Chapter 8

Wednesday, September 3

I remembered reading something, some dignitary’s address to the British Medical Society, how we need for health’s sake to change the image of our heroes: how James Bond, if he were real, would have a hundred illegits by now, and every venereal disease known to man.

And that was before AIDS.

Well, I didn’t have AIDS, I knew that. AIDS takes much longer than two weeks to show. But some things probably don’t. I wondered what things.

I remembered all the pills in Tom’s suitcase.

We went jogging anyway. From the Academy of Sciences, down the bridle paths to the beach. And back. Pain. Not quite like a knife in the gut, but too much like to make it any fun. How long was I going to ignore that I was sick? Tender, bloated, painful, queasy sick.

Harlan never got tired. And he never sweated. Not at all. The bones in my pelvis gritted with every step, like my joints were beginning to rot out. My damn old hair was in my face. I actually longed for Harlan’s hair bands.

Bet he had ’em made to order. Welcome to the world of unlimited money dispensed with unlimited nerve. I bet he did. His very own custom hair bands, black satin, like his heart. Scared to put one in my hair, all sorts of legendary precedents came to mind, like the Wicked Queen’s poisoned ribbons zapping poor Snow White.

That’s ridiculous. If I’m spiteful enough to typecast Harlan as the Wicked Queen, it’s a pretty sure sign Snow White I’m not.

———

Lord God, Father Almighty, I don’t want to love him.

Lord Jesus Christ, do not let me love him.

Lord God, Holy Spirit, please make me stop loving him.

Dona nobis pacem.

Dona nobis requiem.

Dona nobis cold showers. Navy coffee. Something.

———

Afternoon already. We’re in a big old smelly thrift shop in San Jose. “Harlan. Harlan!” I’m bouncing up and down so I can spy over the racks. I see Harlan shoot out of the book section, his fingers still keeping place in the middle of a volume called The Wines of California. “Look, look look Harlan, Harlan, Harlan, Harlan—This is what I’m looking for? This is one! Isn’t it?”

All he says is, “Does it fit?”

Oh God. What if it doesn’t? What if it’s too small?

Dingy plywood booth. No lights. Lank dank curtain. Piles of sweaty musty clothes people hadn’t hung back where they found ’em. A fringe of price tags (unacceptably high ones) stuck behind the edges of the mirror.

Out of the running shoes, the Levi’s, the shirt. A sweet dry benediction of antique withered silk over my head. The moment of truth. I don’t fill it out like Mae West. But the shoulders cling honestly to my shoulders. The waist is in the vicinity of my waist. The hem lies demurely near the concrete floor. Hot Damn. The shirt, the Levi’s, the running shoes. Out into the light. Harlan’s still poring through The Wines of California.

“It fits!”

He looks me in the eye for a moment without speaking, just the kindest, quietest smile.

“Thomas will love it. Very much.”

“It doesn’t match the top thing.” The gown is a waxy-hued mosaic of small random wrinkles spaced with shriveled, crowded lace. The peignoir, shades lighter, has acquired big square creases like a road map.

That got one of his little shrugs. “So the gown made it into bed; the peignoir spent its youth in the hope chest, poor thing. There are ways to minimize such differences.”

The two together cost $2.99, the same as Harlan paid for The Wines of California.

Good fortune to ponder in silence: all the way home from San Jose. The gown and wrap are such a treasure. $9.99 would have seemed an amazing error. $19.99 would have seemed a steal. By now, I can make a fairly accurate estimate, the vintage clothes shops would have wanted $99.99 at least. $199.99 wouldn’t amaze me.

But it was too old to be content labeled. If the collar has a tag saying 100% SILK, dry clean only, the girls in the back room can relate. If the label’s in French or German, 100% seide or 100% soie, forget it. And they never know raw silk at all: be it heavy and rich and labeled; it could lap your skin and cling to your hands like the living essence of love, they wouldn’t know what it was.

Most people never do know what something is, if they—first off—don’t expect to see it, and it isn’t plainly labeled on the collar.

———

Yosh for hair. Just before closing. The tall young man assigned to me had perfectly sculpted golden curls himself. Harlan leaned across, and whispered in his ear.

He let out a very unprofessional squeal. People turned around and looked. I bided my time until the hair was all wet down and he was snipping away, I asked him what Harlan had said to make him laugh.

“Nothing,” he said. “Your friend was being witty.”

“What?”

“Really, nothing.”

“Come on, or I’ll think you were talking about me.”

“He suggested a name, and I didn’t expect it, and it struck me as funny, that’s all.”

“What was the name?”

And he must have thought it was really hilarious; he was giggling again.

“Theda Bara.”

I had only the vaguest idea who Theda Bara was, and no idea at all what made it funny. I clammed up. Spent the rest of the time vigorously loathing Harlan, whom I could still see perusing French glamour mags on a divan out front.

But the hair worked, Theda Bara to the contrary not withstanding. When I was finished and dry and the guy put the mirrors around, it was minimal, durable, sculptured smooth and close to my head, a helmet of sleek seal brown.

Harlan could take his black satin hair bands now, and stuff ’em.

———

Besides, I now knew how to get away from him. Ha. Wait’ll he’s in the shower, and split.

There was a really opulent bookstore a few doors up from the hotel. I strode in there and found what I wanted almost at once. Books on Hollywood, movie history, Glamour Gods and Goddesses of the Silver Screen.

Find the index. Look up Theda Bara.

And there she was.

Dark hair, bangs. Eyes like two enormous smoky blazes consuming half her face. Shapely little mouth and a steel jaw. Impossible: I knew I couldn’t look like that; old Harlan passed for Theda Bara light years easier than I did. Incongruous. That’s why the guy at Yosh had laughed.

Or was it?

I found three pictures, and a short blurb on her: the original vamp (as is vampire), the “v” also standing for the vengeance of her sex, she was the woman who used up men, wrung them dry and threw away the rind. Could that be what Harlan thought of me? Maybe he wasn’t being funny. I had got his lover, and was set to suck him dry.

It wasn’t funny at all.

One other thing, though. She was actually this proper Midwestern Jewish chick named Theodosia Goodman. The studio promo guys concocted “Theda Bara.” It was an anagram for “Arab Death.”

Now that was funny.

Thursday, September 4

I woke up, got up. Threw up. All over the bathroom. I wanted to mop it up, but I was too sick. Harlan found me trying. He rang for the maid. I rang for the Marines.

Doctor Eldridge Curtis. OB Gynecologist. First saw him years ago; Mama panicked because I didn’t have periods. He said it was because I ran. After that I saw him once a year. A sandy, skinny, weathered, down-loose man, with a funny laugh not unlike Father ’Chi’s.

He was standing outside his suite in the courtyard of the medical building when Harlan and I slid past. He was showing some expectant couple the plant.

In among the tropical wonders growing in the long court is this big-leafed thing: it extrudes a bloom like one year in five. It had one now, a man-high jack-in-the-pulpit, or when open, dick-in-the-pulpit: an amazing shameless green phallus, like Audrey II with a hard-on. “How about that?” cackled Dr. Curtis. “Is that the sign for a gynecologist’s office or what?”

I got the exam room I liked best, with the paper mobile twirling from its ceiling. There was the symbol for “male,” and the symbol for “female,” and two silhouette people, frank and primitive like Bushmen made them. The little guy was bowlegged and his penis was a tab sticking down. The little woman’s breasts sat out in cones, one to a side, and her crotch had a round paper-punch hole. The guy’s tab fitted perfectly.

You could just tell: the nurses each time they tidied that room would routinely tear off the paper on the exam table and roll out more, pitch the used gown and sheet and set out clean folded ones, and take the little paper guy’s tab out of his little wife, letting him dangle free so the next appointment could have the secret satisfaction of reinserting him before the doctor came.

Funny. Lovely. Wonder what minute percentage of women didn’t think to do it. Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Memory pulled the plug, and all the fun drained out. There was that tiny sparkle of pain in my guts again. I hadn’t quite started to cry when Doctor Curtis came in.

“There she is,” he said. Did his usual little double take. “They tell me you’re infirm.”

I told him. I told him good. He didn’t say anything.

He lifted up my sheet and pressed my soft parts solemnly all over, leaning his weight into his hand, first down the right side, no problem—

“Ow.”

“—That would be your—left ovary—” Then over in the middle, his entire attention centered in the kneading pressing fingers, while his eyes bobbed forgotten on the ceiling.

“Find anything?”

“Your uterus.”

“Is it all right?”

“It’s—quite hard—and a tad enlarged. Let’s go inside and have a look.” He warmed his little stainless instrument of torture in the sink—still that shock when he stuck it in and opened it, Whoop! Click! Like an umbrella going up inside me.

On my last exam I asked him, just hypothetically of course, like rhetorically, for curiosity’s sake, whether anything he saw in my anatomy might make sex difficult. “If I can put this in all right—” (Whoop! Click! Yeeow!) he said, “your husband shouldn’t have much problem.”

Now I was married, and here was Dr. Curtis again, looking up me with a flashlight. “Noticed any unusual discharge?”

“What?”

“Itching? Burning? Bleeding?”

“No. No. No. Only a little—”

“Juicy.”

“Right.”

He took a swab for evidence, saying, “Hardly need to do this, but I’ll send it to the lab anyway. I think I can make a visual diagnosis. Classic symptoms. Madam, you’re pregnant.”

“You mean I’m all right?”

“Assuming you like being pregnant.”

“But what about the pains?”

“We feel you’re entitled to an ouch or two.”

“You mean I’m not sick?”

“If you are, it’s not in the parts I look at.”

“I’ve only been married three weeks!”

“Come on, lady, you know where babies come from—”

“I was only with him one week! Part of one week!”

“So what d’you want me to say? A little dab’ll do ya? Your husband’s a good shot?” He reached for my file again. “Let’s see. Your last period must have been—and counting fifteen days (about) from there—When did you say you were married?”

“The seventeenth.”

“Gotcha the first night out.”

“He’s in England!”

“Give him a call. Get dressed.”

In the office down the hall, white starched rumps swaying in unison, nurse and receptionist leaned across the desk, peering out through the receptionist’s window at the little lobby with its cozy colonial furniture and baby magazines.

“Can’t be, that was a month ago.”

“Don’t care,” whispered the other, “That’s him.”

I knew just what they were seeing.

“Well he must be with some band, it’s the only excuse I know for looking like that—”

“Marta,” said Dr. Curtis in the direction of the prone nurse and receptionist, “Have you got Andy’s billing here?”

I tackled him again. “Don’t I need some special diet?”

“Do you eat meat once a week?”

“Come on, be serious.”

“Do you drink a lot? Smoke? Do drugs?”

“No!”

“Young lady, you are a perfect physical specimen. You obviously know how to take care of yourself. Pregnancy is a natural condition. An ultimately natural condition.”

“I run a lot. Shouldn’t I stop?”

“Probably harder on your bod to stop abruptly than go on cautiously. You’ve got good sense. Your own comfort is the surest guide.”

“What about sex?”

“Same goes. The final week or so when things begin to open up, there’s some increased risk of infection, but I’ve seen lots of healthy overdues induced into the world that way. Why, it’s better’n climbin’ in the ol’ pickup and ridin’ down the railroad tracks.”

“I’ll need to find a doctor in England, won’t I—”

“Pas de problème. It’s a civilized country.”

Doctors, it’s claimed, have the same speech defect as Las Vegas women, all they can say is “One hundred dollars.” My billing was all typed out, laid out on the desk.

I went, “Sssst,” at Harlan through the waiting room door. He, being never slow, came through it wallet in hand. “That is Harlan Parr, by the way,” I breathed to the nurse, behind his back.

“Oh God,” she breathed back. “Oh God. You’re—not?” (I shook my head.) “They said you were married, I didn’t think to check your record—” (doing it) “Miranda Rhymer?”

———

Harlan had me outside already, next to the plant. From its tip, at eye level, hung a fat round drop of nectar. The whole world looked bright, flat glittery bright, like I was going to faint. “Harlan.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hear what he said.”

He searched my face in quiet alarm. “I assumed from their manner—No, I heard the doctor say you were well—”

“I’m pregnant.”

Everything went black.

At last I was inside Harlan’s charmed circle, with his hair over my eyes and the rest of me glued up against his warm rough linen suit. He was just like Tom, he kissed with his whole body. Tom said Harlan hadn’t known how to kiss very well the first time, but it was terribly sweet. That second part was true even now. Tom said they’d taught each other how to love. They sure were each other’s star pupils. I thought he said, “Now I understand—” (against my right cheek) “why—” (a kiss to the mouth) “I’ve felt Tom’s hand when I took yours.” Implausible as a dream he should be saying that, and convincing instantly, as dreams are—

Then he backed off a little and said, for real and for sure this time, “Promise me, promise me you won’t tell Tom until the proper time. Please promise.”

I was sure he said that. “When’s proper?”

“I’ll tell you when the time comes.” He seemed so pathetically earnest. “Please trust me. I’ll show you how it works.”

“Sure.” I would have promised him almost anything just then. Amazing how reasonable it all could seem. I’m well and I’m pregnant, God bless me, Tom would be kissing me, exactly the same if he were here: exactly the same—exactly the same—in the cool of early evening, presided over by the exuberant protuberant greenness of that enormous phallic plant, in the sweet smell of the blooming courtyard.

———

Somebody cleared her throat, and queried in a genteel whoopy dowager’s voice like Julia Child’s—“Your first?”

We were holed up in the next door down from Dr. Curtis, which was, in fact, the entrance to a dentist’s. An elderly lady in a red suit and hat was waiting to get past. We let go of each other and faced her in as total alarm I’m sure as if she’d caught us fucking in the bushes.

“Er, yes, quite!” said Harlan, blushing and bobbing, doing an excellent job of looking young, flustered, upper class and English. Which, of course, he was.

Hat Lady smiled benignly. “Well, I wish you many many more,” she said, patting his arm, then mine. “Small families may be modern, but the world needs beautiful people.”

We abandoned the Porsche in the medical suites’ slowly emptying lot, and hiked around the corner into Stanford Shopping center. Gaylord’s of India. My hand that wore Tom’s rings traveled tightly enclosed in Harlan’s small, hard, comfortably warm one.

We tried to rev up our old discussion about hot food, but talk kept lapsing. When the split of Chardonnay he ordered was almost empty, Harlan eyed the Mound of Despair and ordered another. And finished it.

But his touch with the car felt smooth and sure as ever.

I curled up in my bucket seat. The pain in my insides wasn’t. Oh, something was still there, but it wasn’t pain. Just something. Short ride.

I was still half asleep when Harlan unlocked the door to the suite. He ducked into his room and came out with a small manila envelope. He handed it to me. It was addressed to Miranda D. Rhymer c/o the hotel. In the upper left corner it said U.S. Passport Services.

“Harlan?”

He was already on the phone. “Want to place a transatlantic call to England, please. London, England.” He used the delay transferring his body to the couch. “Yes, thank you. The number is—” he gave it.

“Harlan, how long have you had this? When did you—”

“Twenty-four hours after our visit to the bureau.”

“But, they had to get my records from—”

He had the phone to his ear, decorating the couch in lithe, half-potted patience; he wasn’t looking at me. “There are four wedding chapels in the street behind the licensing office in Carson City. They read me the numbers, I called them one by one. You were married at seven o’clock in the evening, in the Garden House of Serendipity Square, by one Reverend Milton Pritchard, Episcopal, retired. One hour to locate the right chapel and the Reverend Pritchard, one half-hour of genteel conversation to convince him that I hold Tom’s lasting power of attorney—”

“You do?”

“Of course. As he does mine. How else?”

“I understand,” I said, “around here some guys adopt each other—”

He flopped his head back over the arm of the couch, to regard me upside down. “What—adding incest to injury?”

Somebody must have asked the number again; he repeated it, with emphasis, and continued “—then he, being a gentleman, walked across to the State offices, expedited the issuance of a certified copy; a local courier service carried it in a sealed official envelope to the passport office in San Francisco, which had this issued and delivered to the hotel desk in twenty-four hours.”

“How long would you have hung on to it?”

“Until I knew if I could live with you.”

“What if you’d decided that you couldn’t? Harlan, answer me!”

Tom said Harlan had tried his hand at suicide. I found that hard to believe. With all his poise and self-assurance, he was the least suicidal-looking creature in the world. Still, Tom said Harlan had come for him with a knife, and that was even harder. But what did I know about crimes of passion? Wasn’t it all an act, a gesture? You know, fling himself bodily over the edge, force his lover to catch him, save him. Hot stuff: kissing and making up in hospital emergency. That was more the Harlan style, I guessed, but oh God, what if I was wrong? So who would it have been this time, himself or me?

“Maggee.” Both halves of the name so evenly accented, you couldn’t tell if it was “Maggie” or “McGee.”

He giggled. “I know.” Sinking to an ominous guttural, he rasped “A voice from the dead! Listen, have you a pencil handy?” The person hadn’t, evidently. “I’m coming home. Yes. That’s right. I’ll have Thomas’s new bride with me. As soon as I have the flight details, I’ll let you know.

“First. I want the lads at Heathrow. I’ve tried Thomas. He’s not to be found. That’s right. With one of the Mercedes. Make that both the Mercedes.

“Second, Thomas will want to be at Heathrow. I have no idea. Somewhere between London and Norwich, like as not. Locate him.

“Third, Thomas will want the world to be at Heathrow. Tip the fan clubs. Oh no, of course not. Anonymous will do. You have the numbers. (Pause) Those are indeed the ones. Next. Reservations: a suite, or better still, two, in one of the larger, more impregnable tourist hotels, Strand Palace, or the like. At least through the first of October.

“Right. Expense no object. We’ll make a grand pretense of installing the lady there. They’ll do for her family later.” He giggled again. “Nothing but the finest red herring. Yes.

“And lastly—that’s right. Lastly, Thomas and his bride will be coming home with me.” Whatever was suggested on the far end, Harlan looked perfectly aghast. “Oh no, it isn’t that at all: you’re to make as much of them as possible, or he’ll be terribly hurt. It’s not the other bit at all. Thomas is well and properly married; give the dear boy his money’s worth.

“No, his own room. But do turn it out for a bridal chamber. A fire in the grate, lavender between the sheets. Well, whatever you think appropriate. That’s the ticket. The office should know when they open. It is six o’clock in the morning. Five-thirty. Thank you, Maggee. So, goodbye, dear. Much love.”

Whom does Harlan love? Besides Tom. That’s what I’m thinking now. Who loves him, lives with him, does his errands for him? Laughs and jives with him at five-thirty in the morning. Older or younger? No clue. Male or female? Female, I imagine somehow. Oh God, I hope that’s not just prejudice! It might be like Tim’s boys.

Before ringing off he’s smiling anyway, murmuring again, “Much love.”

I’m off to sleep with both hands under my pillow, and my official U.S. Passport, issued to Miranda Dolores Rhymer, in both hands.

Friday, September 5

Harlan has taken to the phone already, and I’m not out of bed. Remedy that. Two glasses of orange juice this morning, and an almond tart Kit delivered from the coffee shop.

The first available fight to London is a red-eye with a plane change in New York. That gives us one long day and most of an evening to get packed.

Trunks. Bags. Tissue paper. I spread it out one last time and looked at all my wonderful collected stuff. And it was certainly my stuff, all right. No one else’s.

Dead people’s clothes.

Rings from old ruined marriages.

Mourning silk for an Emperor’s concubine.

Castoffs lovingly restored by outcasts.

Luggage off the Titanic.

As if I’d picked up every last thing I could find that was bizarre, offbeat, ill-omened and was trying to drag it bodily with me through the sacraments of Christian Grace.

Tim appeared at the door, just after dark, and behind him four giggling black-leather guys. Black caps, black jackets, black jodhpurs, jack boots. A matched set. I’d seen them all severally at his shop, but not together, and not in uniform: Richard, Neil, Danny, and Cody. They were carrying my wedding dresses.

Tim had another shirt-box-sized package, done up in white rice paper shot with silver foil. “For you, blushing bride,” he kissed my cheek, “To be opened on the morning of your wedding, before you put your stockings on.”

He rolled on past me into the suite. Utter shock. He walked with two canes, those metal orthopedic kind with braces up the forearm. I’d only seen him moving around his shop. No wonder his arms and chest were so built up; his lower body was crippled: thoroughly, and miserably. I cornered Harlan when I could.

“Shot through the hips at Pork Chop Hill,” he whispered. “Pelvis largely reconstituted from bone chips and bits of metal—”

How embarrassing, that I hadn’t seen, or realized or asked. And Harlan obviously had.

Harlan boxed most of his stuff, including the guitars, for Kit to mail at leisure. Some, like the orange juicer and coffee machine, he simply gave him. Also in Kit’s pocket: (quasi indefinite loan?) the pink slip, maintenance log, and keys to the green Porsche.

———

At last it was time.

Pulled up grandly at the curb before the revolving doors, was an antique London taxi, huge, upright, and black as death. Kit and the boys strapped my steamer trunks into the open cargo bay. Driving was a guy I hadn’t seen before, an amiably weird old German by the name of Constantine.

Kit crammed inside with the rest of us, holding Tim’s sticks respectfully. The leather boys hopped on motorcycles and we pulled away, tight formation.

Halfway to SFO Harlan said, “I like your entourage.”

Tim sniffed. “Footmen on the running boards are a nice touch too, but it tends to get the CHP a skosh excited.”

He left us at the airport curb. “You’ll pardonnez-moi for not walking with you? Just remember me, Lord, when you enter into your kingdom.” He kissed Harlan on both cheeks.

He did the same for me. Kit stayed with him, holding his sticks. The boys took my trunks and Harlan’s to the counter.

First Class. First time in my life. In the front door of the plane, and turn left instead of right. I feel like the newly made archbishop who said, “Gentlemen, from now on I expect never to eat a bad meal, nor to hear an honest opinion.”

Still a stifling metal womb. The womb begins to move.

Look down from a window seat by day, you see a variegated pavement taxi by gray and black, green and yellow islands set with little lights. But now it’s night.

Noise swells from soft ventilation to a whine, a shriek, a whistling roar. Wheels lope purposefully over the cracks in the pavement; tires take the rhythm of the cracks, faster and faster. Pause at the end.

A sense of incredible muscle, gathering up behind the small of my back and hurling forward: a walk, a trot, a lope, a gallop, freeway speed. Now faster than any freeway ever. The plane rears back on titanic pneumatic haunches and lofts itself. Thousands of tons of steel and glass and rubber and plastic and carpet, compressed air, fabric and jet fuel, bad food, magazines and human flesh. The rapid-fire stutter of tires along the pavement is gone. And so are we from San Francisco. The fog below us is a wrinkled sea. I see a ring of small islands, the tips of the Coast Range, Mt. San Bruno, Tamalpais, the Berkeley Hills—all the rest of San Francisco Bay lies in between, submerged, invisible.

Food arrives, not very good and too much of it. Temptation is to eat it, because, like Mt. Everest, it’s there. Harlan looks at his with undisguised contempt. I eat all of mine. I’m riding warm and passive in my airline seat as that other unseen passenger inside me.

Most of my girlfriends’ parents spent two years of middle school and four years of high in a permanent screaming flap their daughters’d get pregnant. (None did.) My friends were fought with, mistrusted, grounded, locked up, stuffed through family counseling, shipped off in tears to distant boarding schools. Nobody gave me any of that stuff. Had me worried for a while, whether it was an insult or a compliment.

Imagine Papa engaged in his favorite occupation, “Monkeying with the Computer”: brooding in a darkened room, over the little green terminal screen, Palantir fashion. I’ve been filling him in (unsolicited) on the vicissitudes of my friends’ home lives, leading up to the real, intense question: “Why aren’t you ever scared that I’ll get pregnant?” I figured he hadn’t heard.

A few more thoughts got punched into the PDP-11. Then he said, “I don’t believe in abortion.” In agreement so far: neither did I. Then he said, “So should you get pregnant, guess you’ll just have to share your room.”

That was the only lecture on the subject of teen sex I ever got at home. Now here I am, sharing my most intimate inside room. Some other minute stranger alive and well inside me. My pelvis a living cradle of delicate arched bone to rock it in. Her in. Him in. Seems that I should know this person, thrown together in a lottery of Tom’s dear stuff and my stuff. But I don’t know anything. What a jolly comic miracle: do-it-yourself build-a-person. Here we go, there’s one from you, and one from me, and one from you—and one from me—

I learned human reproduction off of educational TV.

Channel 9. NOVA.

Body fluids. His stuff, part of him. Think about how he is, all composed of swift energy. His sperm a jostling horde, so many microscopic marathoners at the start of that great race, each one carrying all his information.

And the course? Where Alph the Sacred River ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. Such caves, not Mammoth Cave, Carlsbad, or any other famous cavern could vie with them in beauty, if only they were big enough for guided tours—my female insides. Think of that. More beautiful than any National Park. Stalactites, stalagmites, alabaster grottoes, passages, translucent walls and curtains, hanging traceries of every hue.

And somewhere, waiting like the pirate’s treasure in the very inmost recess of that maze of little twisty passages all alike, my own genetic contribution. Round, smooth, pearly, featureless. Motionless, unmotivated. Helpless. The junction of all riches and all poverty. The future is in eggs.

In the midst of death

we are in life—

The Lord taketh away

and the Lord giveth—

Blessed be the Name of the Lord—.

Baby and me, and Harlan makes three. We flash over the top of the world toward a bright sunrise.