring the balloon down, another braked the propeller, which stopped spinning and rolled to a lazy halt. Puffs of vapor smoked from the cylinder. The boys’ bright grins were for the joy of surprising Hugo, for the joy of being aeronauts in a balloon on a fine summer and for the joy of being messengers, which they said they were, talking all at once.

—Who in the name of God are you? Hugo asked. Where have you come from, hey?

—My name is Tumble, and my friends are Quark and Buckeye. Where we’ve come from we’re not to say, and we’re messengers.

—Bringing a message, Quark said helpfully.

—The coordinates are right, Buckeye said consulting a length of paper scrolled between two rollers. Oak tree, meadow, Sjaelland, Denmark. Hugo Tvemunding by the world for name. Shapes alphabet into words about the Company. Yeryuzu kendi kendine bir toprak.

—Buckeye! Tumble said sweetly, you’ve slipped off band. That’s Turkish.

—Sorry! said Buckeye. I was about to blush anyway, this part of the printout about shepherd to the young, a good son, and superb lover in both flesh and spirit, tam avidus quam taurus in a different hand in the margin, the dispatcher I suppose. Nesuprantamas disonansas tarp, oops! Sor-ree. Anyway, you’re the right soul.

—Yes, said Tumble, and here’s the message. Road auspicious. Though young, act like a man. Be steadfast, patient, and silent.

—About what? Hugo asked. And Why?

—That, smiled Quark, we are not free to say.

BOUNDARY

There is only one sense: touch. The sun, by way of caroming off a mellow brick wall with lonely afternoon light on it, firm plump pair of breasts with delectable nipples, a page of Homer, touches the eyes. Eating is touch carried to the utmost. Vibrant air touches the ear. Smell is so many particles from aromatic things. The world is a mush of matter rather than the separateness we ascribe to things. Franklin in his Wolf Cub cricket cap, blue shirt with yellow kerchief, little blue pants, tall ribbed socks, and red sneakers listened to Hugo in Eagle Scout khakis with solemn attention. Boys named Abel and Bruno had got out of him, moments before the powwow, that he has no father, that his sister Mariana is the bedmate of Scoutmaster Tvemunding, that he has only been camping with Hugo and Mariana, that he is poor, that Hugo makes love to Mariana lots and lots, and that his uniform is so new it has little squares of paper in all the pockets with an inspector’s number, to accompany complaint of manufacturing defect. As to other questions, Franklin had offered to bloody Bruno’s nose for him. Knots, naming of tent parts and tools, cards with animal tracks, cards with flowers and weeds, and here was Scoutmaster Tvemunding, who taught Latin, Greek, and gym at NFS Grundtvig and Sunday School at Treenigheden, talking about everything being touch.

—Eugenius, he said, front and forward. Face each other, tall and straight, shoulders back. Theodor, cup your hands. Eugenius is going to give you something, out of his wild imagination, and you are going to feel it, in your wild imagination, and describe it, how it feels.

—A frog! Eugenius said.

—Well, said Theodor, I had a frog in my hands just the other day, and a snake, and a hedgehog, so I’m not up a creek. A frog looks damp but is dry, looks flabby but is hard. It twitches, trying to jump away, but can be still, probably because it’s scared. I’d be scared. It’s cool. Its throat pulses.

ZUM ZIELE FUHRT DICH DIESE BAHN

—Theodor, Hugo said, didn’t know the dative of accommodation from a rat’s ass, and has been stricken with amnesia in the matter of ablative absolutes, Frits and Asgar bloodied themselves in a fight back of the gym, nasty little beasts, and the grounds trolls ran a power mower outside the windows for half of Greek, and around three Ulrich gave me a frantic signal to come quick. Golo and Abel were, for reasons best known to themselves, having a little conviviality outside study hall, playing push and pull with each other’s pizzles while gazing into each other’s big soulful eyes. Fine by me, though they have rooms and showers and woods and meadows in which to welcome puberty cross-eyed and breathless, but why waste the ten minutes before study hall, and then Aakjaer Minor, who grabs people and goes cataleptic, happens along and pins them both. Ulrich was the first to notice this predicament, and knowing that McTaggart had study hall and would be stomping along crabwise at any moment, and would bore everybody for days with the psychology of it all, had the diplomatic genius to push all three into the broom closet and sprint for the gym. We nipped back. McTaggart was bleating about combining study with transcendental meditation, so we could craftily open the broom closet and walk the interlocked three down the hall, one walking backward and zipping himself up, the other sideways, and both carrying the clinging Aakjaer with my and Ulrich’s help, God laughing at us all fit to kill. We disentangled the mass in my office. Abel, who had not managed to get his britches up with his arms pinned to his sides, stood there in pretty outrage. What in hell does it mean? he begged of me.

Mariana, listening with wide eyes, had deshoed and unsocked Hugo as he talked in the chair where he had flopped and sagged, tugged his trousers off, and was unbuttoning his shirt when a banging on the door announced Franklin in full Cub Scout fig.

—O Lord, Hugo sighed, I was forgetting that tonight’s the little bastards in yellow and blue, with beanies.

—Hi, said Franklin. Things look real interesting.

—Hugo, Mariana said, has had a trying day, and has taken a whole ten minutes to get over it.

ZWECK

In pipestem trews snug of cleft, flat Dutch cap, thickwove jersey, Norfolk jacket, hobnailed brogues, and Finnish scarf with an archaic pattern of reindeer and runes worked into its weave, Tumble climbed from the basket of the steam balloon, bounced from his jump, and cued Quark and Buckeye, poised with flute and glockenspiel, to give him a tune. Master Erastus, he sang, stomping with seesawing shoulders and chiming smile, Equuleus quagga! Likes, said Quark in recitative over the catch, clover bluegrass dill, spring onions oats and hay. Kin to, said Buckeye, lowering his flute, Eohippus Five Toes, silver wolves, red deer on Rum, dandelions, and Ertha when she’s broody. Maybe, said Quark, depressing the declinator, which seeped vapor, but the mykla puts them in with asses burros zebras and horses of the good old Hwang Ho Valley, don’t it? Yuss, said Tumble, but Buckeye means chord. Spartan spadgers, springbokker, leapers and runners. So hold fast, wait long, and don’t speak. No, not to anybody.

ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO

Even though we can never see the head that sang, with its deer’s eyes staring at infinity, we have the strong torso from whose animal grace we can imagine the hot summer clarity of its gaze. If the gone head is still not there, in light, why then does the proud chest disturb your looking, or the sweet shift of the hips, slight as a smile, that takes our eyes down the cunning body, to its cluster of seeds? Otherwise this stone would stand senseless under the polished slope of its shoulders, without its wild balance, and would not be as rich with light as the sky with stars. The world sees you, too. You must change your life.

AN EVENT ALSO HAPPENS WHERE IT IS KNOWN

Out past the warehouses and quays on Nordkalksten is a seawall of gray stone. A catwalk at its base, a bicycle path along the top, with iron rail. Harbor, river, barges. Here one could see old men fishing, sailors sleeping off a terrible drunk, and sunbathers spread against the slant of the wall. Boys in dingy bargain-basement briefs, boys impudently naked.

UNDER

We distinguish this seventh stratum by stringers of the stone that readily melts in fire of the second order. Beneath this is another ashy rock, light in weight and five foot thick. Next comes a lighter stratum the colors of ash and a foot thick. Beneath this lies the eleventh stratum, dark and like the seventh, two foot through. Below the last is a twelfth stratum, soft and of a whitish color, two foot thick. The weight of this sits on the thirteenth stratum, ashy and a foot thick, whose weight in turn is supported by a fourteenth stratum of black color. There follows this another black stratum half a foot thick, which is again followed by a sixteenth stratum still blacker in color, whose thickness is also the same. Beneath this, and last of all, lies the cupriferous stratum, black colored and schistose, in which there sometimes glitter scales of gold-colored pyrites in very thin sheets, which, as I have said elsewhere, often take the forms of various living things.

HOLLYHOCKS ALONG A GARDEN WALL

—I’m wonderfully delighted, Pastor Tvemunding said to Mariana, that you and Hugo are friends. He has always been a friendly boy. He used to toddle off behind the postman, and grieve that he could not stay longer than to hand over the mail and exchange comments on the weather. He made friends with the girl who delivered butter and eggs. He fell in love with all his schoolmates.

—He’s a loving person, Mariana said, that’s for sure.

—His loving nature causes him grief from time to time. You know about the student he calls the Bicycle Rider?

—Who’s dead, Mariana said. I know what you mean. He hurt Hugo.

—Because, Pastor Tvemunding said, Hugo had never really before encountered evil face to face. He doesn’t want to admit that evil cannot be dealt with. He cannot believe that there are wholly selfish people drowned in themselves, beyond the reach of love or understanding. That there are people who, impotent to create, destroy. That there are people whose self-loathing is so deep they know nothing of generosity and invariably do the mean thing even when they might as easily do the generous one. The young man was on drugs, and had been for years, but I’m not one to blame drugs for human evil: the evil is there before the drugs, which are part of the meanness and not its cause.

—You couldn’t be righter, Mariana said.

—All this theological work, which will not take him into the ministry, began with a remark I made years ago, that God will remain inscrutable and uncertain forever, but that Jesus (Hugo’s Yeshua, for the Aramaic name is of the essence for him) had an intuitive idea of God that put goodness in our hands. He is light, of which we are free to partake, or be in darkness. We can be transparent to our fellow man, or opaque.

BUCKEYE

Possum ate a lightning bug and now he shines inside.

RED AND YELLOW ZINNIAS

—I want to be up-to-date, Pastor Tvemunding said at tea, reaching over to wipe whipped cream from the corners of Franklin’s mouth with his napkin. There’s Hugo’s room, and the guest room that’s so jolly with the apple tree at the window.

—Mariana and I, Hugo said, will sleep together, and I’ll rig out my old scout cot for Franklin.

—But, said the pastor, there’s the guest room he can have all to himself.

—Oh, no, Hugo said, travellers stay together.

MEADOW WITH GOLDFLOWERS AND POPPIES

Buckeye in a Portuguese sailor’s shirt, abrupt white denim pants, beret, and espadrilles climbed backward down the rope ladder of the balloon, singing onward under over through!

Quark tossed the anchor onto the meadow. The balloon tilted its drift, exhaled vapor from its cylinders, bounced and swayed as Tumble pumped the declinators. Quark swung himself over the wicker taffrail with a deft scissors kick and landed springing.

Tumble closed valves, cinched a line, made an entry in the log and vaulted out, rolling forward in a somersault.

—Hejsa! said Buckeye.

—Hi! said Quark.

—Hup! said Tumble.

For adoration beyond match

sang Tumble pulling his sailor’s middy over his blond rick of wind scrumpled hair,

The scholar bulfinch aims to catch.

The soft flute’s ivory touch

sang Quark sopranino, his gray American sweatshirt halfway over his head.

And, careless on the hazel spray,

Buckeye sang as he snatched off his Portuguese sailor’s blouse,

The daring redbreast keeps at bay

The damsel’s greedy clutch.

Shoeless, socksless, Tumble backed out of his sailor’s pants singing

While Israel sits beneath his fig.

With coral root and amber spring

Quark sang with trills and a cadenza as he wriggled off his Sears Roebuck blue jeans.

The weaned adventurer sports

Buckeye sang tossing his short white pants into the gondola of the balloon.

Tumble, pretending to blush, thumbed down his drawers, Quark and Buckeye their pindling briefs, and the three in the pink-brown slender ribby nakedness sang in chiming Mozartian harmony

Where to the palm the jasmin cleaves

For adoration mongst the leaves

The gale his peace reports.

—Now labor, they sang making a triangle of arms on one another’s shoulders, his reward receives.

For adoration counts his sheaves,

To peace, her bounteous prince.

The nectarine his strong tint imbibes,

And apples of ten thousand tribes,

And quick peculiar quince.

TROLLFLÖJTEN

Ring-tailed kinkajous trotting on the logging road, bouncing and siffling, squeaking and hopping, in pairs and trios, alone and in quartets. Yellow parrots above them, monkeys and kingfishers. Franklin’s world, Mariana said. Years ago he was a rat in the Pied Piper festival, he and scads of littles in brown and gray rat suits with rope tails, creeping along behind the Piper playing Mozart. I remember a rat who lost his way and had to be carried by a woman and restored to the pack. Wasn’t me, Franklin said. I crept good.

GOLDEN SAMPHIRE

Buckeye in the meadow, where the balloon was tethered. Tumble and Quark were leapfrogging by the river. He held out his hand for a meadowlark to fly to him and stand on his palm. She spoke to him. He answered in quail. Silly! she said. Do I look like a quail hen? He spoke goat. She laughed. Frog. Giggle.

AURIGA. BETELGEUSE. BARNARD’S STAR.

In spite of their intangibility, neutrinos enjoy a status unmatched by any other known particle, for they are actually the most common objects in the universe, outnumbering electrons by a thousand million to one. In fact, the universe is really a sea of neutrinos, punctuated only rarely by impurities such as atoms. It is even possible that neutrinos collectively outweigh the stars, and therefore dominate the gravity of the cosmos.

RIGHT THE SECOND TIME

—Tom’ll be here in a bit, Hugo said to Mariana nose to nose.

—I think I can walk, Mariana said, though my brains are all gone. Melted into a jelly. Who’s at the door?

Franklin.

—O wow! he said looking squiggle-eyed and pretending to barf.

—Who, said Mariana, pulled his piddler until his eyes rolled back in his head the whole week we were at Papa Tvemunding’s, while we had to make do with teenage smooching?

—You said Augustus would spoil me, Franklin said solemnly. I like Augustus.

—I imagine so, Hugo said. Nasty little spy. Papa with a dry cough to introduce the subject, which amused him tremendously, said that you confided in him that we were not making love, but only kissing a lot and whispering before we went to sleep. You thought Papa wouldn’t want us to, not knowing that he says that people are close to God when they make love. And being Franklin, you got Papa to say a good word for rabbity-nosed boys jacking off, in moderation, of course.

—It’s nature, Franklin said. And fun. Once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. Augustus said I was to. And at night you said I was to.

—I suppose, Mariana said to the skylight, if a third party had assured Franklin of the naturalness of the kinship between monkeys and boys, he would have had no time to eat, sleep, or those long talks with Papa Tvemunding.

—Who spoiled him rotten, Hugo said.

—I promised to write him a letter, Franklin said.

—Tom’s here, Mariana said.

Hugo, who had pulled on long sweat pants and a singlet and was howling for coffee, set the painting of the Bicycle Rider on the easel. He had whited out the lazily handsome blond face and dead blue eyes. The right arm, on the fist of which the head had leaned, was also overpainted.

—Dark background’s going too, Hugo mused. It wants to be white.

Mariana, her breasts loose under a rich blue pullover, was zipping herself into snug coral shorts when big Tom, tossing his floppy hair out of his eyes, shifted from foot to foot. He crossed his hands on his behind, nudging a lampshade with his elbow. He then cupped them over his crotch, seeing instantly that, expand or contract, he was equally awkward. He tried sliding his fingers into his pockets, hitting the lampshade again, and settled for knuckling his nose and scratching a convenient itch on his thigh. Shown the painting, he stared at it.

—That, Hugo said, was the dopey kid who was a day student, the one who floated around on lysergic acid and managed the ultimate trendy distance by killing himself with an overdose of God knows what. I tried getting his head out of his ass. I failed.

—No, Mariana said. He failed you.

—Anyway, Hugo said, I’m going to repaint.

—Tom hates coffee, Mariana said brightly. Every time he’s been here, he has suffered and squirmed. Beer, milk, fizz water, which?

—Beer, Tom said, his voice rasping at his audacity.

—Head turned slightly, Hugo said, so that you’re looking at me out of the side of your eyes. Right elbow on the chair arm. Everything else the same, except that your body is much harder and better muscled than the Rider’s. I have all sorts of changes to make. Take off your pants.

This sloshed Tom’s beer.

—Leave your briefs on. They’re nicely stinted and stressed.

The balloon, Hugo could see through the skylight, was just outside. He had learned on a walk with Mariana that she could not see Buckeye, Quark, and Tumble. They had come and stood gravely interested while they sat under the oak, Mariana’s head in Hugo’s lap.

—Burnt sienna, Hugo said, raw sienna, titanium white.

Franklin made a great show of finding the tubes and laying them on the little table that served as a palette.

Buckeye was on the skylight, peering in. Short khaki pants, gray white and ochre striped soccer jersey, and not till he came into the room, in less time than an eyeblink, could you see his dinky blue cap.

—Calabash! he said to Hugo, straked gourd pumpkin vine!

—If I had some paper and pencil and an envelope and a stamp, Franklin said, I could write Augustus a letter.

—And, Mariana said, if you could spell and write so that anybody but God could read it.

—Put in your letter, Hugo said, that while we visited I saw what I needed to see. Say that the casting out of demons is the hub on which everything else turns. He’ll know what I mean. The self is the demon. Demon out, daimon in.

—O wow! Franklin said. Start spelling.

Hugo painted. Tom, with only his good nature to get him through this ordeal, took courage from the fact that it was his good looks that got him into this, and thought of seducing Franklin without breaking Lemuel’s heart, share him perhaps, and Mariana, and even Hugo, and the green-eyed sailor with silver eyelashes at the recruiting station, the one with the sleepy friendly smile and crammed trews.

Mariana spelled, Franklin wrote and erased and wrote again. Hugo painted.

Tumble was at the skylight, Quark looking over his shoulder.

—Why do you keep looking up? Mariana asked idly.

—The light, Hugo said. It’s what I paint by.

Buckeye was inspecting Tom, closely, with doggish curiosity. His eyes met Hugo’s. Under all’s a fire so fine it is and isn’t in and out of time, a pulse of is, a pulse of isn’t.

—But, Buckeye mouthed inaudibly, with a shrug of his boney shoulders and a crinkle of dimples in his smile, that isn’t worth knowing, is it? Over all’s the nothing that’s something because of the curving tides of the is and the isn’t. No matter that, either.

He stood behind Tom and put his arms around his neck and rested his chin in Tom’s hair.

Quark read Franklin’s letter. Tumble sniffed Mariana.

—What matters, Buckeye said, is that there are so many who don’t know their right hand from their left.