8

I DON’T remember much of January. The only thing that kept me moving forward was force of habit, and sometimes I couldn’t rely even on that. Always before I’d been able to lose myself—for an hour or two at least—in music, ideas, poetry, books, but now I couldn’t. Trying to write any of the papers that were long overdue felt about as easy as crawling down a continually narrowing tunnel lined with broken glass. I could fall asleep without much trouble, but I couldn’t stay asleep; I woke at four or five in the morning, my body aching with fatigue and my mind running in frantic circles. My thoughts were exhausting me, but I couldn’t find any way to turn them off. I wasn’t seeing anything clearly— as though a thin film, a greasy soap bubble, had been smeared between me and the world. The light seemed dead.

Some days I went to classes, some days I didn’t. Some nights I got loaded, some nights I didn’t. Sometimes I forgot to eat, other times I ordered Johnny’s specials and wolfed them down no matter what they turned out to be—even his vile creamed mystery meat on toast. I walked a lot. Occasionally I remembered to clean my teeth or take a shower or change my clothes. I slept whenever I could, sometimes in the back of an empty classroom, sometimes in a booth at Johnny’s, sometimes slumped over a table at the Mountainlair. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, didn’t have a clue what to do about it, and, if I wanted to continue being a university student, I certainly didn’t have the time to try to figure it out. I wrote myself a note and pinned it to my bulletin board: FIND THE NEXT THING TO DO AND DO IT.

I knew I should go home—simply pick some weekend at random and go—but I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing my father the way he was. I talked to my mother on the phone every day or two, or rather, I allowed her to talk to me, to go on and on as much as she wanted—about my father’s condition, about life, about anything. Since my father’s stroke, she’d been telling me the same stories over and over again. There was nothing wrong with her memory. She knew that she was repeating herself. She even apologized for it. I could sympathize with her need to go over the same damned things endlessly, endlessly, but she never arrived at anything that resembled a conclusion, and listening to her wore me out. Once I had the truly bizarre experience of falling asleep while she was talking to me.

Except for Phys Ed and ROTC, I’d never earned less than an A in anything, but I finished the term with two A’s, two B’s, and a C+. On one level, I felt bad about it and blamed myself for fucking up; on another level, I thought I should have been awarded a medal for sheer survival. I registered for the spring semester and kept plodding forward. I was afraid that I was turning into some version of my mother; my thoughts were just as repetitive as hers. I was struggling to arrive at some meaningful conclusion that would resolve everything—but, given that I couldn’t even define what I was trying to resolve, I continued going around in circles. The closest I could come to it was this: I had to find a way to make what had happened between me and Carol in Huntington not comprehensible but irrelevant. The only sphere big enough to offer me that kind of power was that of religion; what I wanted, and needed, was a satori like Cohen’s.

My ride with that demon trucker fit into nothing whatsoever in my life—that is, I could find no personal meaning in it—but it continued to haunt me. His Biblical description of Hell had struck at something in me, and I couldn’t get rid of it. Although I had a dozen or more books about Buddhism, I didn’t own a Bible, so I had to go to the library to find the passage he’d been citing: “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot.” I didn’t, of course, believe in a literal hell, but I kept playing with the metaphor; I could make it into a version of Plato’s Cave, but, beyond that, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. One night I woke up even earlier than usual—three-seventeen by my alarm clock— straight out of a nightmare that already I couldn’t remember. I had finally arrived at the dark center of everything. I was afraid that the great gulf fixed was between me and the rest of the human race.

• • •

CAROL HAD called me her first night back in Morgantown. “My God, John, are you all right? I was so worried about you.”

I’d known that I was bound to have some kind of encounter with her eventually, and I’d also known that when I did, I wasn’t going to enjoy it very much, but, hearing her voice, I felt a skin-crawling, instinctive revulsion so intense it took me completely by surprise—as though I’d walked into a bright, immaculately clean bathroom and come upon a gigantic black spider. “Oh, I’m really so sorry,” she said. “I felt terrible afterwards. I looked all over the house for you. I couldn’t believe you’d just walked out.”

For moments like that, I always had Hemingway: “Well, you know, kid . . . when it’s time to go, it’s time to go.”

I don’t remember how many more times she called. I do remember that eventually she switched from contrite to angry: “What are you doing, John, intentionally avoiding me?”

“No. Of course not. Been really busy. I’m carrying eighteen hours, you know.”

“Look, if you don’t want to see me, just say so. But I think the way things are between us right now is utterly ridiculous.”

I promised I’d drop over to visit her, but I had no intention of doing it. Hoping she’d get the message, I stopped answering my phone in the evenings. I wanted her out of my life, and out of my mind, but I suspected that I wasn’t through with her, or she with me—or maybe, to put it more accurately, that whatever had brought us together had not yet run its course—and I was right. One afternoon early in the new semester, I ran into her walking along Beechurst. “Oh, John. Hello.”

She’d changed her image slightly, was wearing a straight wool skirt instead of a tartan, a classic Burberry instead of her red raincoat. Her purse matched her gloves matched her pretty little oxfords with high Cuban heels. She looked very much the young lady.

I felt myself retreating to a concrete bunker inside myself, throwing up armor in every direction. I was babbling frantically: “Whew, is this ever going to be a hard term, although it could be fun, the second half of Contemp Lit, yeah, that should be good. How’s it going for you? You look terrific, by the way. Cute shoes.”

“Thank you. You’re sweet . . . How are you, John? It’s been so long . . . It’s been too long. Oh, I’ve missed you so much.”

Her cheeks were flushed from the cold, her eyes sparkling. What I was feeling was shamefully double-faced: that eerie spidery revulsion was skittering over me at the same time as I was appreciating, as I always had, just how goddamned beautiful she was. She asked me to have coffee with her; no, no, no, I said, I was on my way to . . . “Oh, John, don’t give me that.”

She took one of my cold bare hands into her gloved ones. “I know you’re still holding a grudge, and I can’t blame you, but . . . Look, we can’t leave things the way they are, can we? We have to be mature about this, don’t we? Even if we are a pair of half-baked kids. Come on, we’ve got to get over this.”

We had coffee in Johnny’s. She was enjoying her courses this year, she said. She was getting to like teaching and thought that she might have a talent for it. She was afraid that things with Andrew were still going nowhere fast. She’d switched her thesis topic to Yeats, so at least Andrew was useful for that much—said with a wry, self-depreciating smile.

She had defined the conversational space, so I joined her there. Because I’d wanted to have another go at Rilke, I told her, I was taking an upper-level German course, God help me. I loved Rilke, but I hated German grammar; my instructor, I’d decided, must be Adolph Hitler’s nephew.

We chatted like old chums while I tried to figure out what I was feeling. As though I’d needed it for psychic protection, I’d left my Levi jacket on; I felt myself sweating through not only my T-shirt but my flannel shirt and right on into the jacket. I imagined that someone could have wrung me out like a sponge. I did and didn’t like being there with her. I did and didn’t like her. She had assembled herself with the meticulous fashion-plate fastidiousness that had attracted me to her in the first place, and, yes, as always, I liked her attention to detail, and, yes, as always, I was ashamed of my own attention to detail: how I couldn’t help noticing every one of her carefully calculated effects. The burgundy of her lipstick was a perfect contrast to the darker burgundy of her shoes, purse, and gloves. The thickness of her Cuban heels allowed them to be even higher than stilettos and gave her the extra height she wanted without making her look trashy.

“I’m really sorry about what happened,” she told me. Her expression couldn’t have been any more contrite. “It’s all my fault. I should have said that before, shouldn’t I?” She took my hand and squeezed it. “Please call me. Please let’s start seeing each other again. I promise I’ll be good.” She sounded so warm and sincere I almost believed her.

I thought that I should keep Carol in my life if, for no other reason, than to be able, from time to time, to look at her, but I never did call her. I kept going to classes, going to sleep, waking up, eating my irregular meals, cleaning my teeth, doing it all over the next day. I still had nightmares. Nothing seemed to be getting any better. I kept telling myself that if I kept in motion, took one step after the other, I would eventually arrive somewhere, but I wasn’t sure of that.

• • •

“HEY, HERO.” A girl’s voice. Sleep was gone in a flash, whipped away like a blanket. I remember my indrawn breath— remember waiting, not knowing if I was hearing a leftover filament of dream or the crunch of real gravel in the alley outside my partially open window. My heartbeat was accelerated, my body tensed for action. I listened until I felt the strain of it in every muscle. The faint haze from the distant streetlight was just enough to give me the dark shapes of ownership. Nothing out of the ordinary: my dresser, my chair, my guitar, my pile of dirty clothes. But I was locked inside a mystery. A real girl standing outside my window in Morgantown? It didn’t make any sense. Again, the girl’s voice: “Hey, hero.”

“Cassy?”

“Yeah,” she said, laughing, “it’s me. Come on, John, let us in.”

I leapt out of bed, pulled on jeans, and ran outside barefoot into the alley where I’d stood so many times before, searching for omens. With the night still thick against me, I saw Cassandra, and, behind her, a black stripe of new beard making his face look pale as parchment, Bill Cohen. I wrapped Cassy into my arms, smelled the minty scent of whatever she’d used to wash her hair. I hadn’t planned to kiss her, but I was already tasting the warmly human sourness of her mouth. She wasn’t a memory, a ghostly fantasy, a longing set to the tune of a keening rock ’n roll song on my radio in the middle of the night, but flesh and muscle and bone, salty lips, ticking hair, narrow rib cage under her ski jacket, stingingly alive. “Oh, God, Cassy, I can’t believe it. I’m so glad to see you.”

A step behind her, Cohen was grinning. I opened my arm to include him. The three of us embraced. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked him. “And don’t tell me that words are no damned good.”

I couldn’t imagine any two people I would have rather seen appearing so miraculously out of the night. It didn’t seem possible. I didn’t deserve it. I felt humbled by it. I led them into my apartment, put on water for tea. Instead of turning on the lights, I lit the candles on my altar to young girls and carried them to the kitchen table.

Cassandra had unraveled onto my couch. “Guess who has her driver’s license? Guess who’s going to be up at two in the morning, reading? With her bedroom light on so joker here can bounce a pebble off her window? With her hair up in rollers and cream all over her face? And that was the only thing I could think of . . . good grief, I can’t let anybody see me like this.”

Cohen had unloaded his knapsack into a corner. His eyes were shining strangely; his face looked stark and unfamiliar inside that dark beginning of a beard. “Why haven’t you written to me, you bastard?” I asked him.

“That,” he said, “is a good question. A crucial question. Perhaps even the central question . . . It seems that whatever clamped itself down on my pen hand has stayed clamped.”

I liked the yellow wobble of the candle flames lighting their faces. I poured the boiling water into the teapot. I felt that everything I was doing had the weight of ritual. “I’ve dropped out of Harvard,” Cohen said. “The steely-eyed double agent who was using the Dean’s office as a cover called it ‘officially withdrawn.’”

“Christ, Bill, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going back down to my Uncle Harry’s place in Florida.”

“Why?”

“It’s complex.” But then he laughed. “No, it’s not. It’s simple. It’s only the story that’s complex.”

I waited for him to tell me the complex story, but he didn’t. “It took me fourteen hours to hitchhike from Boston to Pittsburgh,” he said. “Can you believe that?” He sipped his tea.

“The old man will kill me if he finds out I drove the car down here.” Cassandra said. She was looking at me closely, searching for something. “He sleeps late on Sundays, so maybe I can pull it off if I leave by . . . I don’t know . . . six or seven.”

Of course it was dangerous running off with her father’s car in the middle of the night, but I could sense that something far more important was going on. She was asking something of me, sending me a message with her eyes. I knew that the key to it was Cohen.

“I was on that goddamn Pennsylvania Turnpike so long I thought I’d grow old and die there,” he was saying. “Finally a trucker picked me up at the restaurant at Breezewood. He was going to Pittsburgh.”

I waited. “The road was beautifully empty all the way to Morgantown.” The muscles at the corners of his mouth were drawn tense, braced against fatigue; the hours on the road had smudged the margins of his eyes, but the green corneas were shining like clear water.

“Yeah, it was a beautiful drive,” Cassandra said, “although I could have used some coffee.” She was looking at me again, her eyes still filled with questions. “He picked me,” she said.

“Your window was beckoning like a lighthouse,” he said.

I poured out the tea. “When I got home,” Cohen said quietly, “I couldn’t go in. I walked around outside the house. It was dark, sleeping in the dark, and I could imagine, so clearly, everything inside. I could see all the furniture in the rooms just the way it’s always been . . . the beds, my family asleep inside. I could feel them in there, quietly asleep, could sense their breathing . . . as though the house itself was breathing, waiting for me. And I felt such a terrible love for all of them, as though I’d been set on watch so they’d be safe. Nothing could hurt them because I was outside, awake and watching.

“Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to go through all the drama. I knew there was bound to be a big scene, everybody yelling and talking at once. I knew what they’d say. I played it through in my mind like a movie. They’d be excited to see me, and then I’d have to tell them what I was doing. My father would say, ‘Well then, Bill, so you’re not going to open a laundry after all,’ or something like that. And I’d have to try to find some kind of explanation. I was even laughing as I thought about it, how perfectly each of them would be themselves. I could have walked into all of that, and it would have been all right. But there was something else, and I couldn’t go in.”

I saw that his eyes were shining with tears.

• • •

WE TALKED quietly in the candlelight, and drank our tea, and then we decided to go somewhere to watch the sun come up. We got into Cassy’s dad’s car, and I guided her over the creek and up Spruce Street. I wanted to get us high above the city, but I didn’t know exactly how to do it. We meandered around those insanely steep streets, always looking for a way to get higher. Eventually we turned left and found a cluster of fraternity houses. “Park here,” I said. It was after four in the morning, and I thought that even the hard-partying brothers of Beta Theta Pi had to sleep sometime. We walked on up to the very end of North High Street. To the right, we could see the edges of the large dark blocks of the university, to the left, on the slow curve of the river, a faint release of light that signaled the coming of dawn, and, directly below us down the hill, a wacky assemblage of night-shrouded boxes that was the city of Morgantown.

We stood without speaking, taking it all in. Then Cassandra said, “The world’s a million times weirder than anybody thinks it is.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Cohen said. “My watch has stopped too.”

I’d been desperate to talk to her alone, hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it, but Cohen, in a gesture of exquisite graciousness, simply smiled at us and walked away. She sank into a squat like a garage mechanic, so I did the same thing. If I stayed in that position very long, my legs would begin to cramp, but she seemed to rest easily like that, her ski pants drawn tight over her narrow hips. “Those pants are something else,” I said. “What did you do, walk into the store and say, ‘Give me the smallest size I can cram myself into?’”

She laughed. “Can’t you think about something other than my ass?”

We were still riding the kick and the danger of it: the sleeping town laid out below us, our parents back in Raysburg sleeping, but the three of us up and out and awake as though time had been suspended—but no, that wasn’t quite right. It was more that the wires which hold the world together had been released and we were in that ticklish crossover when the old world falls down and sleep is dispelled. For the moment, we’d escaped, were outside— had slipped out of bounds at the last possible moment. Soon the wires would be yanked back into place and the world reassembled, so we didn’t have much time—certainly no time for bullshit—and we both knew it. “Well, have you forgiven me?” she said.

“Forgiven you? Have you forgiven me?”

“For what? Because you kissed Zoë? It doesn’t matter. I said some terrible things to you. I knew you were mad at me when you just left town like that . . . and didn’t even call me.”

“I wasn’t mad at you. I thought I’d fucked everything up. I was afraid you’d never want to see me again.”

“You ass. How could you think that?” She looked at me sharply and then away. “We’re stuck with each other,” she said. “Can’t I get mad at you for a day or two if I want?”

“Sure, you can.”

“Besides, Zoë trapped you.”

“It’s nice of you to think of it that way, but it wasn’t quite like that.”

“Oh, good grief! If she didn’t want your tongue down her throat, she could have kept her little mouth shut.”

I laughed, but Cassandra’s grave expression didn’t change. “She’s had a crush on you for a long time,” she said. “Can you imagine how hurt she would have been if you hadn’t kissed her?”

“Boy, are you an understanding big sister.”

“No, I’m not. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s just that Zoë’s not an X person . . .”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She was looking at Cohen. He was standing some twenty feet away from us. “What on earth is he doing?” she asked me.

He was facing to the left, looking toward the blue-black edge where the light was beginning. He was swinging his arms up and down in graceful arcs. It took me a moment to get it. “Oh,” I said, “he’s conducting the dawn.”

“Hey, yeah. That’s exactly what he’s doing.”

He was taking it in four-four, moderato. “The funny thing is,” I said “he can’t even sing.”

“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” she said. “He’s one of the most beautiful boys I’ve ever seen in my life. But I can’t imagine sleeping with him. It’s not a beauty I’d want to sleep with.”

The day that Cohen was conducting out of the semidarkness was going to be one of Morgantown’s dull overcast days; the streets below us were emerging in a gunmetal grisaille. “I don’t understand anything now,” Cassandra said. “I’m kind of afraid of him now.”

“He is in a strange mood, all right. I’ve never seen him quite like this before . . . I think he wants to go back to where it happened the first time.”

“To where what happened?”

“His satori or whatever you want to call it . . . His awakening.”

“Yeah, he told me about it on the way down, about how he was walking on the beach all alone, and what he’d been thinking about, and how it just . . . happened. But I couldn’t understand what it was that happened . . . Dad would call it ‘the storms of adolescence.’ That’s one of the things he says all the time. ‘Oh, it’s just the storms of adolescence, Cassy.’ But he doesn’t know everything. I used to think he did.”

By now, Cohen had teased out every bird left in the West Virginia winter; with gently sweeping arms, he was coaxing them into song. “We came down here because we both really needed to see you,” she said, “but . . . John, why did he come to me? I hardly know him.”

“Why did you drive him down here?”

“Don’t play Socrates. Give me a straight answer.”

“He’s linked to you. Through me.”

“I knew you were going to say that. It’s . . . I don’t know, like being in a secret society. I’m not sure I like it.”

“Cassandra, the cat who walks by herself.”

“Right,” she said, smiling, “I haven’t taken a vow to save all sentient beings.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Yeah. Oh, he wasn’t talking about himself. He’s too modest for that. He was talking about . . . Bodhisattvas . . . Is that what they’re called?” I nodded. “But he really was talking about himself. He would like to take all sentient beings into Nirvana with him, but I don’t know why anybody would want Nirvana to start with. I don’t. Extinction.” She shivered. “I don’t want to die. I don’t even want to get any older.”

“You want to stay sixteen forever?”

“Maybe not sixteen. Could I stop before I turn twenty?”

Picking up the tempo, Cohen called for a swelling of cool light along the Monongahela, along the edges of buildings, a slow but steady crescendo of smoky blue. “I sent David’s pin back,” she said.

Well, that was news. Now there was enough light for me to see her clearly. She must have been able to see me just as clearly. “I could have used Mom as an excuse. She told me I had to send it back . . . ‘Cassy, you’re far too young to be pinned to somebody in college.’ But I thought if I said that to him, it’d be . . . just, you know, chicken shit. And it wouldn’t have been the truth anyway. So I wrote him, and I was completely honest. I said, ‘David, I like you a lot, but I just don’t want to be pinned down.’ Oh, don’t look so damn pleased, John Dupre. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“No, I didn’t think it did. You and I aren’t . . . I don’t know how to say this . . . Do you know what I mean?”

We stared at each other, trying to communicate without speaking. Then I made another attempt with the words that were no damned good: “What happens between us . . . it’s not on the same level as anything with David Anderson . . . or with anybody else.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, how about you and Natalie the Silent? How about your older woman?”

“That’s on a different level. You said it yourself, Cassy. We’re stuck with each other.”

“I don’t know . . . Yeah, I guess we are. I honest to God don’t understand anything. We’re X people, that’s about all . . . When you left without seeing me, I thought, good grief, now we’re playing games. We’ve never done that before. Each of us waiting for the other one to make the first call. So I called you, and I could never get you. Don’t you ever stay home, damn it?”

“I’m sorry. I was afraid to call you.”

“Oh, you ass. Never be afraid to call me.”

I stood up and shook out my stiffened legs. Cassandra stood up too. I was wondering if she was seeing what I was seeing when I looked down the hill.

“Extinction,” she said. “It’s so weird. How could anybody want that?”

“Did he say he wanted extinction?”

“No. Nirvana. I guess that’s something different, huh?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. “We talked about all that stuff driving down here,” she said. “When I was a little kid, I used to ask Dad what happened when you died, and he said nothing happened. It was like going to sleep. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I’d ask him, ‘But don’t you remember anything?’ He’d say, ‘No, you don’t remember anything,’ and I’d say, ‘But don’t you go to heaven?’ He’d say, ‘That’s a myth, Cassy. People invented that myth because they’re afraid of the truth.’ And he’d tell me how you try to improve the world, and you leave your children behind, and that’s enough, but it never felt like enough for me . . . If that’s the truth, then it all seems like a spinning chaos, millions of mindless atoms. It scares me silly . . .” Again, her eyes directed me to Cohen. “He said he’s not afraid of dying. He said death makes us human, makes everything more beautiful.”

Something was coalescing in my mind—nothing built of words but a form taking shape. “Cassy,” I said. I didn’t know how to go on.

“When you think about . . . that someday you just won’t exist anymore . . . Oh, I just hate all the games. We just don’t have time. If you’re an X person, people just never let you . . .”

She made an explosive gesture, flinging her hands up. I guessed that she too was coming up against the limit of words. “Oh, hell,” she said, “I should have been a boy. I hate high school . . . all that crap . . . the games you have to play. And it never works anyway. I hate the way boys think if they go out with you a couple times, they own you. I hate being . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence.

Her passion shot through me to tingle my fingertips. I was working so hard at understanding what was lying behind her words that it felt like a physical effort—trying to separate sheets of rock with my bare hands. Anything I said would be almost beside the point. “I’m glad you’re not a boy.”

“Well, me too. I didn’t mean it like that. No, I just want to be able to do anything a boy can do and not get shit for it. Like when I was ten.”

“Cassy, the back-alley kid,” I said.

“You’re damned right.”

“I’ve always loved the tomboy in you.”

Both of us knew how quickly time was running out. Soon everything would be reassembled, and then it would be too late. But still, I approached it sideways: “Well, I’ve thought that too. About myself.”

“What?”

“That I should have been a girl”—an enormous admission for me; I hadn’t said anything like that to anyone since I’d been in grade school.

She looked directly into my eyes; I could see her concentration, her effort. “Oh, Dupre, you’d be an appalling girl.”

She laughed; it was an invitation for me to laugh with her, but I couldn’t do it. “You’d be worse than Linda Edmonds,” she said. “You’d spend all your time worrying about getting runs in your stockings.”

“Yeah, that’s probably true.”

I was afraid she hadn’t felt the full weight of it, but then she said, “I never had a best girlfriend the way girls are supposed to, so I guess you’re it.”

“Thank you.”

“Is that what you want to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Girls can be real bitches. I don’t think you understand that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“No, you don’t. Not really. God, I hate girls sometimes. I just hate them. All their damned games.”

“You’ve never played games with me.”

“Yeah, I know. And I’ve seen you be phony with other people, but you’ve never been phony with me.”

We had arrived at a pause, and we both felt it, but we weren’t finished yet. We were in one of those gathering points I’d told Cohen about; our lives were changing right before our eyes as we stood there, awake, and watched Cohen conduct more flat rainy light into the scene—dove grey here, steel grey there. It’s as though a scrim were being slowly drawn away; now the firm shapes of buildings were emerging, objects pushing back into reality, the wires tightening, the world reassembling itself. Cohen was conducting into being everything that was needed to make a world—a bit more light swelling up at the edge, the first of the traffic, windows suddenly springing into yellow, flickering sounds, bird voices, the black smears of scrub and weeds. “I believe him,” she said. “He isn’t afraid of dying.”

“I believe him too . . . and it’s because he knows. It’s always been comforting to me . . . to know that it can really happen.”

“Yeah,” she said, “maybe . . . but if you have to know what he knows before you can stop being afraid of dying, then I guess I’d better look for it too. Sometimes I’m so afraid of dying I can’t sleep. When he turned up in the middle of the night like that, I thought he was crazy. But driving down here I began to think he’s not crazy, it’s the rest of us . . . Mom and Dad and Zoë, and you and me . . . and I began to think he is a saint, which is ridiculous, because I don’t believe in saints.”

“Maybe we need to find a new word.”

“But maybe Nirvana’s not extinction. He said there’s no words to define it. Maybe it’s beautiful. And if he’s going to take all sentient beings with him . . . maybe we can come too.”

I hated to admit it to myself, but I’d always felt superior to her—as a boy, as somebody so much older, with a life that was so much more complex, so much specifically mine—but now I knew how wrong I’d been. Her world was everything that was the case, just as mine was. She was just as empty and awake as I was.

Cohen had nearly finished his symphony; it was almost day. Cassandra smiled at me, then looked away. It was fragile, subtle, capable of infinite motion—sentient, alive, there in that grave moment, on that divide. “I believe you too, you know,” she said. “We are linked. You’re closer to me than . . .”

“Yeah. A brother.”

“No, not just a brother. It’s even closer than that,” she said. “Until we die. Is that what it means?”

“Longer than that.”

“You guys are crazy. This is the only life we’ve got.”

“OK, then. Until we die. No matter what happens.”

“It sounds like we’re married.”

“Closer than that.”

I looked into her eyes, and we were in each other’s minds. It wasn’t a metaphor. We were experiencing a moment of mental telepathy as literally as if we were characters in a science-fiction story—but it was far more meaningful than science-fiction. Now I understood how the Buddha had transmitted the doctrine without saying a word.

We could only bear the intensity for a few seconds. Then we were back in our private worlds and could surprise each other again. “Oh shit,” she said, “it’s true, isn’t it? How did it happen? I don’t understand it, but that’s what it means.” I turned and saw that Cohen was looking at us. He wasn’t doing anything. Unsmiling, he was simply there in the full grey light of day.

We know the things we know because people have told us, but we also know the things we know without knowing how we know them—the energy thin at the edge, the crackle down the spine, the tingle at the fingertips, the twinkling of the thumbs, the clarity more real, more essential, than any of their stories. What we knew then was more real than any of their stories.

It wasn’t anything that could be assembled or disassembled, not cogs and flywheels. It was in the pause, the space, the breath—like a paper cut, a nick on the soft skin between thumb and index finer, a continual ache, barely visible but unforgettable. It was what Cohen had always said it would be: an emptiness when everything is simple, something you kept with you at all times, like keeping Kosher—what it means to unwind the thread out to the end and say, “Hear O Israel,” or “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” or “I take refuge in the Buddha and the Dharma and the Sangha,” or any of the other ritual words that are only reminders of the moment when one spool has been removed from the spindle and the other not yet placed on it: to begin again, to walk down the hill, to talk well, to drive safely; it was all returning now. The flat grey light was everywhere. “Call me, yes, please,” I told Cassandra. “I’ll worry about you.” She was gone, moving along the twisty road back to Raysburg. Cohen and I slept.

When I woke again, I felt at first as though I were merely living through another of my endless days in Morgantown— sleeping in the afternoon, waking to early evening—but then I remembered that this time was different. I opened my eyes. Cohen was sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, looking at me. He must have been watching me sleep. “What are you thinking?” I asked him.

He answered me in the Latin we’d both studied at the Academy: “Dormia sine cura, frater.”

I asked him why he’d dropped out of Harvard, and he didn’t answer. But just when I was beginning to think that he wasn’t going to say anything at all, he told me. This time the story was not infinitely complex, on many levels, something that required millions of words—hours and hours of words. He spoke as if he were choosing each word carefully, as if his intention was to use as few of them as possible. He told me that when he’d gone back to Harvard, he’d felt something shifting inside himself. He finished the term with A’s the way he always did. He started the new term. He knew, on one level, that he might as well be at Harvard as not be at Harvard, but, on another level, the student business was getting harder and harder to pull off. It was beginning to feel like a prison. But then he thought, no, it wasn’t Harvard that was the prison. It was the human mind. “And if you live in a prison,” he said, “wouldn’t the most important thing to study . . . be lock picking?”

The day before he left, hitchhiking south to Florida, I took the I Ching out of the library, and he consulted it on my behalf. I turned off the lights in my apartment, lit my candles. I made a pot of green tea. Cohen sat on the floor with his back against the wall and meditated while I formulated the question. When I had it, I read it to him: “What is the state of my life at the moment, and what should I do about it?”

In the closed palms of my hands I shook three pennies and then cast them onto the floor. Cohen transcribed the lines of the hexagram as it was forming. When we had six lines, I poured out the tea. He looked up from the reading and laughed. “You see,” he said, “Difficulty at the Beginning works supreme success.”

• • •

EVERYTHING ABOUT the reading in the I Ching had been right. I was like a tiny green shoot pushing up out of the earth, encountering obstacles. I was in a time of chaos like a wild Ohio Valley electrical storm—the thunder rising up and the rain pouring down, creating a turbulence that could easily turn into disaster. Yes, I needed helpers, and I had them: Cohen and Cassandra—Bodhisattvas, angels of infinite light. I knew, as the reading had told me, that I had to bring order out of chaos. I loved the image the I Ching had used as a metaphor: sorting out silk threads from a knotted tangle and binding them into skeins.

I straightened up my apartment, showed up on time for all my classes, took thorough notes, started researching a couple papers that weren’t due for weeks. Every day I made sure that I shaved, cleaned my teeth, took a shower, and changed my underwear. I collected all my dirty laundry and hauled it to the laundromat. I hadn’t been playing the guitar since I’d come back after Christmas, but I settled down to learn Holcomb’s “Trouble in Mind.” I wrote several new poems. And then, while sorting out the papers that had piled up on my desk, I found, neatly tucked away in a file folder, the two pictures I’d brought with me from home: my second grade class photo and the one of me as Alice in Wonderland on Halloween.

Although it contained my only image of Nancy Clark, the whole of the Jefferson Second Grade Class of 1949–50 certainly did not belong on my altar to young girls, so I taped it up to one side. Then I stared at the altar. At the center were the real girls— Natalie, Cassandra, Linda. Surrounding them were the cinema princesses, and then, at the outer margins, my latest additions— anonymous models I’d clipped from fashion magazines and the Sunday New York Times. I realized what I should have known all along, that those images made a pattern. Then I saw that the girls were like a hexagram in the I Ching, but they weren’t in their proper places. I moved all the pictures outward, creating a space; I taped the picture of me as Alice in the center. That one simple change altered the entire pattern and made the lines of force radically different.

I spent hours rearranging the girls around that picture of me as Alice—trying them one way, then another. My old pattern had been rectangular; the girls had simply formed rows. Now I made a series of concentric circles with me as Alice at the center. I mixed the cinema princesses in with the real ones. Even though I couldn’t have explained the force that made me put any picture in any particular spot—to move Valeria Ciangottini next to Cassandra or Sue Lyon next to Linda Edmonds—I could feel the compelling inner logic of it. When I was finished, I knew that I’d got it exactly right. The new pattern did, in some perfect but wordless way, represent my entire life.

• • •

EARLY IN February—I remember, strangely enough, that it was about a week before Valentine’s day—Carol called me. After a few polite and eminently delicate feints, she said, “This is a terrible thing to ask of you, I know, but could I pull an all-nighter at your place? I’ve got a paper due, and Marge is driving me nuts.”

I couldn’t believe she had the gall. Yes, we’d had coffee together and things had gone well, but we certainly weren’t back on that kind of footing yet. On the other hand, I’d already decided that she fit somewhere in my life, hadn’t I? And what if she was genuinely sorry about what had happened in Huntington? I didn’t want to be cruel. I was tempted to tell her—in the politest possible terms—to shove it, but I heard myself saying, “Sure.”

She told me she’d be over around eight, but it was closer to nine when I heard the unmistakable sound of high heels clicking up my alley. I opened the door, and there she was, too suddenly. Primed by the sound, I looked down and saw that she was wearing those extravagant black patent pumps from New Year’s Eve. I couldn’t imagine why.

“This is so nice of you,” she said. “You’re a life-saver.” In the old days, she might have given me a peck on the cheek or even brushed my lips lightly with hers; now she caught me briefly into a stiff hug. I hung up her Burberry and followed her inside. She had brought a small green suitcase. She was wearing a tight black wool sheath.

She saw me looking her over. Her voice was clipped and distant: “I told Marge I was going to a party.” With a suitcase?

Balanced on her precise little heels, she did a turn around my apartment. I could sense her awareness of being watched. “Well,” she said, “I’m glad to see that nothing’s changed,” and laughed awkwardly. “Plus ça change. And it’s still too cold.”

I laughed awkwardly too. God, I thought, we’re doing just great so far. I lit the fire for her. “Are you hungry? There’s some stew . . .”

“Oh, no, thanks. I’ve had dinner.”

“Beer? Wine?”

“A cup of coffee would be lovely. Just lovely. I have work to do, you know.”

She pretended to look at the new notes and pictures I’d taped to my walls. I couldn’t stop staring at those goddamn sexy shoes. “Did you walk over?”

“In these? Are you kidding? No, a friend dropped me.”

I’d never seen her so ill at ease. She couldn’t seem to find anywhere to put herself, came to rest at the edge of my desk, let one of her hands fall onto the top of it. “I’ve decided to look more mature,” she said as though answering the question I hadn’t asked. “It’s one of my New Year’s resolutions actually.”

Actually? “Oh?”

“I’m tired of people thinking I’m still in high school. It’s so boring. Could you put some coffee on, please?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’d be delighted.”

“And how have you been? ” She pronounced the word to rhyme with “queen.” She was really getting Andrew’s accent down. If she kept at it, no one would ever have to know that she was from West Virginia.

I told her I was just dandy, couldn’t have been better, in fact. I rinsed out the percolator. I was glad to have something to do. We kept trying to find things to talk about. She thought it had been a mistake to room with Marge. Cousin or no cousin, they had almost nothing in common. “She has her comrades over every night. If I hear another word about politics, I swear I’m going to scream.”

She was saying nothing new. “Yeah,” I said, “must be tough.” I filled the percolator, set it on the stove.

She started to pace again. With a skirt that tight and heels that high (I thought, with considerable grim satisfaction), she had no option but to walk like a lady. She was really getting to me. She paused in front of my altar to young girls. “And what’s this? A new addition?”

She bent closer. “Who’s your little Alice?”

I felt an ugly sensation as though a huge murderous reptile had just licked the back of my neck. “My cousin in Parkersburg,” I said quickly.

It would have been easy enough to take that goddamn picture down. I didn’t know why it hadn’t even crossed my mind. Well, I thought, if I’m out on a limb, I might as well go all the way to the end of it. “You can probably see the family resemblance,” I said.

She looked at me, then back at the picture. “No, I can’t really.”

“People were always telling us we looked alike.” I could hear how defensive I sounded. Shut up, I told myself.

“No, I can’t see it . . . really . . . But then I can’t see resemblances between anybody, not even people in my own family. I think people just look like themselves.”

“That’s an old photo,” I heard myself saying. “Can’t you tell? She’s my age. I thought it was a cute picture. Don’t you think it’s a cute picture?”

She gave me a long strange look. “Yes, of course it’s a cute picture . . . If you like little girls dressed up like Alice in Wonderland.”

“Well,” I said, “so Marge is really driving you nuts, huh?”

“Oh, is she ever. I can’t begin to tell you.”

“What do you take in your coffee? I should remember, but I don’t.”

“Just black. Are you sweet on her?”

Another of her weirdly archaic phrases; it was as bad as petted. My armpits were stinging. “Who?” I said, although I knew perfectly well who.

“Your little Alice.”

“She’s my favorite cousin. We were close when we were kids. So what’s your paper on?”

“Yeats and the Irish theatre. I can use your typewriter, can’t I?”

“Oh, sure. Let me get some of that stuff out of your way.” I cleared away my papers and books, lit the old gooseneck lamp I’d inherited from one of my father’s failed businesses.

“What’s her name?” she said.

“Who?”

“Who have we been taking about?” she said, laughing. “Your little playmate.”

I didn’t hesitate. “Nancy Clark.”

“Did you play house?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Oh? I’ll bet you do remember. You just don’t want to tell me . . . I remember playing house. It could be really naughty . . . And truth, dare, or consequences. Boy, could that be naughty.”

“Naughty how?”

“The consequences, silly . . . and I’m not going to tell you either.”

She was, of course, flirting with me—and I knew how to flirt back. I even had the next line: “Come on, Carol, I dare you,” but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I poured her a cup of coffee.

She sat down at my desk. “I hate this,” she said. “Why do I always leave things to the last minute?”

“I won’t bother you,” I said. “I’ll read or something.”

“Oh, God, it’s so hard getting started . . . So what do you hear from the two Bills?”

“Two Bills? Oh . . . you mean Revington and Cohen? From Revington, nothing. He never keeps in touch. I haven’t got a clue what he’s doing. He’ll turn up eventually . . . And Cohen was just here on his way to Florida. He’s taking some time off school . . .”

“You mean he dropped out?” She sounded genuinely shocked.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You’re kidding me. Out of Harvard? ”

“Yeah, out of Harvard. That’s where he was going.”

“Why on earth would he do that? I thought he was on the Dean’s List.”

“He is on the Dean’s List. It’s not permanent. He’s going to go back . . . I think he wants to practice Buddhism instead of just reading about it . . .”

“Practice Buddhism?”

“Yeah, you know . . . it’s not like Christianity. In Christianity, all you have to do is believe it. In Buddhism, you have to do something.”

“So what’s he going to do?”

“I don’t know . . . Run. Swim. Meditate.”

“Oh, my God.” She was furious. It didn’t make any sense. Why should it have mattered to her whether Bill Cohen did or didn’t go to Harvard?

“You’re hopeless, all of you,” she said. “When are you ever going to grow up? You call each other by your last names just like you were still in your silly prep school . . . and William’s Humphrey Bogart, and Bill Cohen’s a Buddhist monk, and you’re . . . I don’t know what . . .”

“Holden Caulfield?” I supplied for her. “Woody Guthrie?”

“Oh, it is funny, I suppose,” she said, “but how much longer is it going to go on being funny? Clever clever games for bright little boys.”

Now I was angry—so angry I couldn’t speak. She rolled a piece of my paper into my typewriter and began to hammer away on it. “Boy, is this damned thing stiff.”

• • •

I WENT for one of my long catatonic perambulations through the bleak winter landscape of Morgantown, stayed away as long as I could. When I came back, she was still pounding my typewriter. She’d kicked off her heels. She looked up at me, smiling, and sang out, “It’s going really well!” just as though I’d asked. I took a quart of beer into my bedroom, threw myself onto the bed, and tried to read. The guys upstairs seemed to be enjoying themselves; I could hear them laughing, the distant sound of rock ’n roll blasting out of their hi-fi—the boring bass line.

When she’d said “an all-nighter,” that, obviously, had been exactly what she’d meant. As the night sidled by, all I could do was wait. Around four in the morning, she appeared in my open doorway saying, “Knock, knock.” I thought it was odd that she would put her heels back on to walk from the living room to my bedroom—although I certainly did appreciate the gesture.

“I’m almost finished,” she said, “but you don’t have to stay up just because I’m up.”

“Oh, I won’t. I was just going to sleep.”

“I’m exhausted . . . Would you mind if I stretched out with you in a little while?”

Oh, Christ, I thought. “No, I don’t mind.”

I knew that there wasn’t the faintest possibility I could sleep, but I turned out the light anyway. Fully dressed except for my boots, I lay down under the unzipped sleeping bag I used for a quilt. After twenty minutes or so, I heard the typing stop. Like a child pretending to be asleep, I opened my eyes slightly. I saw her hesitate in my doorway. With the light behind her, she was a woman-shaped silhouette.

She stepped out of her heels and into my room. I heard her unzip her sheath. Then she crossed back across the rectangle of yellow light that was spilling in from the living room. She was still wearing her stockings. They were attached to a long black foundation garment that fit her tightly in one clean sweep from the bra on top all the way down to mid-thigh. As a Vogue reader, I even knew what it was called—an “all-in-one”—and it was exactly what you were supposed to wear under a sheath. It made her look like a sleek shiny black mermaid. She lifted the edge of the sleeping bag and slipped in next to me. “Are you awake?” she said.

I’d never been more awake in my life. I was like an owl. “Yeah,” I said.

The guys upstairs must have gone to bed. There was nothing to hear but occasional traffic; a trucker somewhere was highballing it through the night. “Do you want to talk for a minute?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Can you forgive me for what happened in Huntington? I mean really forgive me.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, although she was right in guessing that I hadn’t forgiven her. I didn’t think I ever would.

“I was so worried about you. I was sure you’d gone to Marge’s. I called her the next day, and then I was worried sick.”

She’d already told me that, but apparently she needed to tell me again. I thought I should be helping her, making it easier for her, but I couldn’t do it. I lay there and waited.

“I was so ashamed,” she said. “I hate it when that happens to me. I get in a bitchy mood, and . . . I don’t know . . . When I was a kid, I used to have spectacular temper tantrums. I mean, spectacular, absolutely legendary, you can ask my mother. I’d get started, and I couldn’t stop . . . even when I wanted to. Completely out of control . . . Sometimes I’m still like that. I just hate it. I can’t stop. I really can’t stop. I watch myself doing it, and I can’t stop.”

She was saying none of this easily, and I was delighted with her discomfort. “What were you thinking?” I asked her.

“When?”

“In Huntington. Just before I left.”

“Oh, God, John. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Do we have to talk about it?”

“No, I guess we don’t.”

“Oh, hell. Give me a cigarette, please.”

I lit two cigarettes, put the ashtray between us. We lay there side by side and smoked in the dark. “Do you have an alarm clock?” she said.

“Of course I’ve got an alarm clock.”

“Will you set it for seven, please?”

I set it for seven. I knew that she had something more to say.

“John? . . . I’ve been thinking. I don’t . . . I guess I’ve never understood why you’re attracted to me.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not really your type.”

“What’s my type?”

“You know . . . You’ve always dated high-school girls, and . . . Well, I suppose with a girl so much younger, you can feel . . . It must be more . . . You’ve got their pictures all over your walls. Those young girls are so obviously what you want, and I just don’t . . . You do know what I mean, don’t you?”

I did know what she meant, but I’d be damned if I was going to admit it. My mouth had gone dry. I could feel an enormous rage building up in me; if I’d been able to think, it would have frightened me. When I tried to speak, I made a strange clicking sound. “No, I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, John, you know perfectly well . . . I’m not . . . Oh, I know I’m no paragon of maturity, but I’m certainly no teenager, and I just don’t . . . With one of your little schoolgirls you can feel manly, and . . .”

I was so angry it blotted me out. “Wait a minute.” I didn’t plan any of the words that were hissing out of my mouth: “I don’t want to hear that crap. ‘Your little schoolgirls.’ Never ever say that to me again.”

I was shaking with fury. She must have felt it. It took everything I had to control my voice so I wasn’t screaming at her; what was coming out sounded dry, nearly inhuman: “Jesus Christ, little schoolgirls, you make it sound like there’s a dozen of them. There’s only been three, and none of them are little schoolgirls . . .”

“John, wait a minute. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”

“When I dated Linda . . . we were both of us in high school . . . Even when she was fourteen . . . she wasn’t a little schoolgirl . . . and Natalie and Cassandra . . . Christ, what are you . . . ? When you say, ‘little schoolgirls’? Something out of Little Women? Jesus, none of them are little schoolgirls. They’re bright strong independent girls . . . Goddamn it, none of them are little schoolgirls.”

I butted out my cigarette. She butted out hers. I set the ashtray on the floor. My entire body was shaking, but she wasn’t moving a muscle. Now I had enough sense to be frightened. I should, I thought, leap up and pull on my boots and walk out of there. I should walk for miles. And miles and miles. Finally she said in a small voice, “I’m sorry. Everything I say seems to come out wrong.”

She reached over to take my hand. I jerked it away from her.

“We’re not very good for each other anymore, are we?” she said.

“No,” I said, “we’re not.”

I don’t know whether she slept. I kept wanting to get up and walk, but some dark inertia kept me bound to the bed. Then sleep must have crept up and mugged me. When the shrill clang of my clock woke me, I was miles deep. I slapped the alarm into silence. Carol wasn’t in bed with me any longer; the shower was running. Oh, thank God, I thought, soon she’ll be gone.

I needed coffee. I got up. Dazed, half awake, I stumbled over Carol’s damnable patent leather pumps. She’d shed them directly in the middle of my bedroom doorway. How typical of her, I thought, and felt like hurling them against the wall, but I picked them up carefully and set them on the top of my dresser where she’d be sure to see them when she came out of the shower. I put the coffee on to perk.

She burst into the living room, one towel wrapped around her body and another around her head. “Oh, my hair! Why didn’t I think to bring a shower cap? Will you call me a cab, please?”

I’d never called a cab in Morgantown and wasn’t sure I even knew how to do it. I looked in the phone book, found a number, and called. She shot back into the room, now in a blouse and a tight straight skirt. She was shoving books and papers into her suitcase. “Is that coffee? Oh, good.” I poured her a cup. She pawed through the suitcase, pulled out her Cuban-heeled oxfords, threw them onto the floor, shoved her feet into them, sat down and laced them up. “Oh, John, this has been so good of you.” Her fake British accent was quite pronounced. “You’ve really saved my life.”

She did her makeup, brushed her hair, flung her sheath, and then that disturbingly erotic all-in-one, into her suitcase. Outside, a horn was blowing. “Oh, God!”

I helped her on with her coat, carried her suitcase out to the cab. “Take care of yourself,” she said and kissed me on the cheek.

“Yeah,” I said, “I will. You too.”

Long after she’d gone, I continued to stand in the alley, smoking. I felt abraded and raw, exhausted beyond the point of mere fatigue, but at the same time still angry enough to drive spikes. What, in God’s name, had that been all about? The longer I thought about it, the stranger and nastier it seemed. I had the sense that something obvious had been going on, something I’d been too stupid to see. One thing was certain, however: it was pointless to worry about what she might or might not have meant by anything she’d worn or said or done. I could translate “take care of yourself ” easily enough. It meant “Goodbye.”

I went back inside, picked up her wet towels, saw in the bathroom mirror that she’d marked my cheek with a scarlet blur in the shape of her lips. I wiped it off. I considered going back to sleep, but I had a class in an hour, so I poured myself the rest of the coffee and sat on the edge of my bed sipping it. Then I saw that Carol had forgotten her high heels. They were still on my dresser where I’d put them. Something monstrous happened in my mind; it was as though I were hearing, faintly, from very far away, a sound like cold steam at high pressure being forced through an opening no larger than a pin head. I picked up one of the shoes. It was a size 6. Inside, it said “Suzette.” I couldn’t tell if that was the name of the brand or of the style. The heel was thinner than a pencil and an inch longer than my index finger, the patent leather as shiny and black as the pupils of Carol’s eyes.