1

THESE ROADS—back-tracking, ass-kissing, built in Depression years when water runoff was more important than high-speed travel so that many of the curves were banked backwards and others so sharp they’d become landmarks in themselves—these insane mountain roads, I thought, must be the very geography of hell for someone from someplace flat, and all of them, according to the map in the West Virginia University Catalogue, lead to Morgantown. “There’s your mold, Dupre,” Revington said as we shot over the crest of the final hill in the blue evening, as we saw the lights laid out below us in that characteristic smoky haze of the city which could be either heartbreakingly beautiful—evanescent greys and slates, ambers and duns—or the very personification of melancholy. “The mold,” Revington said again, chewing the word as though he enjoyed the weight of it in his mouth, “the Morgantown mold.”

“It always excites me when I see it for the first time,” I said, “when we come around that last curve and there it is . . . the city, the river . . . laid out like that. It always touches me. I think it’s the only time I love the place.”

“No,” Revington said, “it’s not this dumb little town you love, it’s the road. You wouldn’t give a shit where you were going as long as you were moving.”

He wasn’t entirely right, but he was right enough, and if he knew me really well, I knew him just as well; for years I had watched this absurdly handsome scion of our hometown’s aristocracy try out one role after another in the continuing drama that always starred himself: the madcap class fool, the menacing fifties hood, the urbane man of the world, and now—with hair falling over his dark face and three days’ growth on his lean jaws—the bleakly ironic survivor of darkest despair. He checked his watch. “Did it,” he said dryly—that is, he’d just driven from Raysburg to Morgantown faster than he’d ever done it before. “For what it’s worth,” he said. He relaxed visibly, slumped, stretched his forearms, pressed his hands against the wheel.

“Yeah, I love moving,” I told him, “but it’s more than that. It’s something I feel about specific places. It’s . . . I don’t know. It’s the site of the suffering, the battle. It’s like that thing Hemingway talks about, that finally all that will be left will be the bare record, the location and the date. And I feel it too, that eventually I’ll be able to write, ‘Morgantown, West Virginia, November, 1962,’ and that will say everything.”

“So it excites you to return to the site of your suffering? Yeah,” sighing, “but only as a movie. But when you’re in it . . . Fuck, John, it’s just dull, stupid, banal, boring,” and then he glanced at me with a quick flash of smile, a signal that he’d caught something. “What it comes down to,” he said, his voice no longer flat, now resonant, “do you enjoy finding new places to hang your toothbrush?”

“Oh, you guys,” Cohen said from the backseat.

“Another party heard from,” Revington said.

“The delegate from Nirvana,” I said and turned to look at Cohen who was leaning against the window, his legs drawn up. He was so compact he fit neatly there, at ease in that small space. “In the Northern Mahayana . . .” Cohen began.

“In the Romantic Movement,” Revington said, “as in the Bowel Movement . . .”

We all laughed. But Cohen persisted. “In the Northern Mahayana there are awesome hells full of the most hideous demons imaginable. But there are also infinite numbers of compassionate beings waiting to help you. You’re surrounded by them on all sides. They’re reaching out to you . . . Bodhisattvas. All you have to do is make one step toward them, and they’re already at your side . . . angels of infinite light.”

“That may be all well and good for John,” Revington said. “He claims to live in hell. He could use an angel or two. But for me it’s just purgatory. No. Worse than that. Limbo.”

“Yeah, angels would be nice,” I said, “but demons are more my speed. I keep thinking that one of these days I’m going to meet the devil on the road . . . you know, like in one of those old mountain songs.”

“And it’d be a kind of relief, wouldn’t it?” Revington said, “to know there’s really evil, to see it personified. Yeah, he’d probably turn out to be like Death in The Seventh Seal. Completely matter-of-fact, no big deal at all. ‘Hi, son, I’m Satan . . . and you’re screwed.’”

Revington and I were twenty, Cohen nineteen. We’d just spent Thanksgiving at home in Raysburg. Revington had volunteered to drive me back down to WVU, and it hadn’t been hard to talk Cohen into coming with us—taking one of his unofficial leaves from Harvard that never seemed to hurt his grades any. I was in my third year of university, Cohen in his second, and Revington was out of school, either officially withdrawn, temporarily suspended, or irrevocably flunked out of Yale—I’d heard him tell it all three ways. (What he’d told me was that he’d found it somewhat difficult to pass courses taught in New Haven when he’d been stoned in New York.)

We pulled up in the alley that led to my basement apartment. “It’s weird,” I said, “for at least a week after I come back, I’m always happy.” And I was particularly happy to see again the narrow concrete passageway outside my door; it was one of my favorite spots. I could stand for hours there, smoking, sheltered from the rain, staring up at that narrow slice of ominous grey Morgantown sky.

“Of course you’re happy,” Revington said. “It may be a half-assed school, but at least you’re in school.”

Amazed at my own foresight, I found two quarts of beer in my ancient refrigerator, opened one for Revington and me. Cohen, who never drank alcohol, put a pan of water on the stove to boil.

“You had the right idea, ace,” Revington said to me. “I should have said fuck the Ivy League and come down here.” He shook himself and stretched. He was too tall for the ceiling, pressed the palms of his hands flat against it. “Jesus,” he said, “that drive burned me out.”

He slumped back against the wall, slid down it to arrive on the floor. “You know what really pisses me off?” he said. “All that crap we went through at the Academy . . . and it was supposed to prepare us for college. Good God, what horseshit. Do you ever think how pointless our education was? How monkish? How absolutely useless for anything in the modern world? Riflery, close-order drill, athletics and cold showers, four years of Latin . . .”

“I wouldn’t have minded going to school with girls,” I said.

“Right,” Cohen said, “and I certainly could have used something that covered the basics of rocketry, deep space navigation, orienteering on alien planets . . .”

“You know, ace,” Revington said, assuming the flabbergasted voice of someone who has just made a fabulous new discovery, “you really are out of your fucking mind.” This was a standard routine between the two of them. Cohen laughed as he always did.

Cohen never went anywhere without a tea ball and several varieties of tea: the plain green tea you’d get in any Chinese restaurant, the exotic smoky Lapsang Souchong I was sure he’d chosen for the name as well as for the flavor, Earl Grey, because, he said, how could you resist something as startling as bergamot? He let the water come to a full boil, took the tea out of his knapsack, turned the heat off, allowed the water to cool a specific length of time measured by his Swiss wristwatch, and then slowly filled a mug. It was his personal tea ceremony. The scent of Asia diffused into the room.

I found it hard to describe Bill Cohen. Wiry is a word often used for people who are strong but not massive, but it wouldn’t work for him. He was the only person I’d ever met who’d developed those distinctive half-moon formations of muscle on either side of the abdomen that the Greeks carved so carefully into their statuary; what he might have done to get them remained a mystery to him. He’d swum and run track at the Academy, had been a dependable back-up man but far from an outstanding athlete. Like me, he was a great walker and climber of hills. It was easy to think of him as small and forget that he could draw a sixty-pound bow to full hunter’s nock over and over again without the slightest sign of strain—but it was his smallness, compactness, that stayed in my mind—a neat cat quality like a cartoon Felix. His eyes were green, his nose narrow and pointed, his hair a mass of tight black curls. He couldn’t sing at all, couldn’t begin to carry a tune, but his voice had at times a peculiar chanting inflection as if he were nearly singing—in a gentle, chiding tone: “Dupre, Dupre,” or “Oh, you guys.” He gestured when he talked, great sweeps of the hands. He dressed like a gunslinger in an old western—jeans riding on his hipbones, a broad belt with a Navajo silver buckle, expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots. Not always, but sometimes, he moved through the world with the focused intensity of a mime. He was the only boy I’d ever known I would have called beautiful.

I thought Revington must have fallen asleep slumped against the wall, but now he pushed himself to his feet, poured himself a second glass of beer, and began to pace up and down my living room. Given how small it was, he couldn’t work up much of a pace. He glanced at the bulletin board where I’d pinned up the last stanza of Rilke’s “Herbsttag” in the original German and sent me a look that said, “Who do you think you’re kidding?”

He tilted toward the wall to survey my picture of the Buddha reclining in Nirvana and the print Cohen had sent me: a Buddhist monk leaning on his staff, watching two cocks fight. He smiled when he read my version of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:

1.) All sentient beings suffer.

2.) Suffering arises from attachment.

3.) End attachment, end suffering.

4.) There is a way out of this shit.

He moved on to examine my bookcase and the altar to young girls I’d constructed on top of it—complete with candles and incense. The cinema princesses—Lori Martin, Sue Lyon, Hayley Mills, Eleonora Brown, Valeria Ciangottini—and then my personal princesses, the real ones. “Ah, the jerk-off corner,” he said.

“Angels,” Cohen said.

“No,” Revington said, “just ordinary female Homo sapiens of the barely pubescent variety. You know, John, some people shouldn’t be allowed to read Lolita.”

He pointed to a photograph of Natalie Hewitt, my girlfriend from last year. “So what’s happened to this mature, sophisticated, and highly articulate young lady?” It was a candid shot, typically Natalie, that I’d taken of her sitting on the front porch at my Allen Street apartment. She was bent over her Spanish guitar, her long lovely hair drawing a line down her cheek. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt, pedal pushers, and ballerina flats. Natalie was a tall girl, but, with nothing in the picture for comparison, any sense of her height was lost, and she didn’t appear to have any more figure than a twelve-year-old. She and Revington had despised each other. “She’s at Swarthmore,” I said, my annoyance growing by the second.

“And what do we have here? Why, it’s the fair Miss Cassandra Markapolous.” He raised an eyebrow at me. He still hadn’t forgiven me for dating Cassy when she’d been fourteen.

“And I’m glad to see that you’re still cultivating your original neurosis.” He tapped his index finger against the photograph. “The lovely Miss Linda Edmonds, Homecoming Queen.”

He traded in his sardonic, bantering voice for one of weary gloom. “Why can’t we ever find one that just stays with us? That goddamned wench.” Meaning, of course, Barbara Daniels, his high-school girlfriend; she’d been his first love just as Linda had been mine. “And don’t tell me, Cohen, that unrequited love is a contradiction in terms.” He paced to the end of the room and back.

“Do you think it would have made any difference,” Revington asked me, “if it had worked out for us?”

“Yeah, I think it would,” I said. “Everything might have fallen into place.”

“That’s right,” he said. “I might still be in school.”

“Oh, you guys,” Cohen said.

I couldn’t tell if Revington was genuinely annoyed or if it was merely another performance: with a sweeping gesture like that of a villain in a silent movie, he turned toward Cohen as though to cut him off in the small space. “Hey, ace, have you ever even kissed a girl?”

Cohen was fully aware of how odd he must have seemed to us—he’d yet to have his first date—but if he minded being the butt of Revington’s humor, he never showed it. “Spin the bottle in grade school,” he said, laughing.

“No, you hopeless jerk, I mean really kissed a girl.”

Cohen smiled. “No,” he said.

Revington crouched in front of him, grinning. “Now here’s the real question. Have you ever wanted to?”

Cohen thought about it. “Last summer at the pool,” he said, “there was a girl. She was lying on the next beach towel. She had glorious long blonde Rapunzel hair. She looked as though she’d spent most of her summer in the sun. She was golden. She had on a bikini, and she had a little round tummy. I don’t mean she was fat . . . just a little round tummy. And I wanted to kiss her . . . on her little round tummy.”

“Listen to that, will you?” Revington said—Ben Gant’s line from Look Homeward Angel that he’d been quoting ever since we’d read it in one of our English classes at the Academy. He arranged himself decoratively against the wall in a languid slouch. “Do you think he’s conning us?”

“No,” I said.

“You sound like my father,” Cohen said and fell into a New York accent: “Bill, have you noticed how God created the human race? They come in two kinds, male and female . . . You have noticed? Don’t get me wrong. I know you’re a pretty bright kid. I just thought I’d point it out in case it slipped by you.”

“A perceptive man, your father,” Revington said. “Now here’s another question. Have you been blessed with a sex drive? Yeah, how about screwing? Do you ever want to screw someone?” He pronounced the word as though singing comic opera, rolling the r: sca-rrrooo.

“Revington, Revington.” Cohen said. He stood up and began pacing too. “No, I don’t ever want to screw someone. Not that way. What’s important is what happens between people . . . so if I get to know a girl, get close enough to her, sex will happen of its own accord . . . because we’ll want to get closer, and then it will be the perfect thing to do.” He smiled. “Of course I feel desire too . . . on one level. On another level it just doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t matter what you say about it.”

“You bastard,” Revington said with affection, “either you are a saint, or you’re the world’s biggest asshole.”

Only a few minutes earlier I’d been happy, but now I felt myself sinking into the old familiar pit. I didn’t like to think about it, but I was just as much of a virgin as Bill Cohen. Sometimes I imagined us as the only two boys left in all of America who’d never been laid. But Cohen didn’t seem to mind talking about it, didn’t seem to mind who knew it, didn’t even seem to mind being kidded about it, and I couldn’t understand how he could be so cool, so unconcerned. I was ashamed of my own virginity, would never have admitted it to Revington, or to anyone else for that matter—not even Cohen—and I felt like a hypocrite. And, yes, here I was back in Morgantown—the site of my suffering—and, no, nothing was going to change. All I had to look forward to was more of the same old shit. “Hey,” I said, “let’s get out of here.”

• • •

THE OWNER of The Seventh Circle had known enough Dante to come up with the name for the place but not enough to decorate it accurately—not evoking terrifying iciness, the absence of heat or light, but rather the most banal, man-in-the-street conception of hell: cartoon flames, demons with pitchforks. A grinning Satan with horns and tail presided over the bar; he looked more like a Budweiser Beer commercial (and indeed he was raising a tankard of something to his lips) than the Prince of Darkness. But the Circle had, in some obscure and disgusting way, become a kind of hell for me, one totally lacking in grandeur, a perfect Morgantown hell. It’s where I’d sit by the jukebox night after night, pumping in my quarters to hear “Mule Skinner Blues” or “Everyday,” drinking quart after quart of weak West Virginia beer until I was running to the can every five minutes, watching the beautiful young coeds on the dance floor circle by with the fraternity boys. It’s where I’d stumble, so drunk I’d be exploding with unused talk, through the circle of tiny interlocking rooms (all painted red, of course) looking for somebody, anybody, no matter how stupid or boring, to share a beer with—where I would see, reflected in a mirror across a press of people, Carol pass by with her wretched Englishman. And it’s where I and a few of my cronies would sit till closing time constructing conversation like a madman’s scaffolding hastily into the upper air—existentialism, pacifism, theosophy, Jung, alchemy, the Cabala, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Jaspers, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Henry Miller, T. E. Lawrence, D. T. Suzuki, Zen, the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, the Steppenwolf, the Outsider—to have collapsed as always for me the next morning, my hangover screwed tight as a watch spring ticking away my wasted time, debris littering a barren plane, my metaphors mixed and me late for class, and then all of it, all of my tricks and disguises, would seem in that awful morning light the shoddiest of effects, a fucked-up sleight of hand attempted by an incompetent charlatan. Revington was staring into the ruddy gloom with his eyes narrowed to slits. “Christ,” he said, “it’s crowded.”

“Everybody getting their last drunk in before classes start,” I said. I loved the Circle most on weekday nights near exam time when it would be nearly empty except for me and those few other diehard souses who really needed a drink.

“Gentlemen, good evening.” A woman’s voice behind us. We turned, and there was Marge Levine who must have come in just after us. “Hey, John,” she said, giving me her brief flick of a smile. She’d met Cohen and Revington when they’d come down to visit me last spring. “Bill,” she said to Cohen, “great to see you.” Then she deliberately turned to Revington, smiled and said, in an amused voice heavily weighted with subtext, “Revington.”

“Levine,” he said, inclining toward her from his picturesque height. “Here’s looking at you, kid.” Their hands touched briefly, a brushing of fingers, his pale and bare, hers black and gloved.

Marge had drawn emphatic Nefertiti lines around her eyes as she usually did; that evening she’d also painted her eyelids a virulent green. In the dim red gloom of the bar, her face looked mask-like, an effect that both pleased and distressed me. She’d undone the toggles of her unremarkable car coat, revealing beneath a black wool dress so unadorned and matronly it would have been ugly on anyone else; her hip bones showed through the skirt like knife points. She was startling as always, in black nylons (no one else on campus wore black nylons out to a bar), and pulled to one side of her head, so unlike her that it had to be a deliberate joke, a velvet beret. Oh, I thought, remembering, it’s Carol’s. “Hey, buddy,” she said to me, “when did you get back?”

“Just now.”

“Maybe we can find a table.” She pushed through a knot of students, her body a lean tension balanced on high heels, and I trailed after her, saw her give Revington another thin smile. I loved the noise and press of the crowd, loved seeing girls all around me—but even as I felt a surge of elation, I knew how treacherous it was. I didn’t care. I was going to get pissed.

Jammed into a corner, knocking back my first beer, I told Cohen, “My God, Bill, sometimes the world sizzles like a frying pan. It’s incredible how the days can pass like bland beads on a string, with a deadness so total you forget completely there’s anything else, and then . . . WHAM . . . it hits you again. The power. Like that drunk old man in the bar in South Raysburg told me . . . that Bodhisattva: ‘Son, you’re never late.’ I keep forgetting it, keep thinking there’s somewhere else I have to be, and then I miss it. The power turns off. But when it’s moving . . . the clarity . . .”

“Yes, clarity, that’s it,” he said. “Mornings when I walk through the Yard and see, really see, the branches of the trees, outlined so clearly, so sharply . . .”

“Yes, yes. Even the power lines right outside my apartment . . . just to be able to see them. As though the quality of light . . . I don’t know . . .”

“As though the light’s alive.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right. But why can’t we stay there all the time?”

“If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen,” he said. “It’s something given to you.”

“What do you do when it goes away?”

“You wait.”

And Marge was asking Revington, “How long will you be staying?”

“Long enough,” he said. Right, I thought. He’s here for a while, but I won’t see much of him.

Speaking quietly so no one else would hear, I asked Cohen, “Do you ever get tired of waiting?”

“On one level, no. But on another level . . . of course I do.”

“All right, let’s look at that bottom level . . . that ordinary, everyday level. How do you feel there?”

He smiled. “Stupid, clumsy, and slow.”

Suddenly, Carol, with her Englishman, was leaning over the table, bestowing her graciousness upon all of us. She kissed me on the forehead, marking me with her lipstick, as I wouldn’t discover until hours later. Unlike Marge, Carol didn’t appear as a sinister masked figure in the dim light of the bar. Looking closely, I saw how cleverly her makeup had been done: in daylight, she’d look garish; here, she looked merely healthy. A goddamned consummate artist, I thought, infuriated by her feminine skills as I wouldn’t have been if they’d been used on my behalf, but she was gazing up at that vapid visiting professor who was saying, “Oh, we didn’t go anywhere, actually.” Actually? Tweedy bastard.

Conservative Carol in an exquisitely tailored suit. Sexy Carol with her generous breasts and tiny waist. Helpful Carol pushing a chair to the Englishman. And suddenly angry Carol saying to Marge, “Oh. You’re wearing my beret.” Marge raised a finger, touched it to one eyebrow, and flicked it away, an abbreviated salute: Yes, I am. So what?

The blood rising into Carol’s cheeks, igniting her face, overwhelming her makeup; the involuntary toss of her head, swing of her glossy black pageboy; the flash of outrage in her eyes; the quick inhalation of her breath— A fresh round of beer had, thank God, arrived at the table. “Knock it back?” I said to Revington.

He nodded in reply. I hoisted that beautifully chilled quart; we clinked bottles and drank. I watched him. He was watching me. Neither of us stopped until we hit bottom. I slammed my empty bottle down first, my throat burning from the effort. Far away, behind the nasty, rising murmur in my ears, behind the yattering voices all around me, I heard him say, “Ah, Dupre, you’re still the fastest drunk in the West,” as I let myself sink, flop into the plastic red padded seat of the booth, thought: here we are again, everything known, mapped, pre-drawn, laid out, predictable, and expected him to say: nada, nada, and yet more nada, or some such—just as he was already saying, leaning across the table to me like a conspirator, “See that old fucker over there in the corner, that campus cop? All by himself, right? Probably came in to get loaded so he could sleep . . . Yeah, and that’s how I’m going to end up if I don’t watch it. Some dead end like that. Campus cop, night watchman, hotel clerk on the night shift . . .” and let it trail off. On the tabletop, his hand was resting on Marge’s. Carol was talking to her Englishman.

“Déjà vu,” I said to Cohen, but I meant stale, flat, pointless repetition—to watch Revington light a cigarette and stare at nothing, to light a cigarette myself, burp the fizz up, inhale smoke, hear that damnable visiting professor say, “the underpinning of the mythic structure . . . ,” see Carol’s doe eyes gazing up at him, rapt and attentive, hear myself launch in dizzily, losing control: “Oh, it’s the mythic structure, is it? The underpinning structure. The mythic overpinning. The structuring mythopin. The mythic structuro-pin.” I was imitating his accent. “That bloody book is the most over-rated major work of the twentieth century,” I said in my own voice.

“Ulysses?” he said, our Oxford straight man, “Indeed?”

“Indeed,” I mocked him. I wanted to stop the spill of my words, but I didn’t know how. I was being obnoxious and hated myself for it. “Oh yes, the bloody subtext. But what’s the point? What’s the use? Where’s the icy outline of things in themselves? Where’s the fiery transforming numina of lived experience?”

My God, I was pontificating like an owl. “All those guys,” I went on. “Symbolists. Cross-references. Word games. Anacrostics. It’s pointless, pointless, pointless.” Washing away, I looked to Cohen as an anchor, said to him sotto voce, “Out of the cradle, endlessly talking.”

“I’m not sure I understand you.” The Englishman was bending over me like an earnest gargoyle. “If it’s that icy outline you want, then surely the opening in the lighthouse . . . the clarity of the prose . . . the clean, brilliant sea light . . .”

“John’s our resident outsider,” Carol said.

“That’s right. Explain me away.”

“Are you all right?” she asked me, and now I had what I must have wanted—her attention, her concern, her splendid eyes turned to me.

Cohen was looking at me too. The beautiful Jews, I thought, seeing them together. “Let’s walk,” I said to him.

Out on the street we were met by the first snowfall of the season, stopped by it. The sky was thick with the motion of the fat wet flakes; they quieted the campus as though someone had said, “Shhh.” Cohen smiled—not one of his elusive, enigmatic smiles but a little kid’s broad delighted grin—and gestured to me: look.

• • •

BILL COHEN and I hadn’t become friends until after I’d graduated from the Academy. I’d known who he was, of course—the top student in the class one year behind me—but the military structure of our school didn’t encourage fraternization with younger cadets, and it wasn’t until my freshman year at WVU that I got to know him. I’d been at home at Christmas; Cohen had turned up at a hootenanny at David Anderson’s. Cohen didn’t sing or play anything, but he loved the music. I sang “Whoa Back Buck,” and he came up to me afterward to tell me I’d killed him. We started talking and couldn’t stop.

We talked at David’s until they threw us out. I drove down to the Pines where I used to go with Lyle; we sat in that dark back room surrounded by evocative pools of guttering candle light and ate kielbasa sandwiches. I drank whiskey and water; Cohen drank root beer. We talked until two in the morning; then I drove over to the Island and we sat on the pilings under the bridge, watched the reflections of the city lights in the river, and talked until four. Cohen had some things at home he wanted to show me, so we drove out there, crept in quietly, closed ourselves into his bedroom, and talked until dawn. Eventually the rest of his family got up, and his mother made us breakfast. After that, we were quite literally inseparable for the last few days of the Christmas break. Whatever I was doing, I brought him along—even to visit Cassandra. He slept at my house or I at his. I don’t think either of us planned it that way, but we just couldn’t stop talking.

What did we talk about? Every damned thing under the sun. Folk music got us going, and then we moved on to science fiction—which used to be my passion and was still his. We’d read many of the same classic authors: Asimov, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simac. Neither of us got too excited by the space-ships-and-robots variety of Sci-Fi; no, we wanted something stranger—time travel, alternate realities, weird worlds that would bend our minds. We agreed that Galaxy was a better magazine than Fantasy & Science Fiction, but F & SF certainly had some wonderful stories from time to time—for instance, I said, there was Manly Wade Wellman. “Oh, my God, yes,” Cohen said, “Manly Wade Wellman!”

But he’d read a lot more than merely science fiction; Cohen had read everything—a million Westerns, all of Sherlock Holmes, the American school of hard-boiled detective novels, even Agatha Christie. (He was the only other boy I’d ever met who would admit to having read Little Women.) He’d read, and memorized, yards of poetry. He’d also read all that stuff we would have called “literature”—everything from Dickens to Kerouac, from Moby Dick to The Catcher in the Rye. He read so compulsively he saw it as a flaw in his character. He would read anything—any book or magazine that someone had momentarily laid down, junk that came in the mail, the cereal box on the breakfast table, the newspapers his mother spread on the floor under the kitty box. He said he was afraid to open the dictionary because he could get lost in it for hours. Like a jackdaw collecting bits of glitter, Cohen collected words; he’d forget how rare some of them were and use them in his ordinary conversation—to the consternation of his listeners, including me—words like anacreontic, katabatic, viverrine, quillet, sequacity, epilimnion, anacoluthon.

His bedroom astonished me. The walls, of course, were lined with bookshelves, and the shelves, of course, were crammed with books, but that’s not what drew my attention. His American long bow rested in the corner next to his six-foot African spear. A quiver of target arrows hung on the wall next to his samurai sword. In another corner stood his fencing foils and his rifle. Arranged on top of the bookcase were his Bowie knife, his collection of throwing knives, his coiled bullwhip, and his BB-guns—not toys, but exquisitely made replicas of real guns. High on one wall, in a place of honor, hanging in a leather holster, was his Ruger Single-Six twenty-two caliber revolver. Looking out from his bulletin board at all these instruments of mayhem was a little girl of about twelve. Her hair, bound by a white ribbon, was a dark honey blonde with red highlights; she wore a black velvet dress with a white collar. She wasn’t smiling. Her face was both wise and innocent—a face with a luminous, nearly otherworldly beauty.

I’d never met another boy who shared my fascination with young girls—as Cohen obviously did—but I would never have pinned up a girl that young. For me the magical age was still fourteen, just on the edge of womanhood, and I knew perfectly well how my pictures might look to other people (for instance, to a relentlessly cynical William Revington), but I didn’t see the girls on my altar as erotic—rather, for want of a better word, as religious. Like Rilke’s “already lost beloved,” they were my icons, my muses. So I was dying of curiosity to know how Cohen felt about his little blonde. She wasn’t anybody he knew, he said. He’d cut her picture out of a catalogue and put it up in his room because, “She killed me.”

Cohen would talk about anything—that is, he seemed capable of being genuinely interested in anything—and there were no taboo subjects. I could ask him any question, no matter how personal, and he would try to answer it—often at great length, because, for him, the world was “infinitely complex” and his experience of it came “on many levels.” Being “killed” by something—the word was Holden Caulfield’s, and you could be killed by all kinds of things: a folk song, a girl, a crystalline morning, a line of poetry—but the word was just a shorthand, he had to admit; the experience itself was what mattered; as he described it (and he really didn’t want to be pinned down by words, trapped by them, but he was doing his best to communicate), being killed was an aesthetic, nearly mystical, utterly heart-stopping moment of pure bliss. “OK,” I said, “but that particular little girl in the picture . . . how do you feel about her?”

He had to think about it. His first reaction was that his feelings were too complex to describe. Finally he said, “I probably feel about her the way Holden Caulfield did about his little sister, Phoebe.”

How he felt about guns, knives, swords, bows, spears, and bullwhips was also infinitely complex and required several days’ worth of elucidation even to begin to plumb the depths. He loved the old American myth of the lone man standing up to all the forces of evil; he’d seen High Noon over a dozen times. The skill and the speed of the Western gunman—both in legend and reality—fascinated him. In grade school, he’d begun practicing the quick draw with BB-guns. He’d bought that Ruger only in the last year. Of course he couldn’t fire it within the city limits, but if I wanted to ride out of town with him to a spot he knew, he’d show me what he was talking about—because it was a topic you could talk about forever and not get to the heart of it, but if you saw it, you might get a better feeling for it. “I’d love to,” I said.

Cohen brought along a bag full of tin cans. He lined them up on an old fence, then turned and paced off a High Noon’s worth of distance and stood, regarding the fence. As he always did when he wasn’t in school, he was wearing jeans and cowboy boots. He’d told me that when he’d first bought the Ruger, he’d worked over it for weeks—smoothed and polished the moving parts, fitted it with Fitz Gun Fighter Grips and Flaig’s Ace Trigger Shoe, lightened the trigger pull to little more than two pounds. He wore the Ruger high to the rear of his right hip, in a holster canted oddly forward.

Cohen simply stood there awhile, his face altogether devoid of expression. He didn’t make the slightest motion to give away his intention, but suddenly I heard a sharp spitting sound followed instantly by the metallic ping of the first can being swatted off into the woods; then he was again at rest, crouched slightly forward. He’d already drawn and fired. It had happened so quickly that the motion had to be reconstructed in memory—the high rising elbow, hand back to the hip and then thrust out, smooth as a cat’s jump, the gun itself an unintelligible blur, like a hummingbird’s wing. He was smiling, very slightly. He settled the gun back into the holster. Doc Holliday’s cavalry draw, Cohen had told me, was the fastest method of drawing and firing a single-action; it was also the most difficult. He’d never been able to figure out a way to time himself, so I’d brought along my stopwatch. “Now!” The best I could tell, he could draw and fire that Ruger in less than half a second.

Cohen didn’t demonstrate his gunplay to very many people, said he didn’t like to show off, so I think I might have been the only other person who ever got to see the whole show. He demonstrated in his basement at home, used a BB-pistol, not the Ruger, and gave me an exhaustive account of the evolution of the handgun as a weapon. He showed me the cavalry draw, the border shift, the FBI draw, the ankle draw, the shoulder draw, the inside-the-pants draw, the unorthodox across-the-body draw perfected by the Ringo Kid. He showed me “drop the dollar” too; with that BB-pistol and a fifty-cent piece, he hit the coin eight tries out of ten.

I could have called Revington, simply, one of my best friends, but I was never sure what to say about Bill Cohen. I knew that he’d gradually come to fill the void in my life that Lyle had left, so Cohen was a friend, certainly, but something more. Even when we first met, my regard for him bordered on awe—but there’s one more twist to the story. He won a full scholarship to Harvard. His family was so delighted with him that they wanted to give him something special—what did he want? He wanted to travel, he said. That was easy enough. In the spring after he graduated from the Academy, he went to New York, stayed with his Uncle Syd, came back talking ecstatically about the paintings in the Met and the Guggenheim, about hearing Lightning Hopkins at the Ethical Culture Society, about the wonderful foreign flicks. Then, later in the summer, he went to visit his Uncle Harry who owned a hotel in Miami Beach, and when he came back from Florida, he’d been enlightened. We’d both been reading about Buddhism, but he’d been the one to have the experience, and it had been just the way Watts and Suzuki described it: mind-shattering and utterly beyond words—although, God knows, he tried to tell me about it over and over again.

I kept studying him to see what difference it might have made. For one thing, he now spoke occasionally in flat declarative sentences, as though he knew. (It was what Revington came to call, “Cohen speaking ex cathedra.”) Some of his dicta were: “What’s important is what happens between people,” and “Despair is evil,” and “Words are no damned good.” And for another thing, there seemed to be—and here was where I had trouble finding the right way to put it—an enigmatic sweetness growing in him. It was more than kindness (although he was kind); it was as though he had acquired the ability to hold anyone he met in a nearly infinite regard.

He never claimed to have achieved the big one—perfect incomparable enlightenment like the Buddha’s; he didn’t mind the word the Zen masters used for an enlightenment experience, satori, but the way he referred to it was “my awakening.” It was like a rock inside of him, he said; it was eternal. In an instant, everything he’d ever thought about himself in the world had been changed.

“Was it like when you used to say, ‘It killed me,’ only more so?” I asked him.

“No.”

“Did you lose consciousness?”

“No.”

“Was it like an incredible insight?”

“No.”

“Do you remember what you were thinking?”

“Thought had nothing to do with it.”

Florida in the summer is hotter than hell, he said, and he’d loved it. He felt as though he’d been born to live in the tropics. He’d been having a great time, running on the beach, swimming in the ocean. His uncle had taken him fishing, and he’d caught a marlin. One night he couldn’t sleep because he was so filled with joy. He got up and walked on the beach. Just as the sky was turning the intense lucent blue that comes just before dawn in the tropics, he stopped walking and looked out to sea. He didn’t remember what he was thinking. And that’s when it happened.

It’s August two summers ago. We’re sitting in his kitchen, and he’s been trying to tell me again how it happened, what it was that happened. He keeps trying—pouring out more and more of those words he doesn’t trust, those words that he says are “no damned good.” He’s just cooked cheeseburgers for us, gigantic ones with nearly a pound of meat in each. Bright sunlight, broken at the windows, patterns the room; we’re glowing with it. The West Virginia dog days, hot and humid, pulse with the locusts in the trees—that ancient, monotonous drone that says to me, as it has since I turned six: almost school time, almost school time. The cheeseburgers drip grease and mayonnaise onto our plates, small pools giving back sun; the plates are glowing, the pickles are glowing—light through the pickle jar, light on the bubbles in the sink full of dishes, light on our faces. We’re sweating, the kitchen vivid with heat, the sun everywhere. Cohen, brown from Florida, is wearing only swimming trunks. Black curly hair on his chest and legs, his bare feet wrapped around the rungs of the kitchen stool, his eyes on my face, and I’ve been asking him over and over, “But what was it like? Tell me what it was like,” until finally he reaches out to me, seizes both my hands in his, and squeezes, hard, until I can feel the heat of his flesh, the tightening of his muscles, even the bones underneath. His smile is so fierce it’s beyond any term as mundane as joy; his eyes are blazing. “John,” he says, “you’re alive.”

• • •

COHEN HAD stopped walking to look up at the snow falling through the brilliance of a streetlight. He hadn’t said a word since we’d left the Circle; trying to match his mood, neither had I, yet I couldn’t stop my mind from nattering—still coming up with trenchant lines to stun Carol’s Englishman (although we’d left him behind a long time ago), still writing descriptions of the obsidian luminosity of Carol’s eyes as seen in the dim red light of that phony hell. But Carol was not here; I was here, and looking to where Cohen was looking, I finally caught up to where we’d arrived, hoped that I could see what he was seeing—simply the snow falling in flakes fat as cotton balls, white in the street light, grey beyond in drifting curtains that enveloped us like a blessing. Even though the curfew was still a half hour away, already girls were hurrying up the hill toward the Women’s Dorm, some paired with dates, some in all-female clusters. I heard their voices all around us, but the snow hid their images.

Once again I had the sense of intense quieting, of the snow smoothing out sound. The feeling of staleness that had been oppressing me in the Circle dropped suddenly away. I could, I knew, if I kept on walking, shed my drunkenness like stepping out of an inept disguise. This was new, as though I’d awakened to catch Cohen and myself in medias res; I didn’t know what drama we were enacting, but wherever he was going, I’d gladly go with him. He was grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat. I hadn’t felt either of us choose a direction, but we were leaving behind the center of the campus—the focal point of the library—to follow out white blankness toward the curve of the stadium, to climb the hill, to look down on the empty circle of the track where we would find no one.

“You know, John,” he said, “this student business . . . On the maintenance level, it’s getting harder and harder to pull off.”

I laughed. “Oh, yeah, it sure is.” But I was surprised. It was the first time I’d ever heard him say anything like that. I’d always imagined him having no trouble at all with school.

“I’ve got a paper due on the Amaravati stupa slab,” he said. “It’s not hard. I just have to go through image by image, identify each one, say what it represents . . . Here the Buddha’s hand is open, welcoming all who come to him, and here the Buddha’s hand is pointing downward to the earth, representing his vow to sit beneath the Bo tree until he achieves perfect incomparable enlightenment . . . But I keep thinking that if I were a pilgrim coming to Amaravati, I wouldn’t be cataloguing the images. I’d be coming to experience them.”

“Right.”

“Of course, on another level, none of that matters. I might as well be at Harvard as not be at Harvard. But I’m glad to be here with you, right now, in the snow, in Morgantown, and not in Cambridge getting ready for my classes tomorrow.”

From our viewpoint on top of that hill, WVU looked ghostly, unreal; the snow obscured even the nearest buildings. “I thought you liked Harvard,” I said.

“Oh, I do. On one level. On that level I wouldn’t be anywhere else . . .”

“But how about the other levels?”

“On another level, I keep wondering how much use any of it is.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I had all these illusions. I don’t know what I thought it would be down here . . . some kind of medieval university maybe, or a continual Socratic dialogue. But no, you’ve got to fill this requirement, that requirement . . . sit through another boring lecture. Maybe we were just incredibly naïve to think that going to school has anything to do with learning.”

“Oh, I’m sure we could do a hell of a lot better job educating ourselves,” Cohen said, “but there’s . . .”

“What?”

“OK, let’s imagine it as a kind of science-fiction story. You’re being tested for a mission into deep space, a very important mission. But they don’t tell you what the mission is, and they don’t even tell you that you’re being tested. Part of the test, one of the most crucial parts, is to see if you can figure out that it is a test.”

I didn’t know why I should find Cohen’s metaphor so thoroughly unpleasant. “That’s not science fiction,” I said, “that’s Kafka.”

“Ah, but it could be any day now,” Cohen said. “It could be the buildings-and-grounds guy. It could be one of my professors. It could be the secretary in the Registrar’s office. She gives me a significant look. I wonder how I could have ever missed the purposeful steely glint in her eye, but this time I pick up on it instantly. I don’t need any explanation. Without a word, I follow her out into the middle of the Yard, well away from the bugging devices. ‘Cohen,’ she says, ‘we’ve been watching you for years. And now we see that you’re ready.’”

“Revington’s right,” I said, laughing, “you really are nuts.”

We looked down from our elevation toward the blurry shapes of the buildings obscured by the scrim of snow. I lit a cigarette. I’d been waiting for the chance to talk to him alone, to tell him about Carol without having Revington around to drop his funny cynical lines into the conversation; I’d had several opportunities in Raysburg, but I hadn’t taken advantage of them. Now might be a good time, but no, it still didn’t feel right. We began to walk back the way we had come. We continued to talk—about courses, papers, professors—the mundane miseries of student life. It was one of our meandering conversations that could last forever, go anywhere.

At first we could see our own boot prints leading up the way we had come, but the snow was falling so thickly that soon the sidewalks stretching before us were blanked out to the untouched whiteness of typewriter paper. Then I saw that someone else was out there sharing the snow with us: a single set of small footprints, obviously a girl’s. The length of her stride was less than half of ours. The weight at the balls of her feet had left delicate marks in the shape of valentine hearts; her heel prints were so tiny they could have been covered by dimes. She couldn’t have been very far ahead of us or the snow would have hidden her tracks. I looked at my watch, saw that it was after midnight and felt a rush of sympathy for her—poor kid, whoever she was, caught out in high heels in the snow after curfew.

To overtake her, all we had to do was continue to follow her footprints. I didn’t tell Cohen what I was doing, but I began to walk faster. I felt that the ordinary lines of the world had fallen away, leaving things chancy and unpredictable. Then I could see her at the end of the block: a blurred and elusive image, a hazy pale silhouette—slender and hooded. I was startled to have caught up with her so quickly without having first heard the tap of her heels; the snow must have muffled the sound. She seemed to turn and look back at us.

I stopped walking. With an outstretched hand, I stopped Cohen. “What are we doing?” he said. “Don’t you want her to see us?” I hadn’t known until then that he’d seen her footprints too.

“I don’t want to frighten her,” I said.

“Then we should behave absolutely normally.” He started walking again; I fell into step with him.

For a moment I’d been looking at him. Now, looking back to where the girl had been, I saw nothing but snow. “You did see her, didn’t you?” I asked him.

“Of course I saw her.”

I pointed down. Her footprints were still there. We followed them downhill toward the center of campus. Eventually they led us into that curious cul-de-sac behind Woodburn Hall. “Oh, she must be lost,” I said. “This goes nowhere.”

I saw her again—or at least I think I did—an even more elusive image than before, a slender wavering line drawn momentarily into the snow and then gone. “Excuse me.” I called out. “Are you lost?” There was no answer.

“The way in’s the only way out,” I said to Cohen, and, walking fast, led him into the cul-de-sac. Halfway in, I couldn’t see her footprints any more. I stopped, confused.

Cohen sank into a crouch, and, with one bare hand, began to brush snow from the sidewalk. I sank down next to him. He’d uncovered one of her prints. As we watched, it filled with snow. We walked to the end of the cul-de-sac, then back. There was no sign of the girl. As we retraced our steps, I saw no footprints but our own.

• • •

IT WASN’T until we were back inside my apartment doing maintenance things—washing away the interesting green slime I’d been cultivating on the dishes I’d left in my sink over Thanksgiving break, emptying ashtrays, collecting the empty beer bottles, boiling water for Cohen’s tea—that I realized just how disquieting it had been to track that elusive girl across campus in the snow. It had been like finding a fascinating piece of a jigsaw puzzle that, unfortunately, didn’t happen to belong to the puzzle I was working on.

Cohen was standing against the wall in front of my bulletin board. He’d propped an empty carton against the opposite wall, and, with relaxed deft flicks of his wrist, was throwing knives into it. In a leather pouch in his knapsack he always kept five of them: thin slivers of forged steel small enough to be hidden in the palm of his hand, the cutting edge at the points (as he’d showed me) sharp enough, with a bit of spit as a lubricant, to shave the hair on his arm. “Half turn,” he said, “I’ve almost got it.” I didn’t know why he bothered with the “almost”—he hadn’t missed yet. The knives struck the cardboard with a neat thwack and stuck up to the hilt. Soon the carton would be ripped to shreds and he’d have to find another one.

“Cohen,” I said, “what the hell happened?”

“You mean the girl who wasn’t there?”

“Of course that’s what I mean. What else would I mean?”

“Funny . . . my watch has stopped too.”

I could see that he was in one of his playful moods—kittenish and a bit silly—that could drive me absolutely nuts. “Look,”

I said, “let’s just get the facts straight, OK? Did you see her?”

“Yes,” he said, laughing, “I saw her.”

“How about in the cul-de-sac? Did you see her in there?”

“I think I did, but I’m not sure.”

“Yeah. I’m not sure either. But her footprints led in there, didn’t they?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“OK, so where the hell was she?”

“John, there’s a simple, perfectly logical explanation for this. When she saw that we were getting too close to her . . . she flew away.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

I went back to drying my dishes. I could see that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him on that topic, but maybe I could get somewhere on another one. “Cohen,” I said, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about . . . You know Carol?”

“That little raven-haired beauty who came in with the British guy?”

“Yeah. Exactly. Well, I know what you say. Unrequited love is a contradiction in terms. But I think I’m in love with her, and I can’t stand it this time. It just hurts too much.”

The motion of his arm on the next throw was not small and deft but a broad powerful sweep. The knife shot past me, through the archway to the kitchen, and stuck, quivering, in the wall above the stove. The sound it had made, striking, had been loud and vicious as a whip crack. “Turn and a half,” he said.

I must have jumped a foot. Adrenaline was charging through me; my entire body felt licked with electricity. All I could do was laugh. “You’re a goddamned ham,” I said. “You’re as bad as me or Revington.”

He had to use both hands to pry the knife from the wall. “That was stupid of me. I’ll get some plaster tomorrow and fix the hole.” But he couldn’t help grinning; he looked as pleased with himself as a little boy.

I filled his teacup, poured myself a beer, sat down at the table, gestured for him to join me. “I really want to talk about this stuff,” I said, “I want to ask you something. I want to use words. I want you to try, OK? No more silence or dramatic Zen gestures . . . just some good old-fashioned words, OK?”

“All right, I’ll babble like a brook.” He put his knives back in their pouch and sat down.

I pointed to the picture of Linda. “I keep thinking that she’s the key to everything. She was the first girl I was ever in love with, and I fucked it up, and somehow that means I’m doomed to fuck up again, forever and ever.”

“So love’s like a gun with one bullet?” Cohen said. “If you miss, you never get another shot?”

“Boy, is that a sexual image.”

“Yeah, I guess it is, isn’t it? I didn’t even think of it . . . All right, how’s this? Love’s like a . . .” He began laughing. “Is it bigger than a bread box? Oh damn it, John, words are so damn silly . . . OK, is it like diving off a high cliff into a pool with rocks all around it? You only get one jump because you either hit the water or you break your neck?”

“Hey, that’s not bad. And if you’ve ever done it once, you know you can do it again. Yeah, that’s close to how I feel about it, but . . . I don’t know why I’m even thinking about Linda. Cassandra means more to me than Linda Edmonds ever did, but Cassy and I . . . Well, we were never exactly boyfriend and girlfriend . . .”

I found it difficult to talk about Cassandra. She’d always refused to play by the rules, and she still maintained her old distinction between love and in love. By her definition, we’d never been in love with each other—although I wasn’t sure of that. If she was the only girl I would have called one of my best friends, she was also the only one of my best friends who made out with me from time to time. Sometimes we made out like fiends. “I love her,” I said. “I know she loves me, but she’s like a sister . . .”

Cohen was smiling at me. I could guess what he was thinking: what’s wrong with that?

“OK,” I said, “and then there’s Natalie,” and I tried to tell him how I felt about her. I’d never been sure if I’d loved Natalie—or, to stay on topic, if I’d ever been in love with her—because on some elusive level I certainly had loved her— Well, maybe what I’d loved hadn’t been Natalie herself but simply the convenience of having a steady girlfriend. It had made things so damn easy—not having to wonder what you were going to do on weekends or in the evenings. And, as I kept on talking, listening to myself backtracking, revising, editing—stopping to erase everything I’d said so far to launch in again with yet another elaboration of something else that would probably turn out to be wrong, I thought, Christ, I haven’t got a clue how I felt about Natalie. “We were so different,” I said.

He kept on smiling. He was right. Sometimes you did hit a point where words were no damned good. “I miss her like crazy,” I said. That was true enough.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “I know how pathetic I must sound . . . like Romeo in Act I, but . . . OK, and now there’s Carol. And she just drives me fucking nuts. And she’s completely infatuated with that goddamned stupid Englishman. And I’ve managed to convince her I’m her friend . . . you know, her good buddy.”

He couldn’t help himself. I could see how it had been building up in him, and now all he could do was laugh. But it was absurd for me to expect any kind of useful advice from him; he’d never even had a girlfriend. “Go ahead,” he said, “just love them.”

“‘For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,’” I quoted for him.

“Yes. That’s exactly right. On one level, love is just love. But on another level . . . I think love’s like something you have to practice. The more you practice, the better you get.” Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he added, “It helps to look into their eyes.”

It took a moment for it to sink in. “It helps to look into their eyes!” I said. “What did you just say, Cohen? Did I just hear you admit that you feel desire?”

“You guys talk about me as though I’m not human.”

He’d sounded genuinely pained, and I thought, oh, Christ, now I’ve hurt his feelings, but he was saying, “Come on, John, I’m just as human as you are . . . Of course you have to overlook the odd greenish iridescence that reflects back from my skin in certain lights and the pale white nictitating membrane that appears over my eyes when I get overly tired, but other than that . . .”

“Cohen. Shut up. What do you mean, it helps to look in their eyes?”

“To stop attachment . . . You never stop it completely . . . because we are human. But you look into a girl’s eyes and remind yourself that she’s a coming Buddha.”

“You’ve really done that?”

“Yes.”

“And it works?”

He smiled. “Sometimes.”

Looking at him now, I saw how his own face was beginning to show precisely that quality that had moved him to clip a girl’s picture and put it on his wall—not merely beauty but something more elusive, something remote, mysterious, and self-contained.

“Have I told you about Musashi?” he said, pointing at the painting he’d sent me: the monk leaning on his staff, watching the cocks fight.

“Yeah, you wrote me a long letter.”

“What did I say?”

“You said it was painted in something-or-other style . . . that’s very demanding. You have to be really fast. You can’t make a single mistake.”

“That’s right. Sumi.”

“You said the painter, Miyamoto Musashi, was Japan’s greatest swordsman, and he died in bed. The caption on the painting says, ‘There is no slayer, and there is no slain.’”

“Sounds like I wrote you a pretty good letter . . . But did I tell you what he said? When someone asked him how to be a good swordsman?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He said, ‘Arouse the mind without fixing it anywhere.’ OK? And I’ve been thinking about that a lot. If you fix the mind somewhere, that’s attachment, and attachment slows you down.”

He must have seen that I wasn’t getting it. “Look,” he said, and all of his playfulness had dropped away. “If you’re standing there thinking, oh, my God, I could be killed any second, then you’re attached. If you’re thinking about anything other than the motion of the blade, then you’re attached . . . You must know what I’m talking about. Playing the guitar must be like that.”

I was getting it finally. “Oh, right. The times when the music plays itself because you don’t get in the way.”

“Yes, yes, yes. That’s it exactly.”

There were moments, such as this one, when I expected everything to be revealed. “So what is this thing with girls?” I said. “What the hell were you talking about?”

“As long as you’re attached to any outcome, you won’t see the human being in front of you. You’ll only see your own mind stuff. Attachment makes us stupid, clumsy, and slow. So if you can look into a girl’s eyes and see her . . . as equally empty, equally awake, equally a coming Buddha . . .”

“God, that’s impossible.”

“No, it’s not. Hard, but not impossible.”

“And if you’re not attached . . .”

“You’re fast. You’re unbelievably fast. You’re the absolute master of now.”