Eight

This is what happened to me on Friday, the thirteenth of July: the day most people remember as the day the leaders of the great nations first exchanged threats of holocaust.

For me, it was, to begin with, the day Elizabeth and Lansky were married in a brief ceremony at eight a.m. at the U.N. chapel with both a minister and a rabbi presiding. Buck and Allie were there, looking, respectively, ovoid and shapeless, but smiling nonetheless and saying, “Yep, our little girl,” a lot. Lansky’s parents were there, too. They sat in the back pew because they didn’t want to be any trouble. She was a very big woman who sat erect with her hands folded in her lap, trying to look like everything on earth was going exactly the way she had planned and arranged it, though it seemed to these hyper-sensitive eyes that she was unhappy about the whole thing: angry and afraid. Lansky’s father, a series of sagging eggs placed one on top of another, wore a black suit, a wrinkled nose and a strained smile: he looked, throughout, as if he had just bent over to smell a rose and found a piece of shit in the middle of it.

Arthur was on don’t-worry-Lansky detail, and I was saying fine-perfect-it’s-beautiful-Elizabeth over and over and over again. She really was beautiful, too, in a knee-length, pink linen dress, and a lace posy in her hair. She was smiling so much that, at first, I thought she was just pretending to be happy. But she really was happy—she was just pretending not to be scared.

No one gave them away or anything, and there was no best man or maid of honor per se. Arthur and I were the witnesses and stood behind and to one side of the couple while they were joined by the two clergymen Lansk called “the reb and preacher show.” Lansky shook with terror and Elizabeth was as radiant as the sun and the only reportable highlight was when the rabbi asked Lansky if he planned to love and respect Elizabeth through sickness, health, wealth, poverty and the rest till death did they part and he said, “Do …? You’re asking me? Yes. Absolutely. That’s right.”

“I do, Lansky,” Elizabeth whispered.

“So do I,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Which apparently satisfied heaven and the state of New York and they were hitched. See Buck and Allie’s snapshots for details.

Then, Arthur had to run to a bunch of meetings, and Buck and Allie went out to have a gander at the big city, and Mr. and Mrs. Lansky (the elder) went out to have breakfast which, Mrs. Lansky gave us to know, should have been provided for, and Reb and Preacher, I guess, headed to Atlantic City to play the dinner shows.

I walked outside with the new Mr. and Mrs. L., and we waited on the sidewalk in the morning sun for their cab to arrive. They were bound for the airport and thence Switzerland, which had triumphed over Lansky’s Australia where he thought the fallout would come last.

Lansky (Mr.) glanced at his watch. They only had five hours to make the airport, which is twenty minutes away. Elizabeth had traded breakfast for Australia.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m going to miss you guys.”

“You won’t have to if that cab doesn’t show,” said Mr.

“Don’t worry, darling,” said Mrs.

My eyes filled with tears. “I better go,” I said.

Lansky came over and took me by the shoulders. “Listen,” he said, “if we don’t all meet again …”

“Sweetheart!” said Elizabeth.

“Well,” said Lansky, “things are like that.” And they were. “I just want you to know, Sam, that you’re the closest potential cloud of radioactive vapor we have, and if you survive to write my biography, remember—I was the one who said we should have gone to Australia.”

I threw my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “Go safely, Lansky, and come back soon,” I said.

“Vaya con dios, Cutes,” he said, and I released him and he turned away from me before his own tears could overflow and he walked to the corner to watch for the cab, and to leave Elizabeth and me alone.

Elizabeth took my hand and smiled.

“All well?” she asked.

“All well.”

“We have a date for dinner and married-lady gossip in two weeks, right?”

“Two weeks,” I said.

“So stop crying.”

“Right. You, too.”

“Right.”

“You saved my life,” I said.

And she gave me a classic Lansky shrug. “It was a slow day.”

The cab arrived and Lansky Mr. hailed it with all kinds of fantastic gestures while simultaneously running back for the luggage and screaming for Lansky Mrs. to hurry up.

“Well,” I said to her, “if this is the age of anxiety, I think you just married into royalty.”

I threw myself into her arms and we embraced for a second of dying clarity.

“Oh God,” I said, “can you bear how much I need you?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth.

I let her go. The Lanskys got in their cab, and while Mr. checked to see if his traveller’s cheques were still in his shoe, Mrs. leaned out the window and waved to me.

“Send us a postcard from Nirvana, Sam,” she called, and the taxi pulled away into the traffic, and then turned the corner and was out of sight.

So now, I am all alone. It is about eleven in the morning, I am too depressed to work, and Arthur will not even be in his office till after lunch so I can’t call him to chat, and there’s no earthly chance I’m going to start reading the newspaper, so I decide to walk up to the fifties and over to Third and see if there is an early movie showing.

I am in luck. By the time I get up there, the first showing of “The Twelve of Us,” starring Tom Safire, one of my favorites, is about to begin. The Friday noon movie in New York is what I call the poet’s screening, as the audience generally consists of five lean, bearded young men and two scrawny blonde women with close-cropped hair, all of them telling themselves, as the lights fade, that indolence is part of the art form, while three executives who are supposed to be at working lunches sidle to their seats in the deepening dark. At any rate, there’s no line for tickets, and I walk up to the booth and the woman says, “How many?” though I’m standing there by myself, and I hear myself say to her:

“The great beast dies.”

And as the woman stares at me as if I had said nothing—because I have not said “one” or “two” or “when’s the next showing?” the only sounds of which her cockleshell ears can make sense, I think: Oh shit, a poem.

This is the last thing I want. That is, what I want is to go to the movies. I assure myself that it is merely the tip of the thing surfacing and that it will be days, maybe weeks, before the rest clears—and, for some not very subtle reasons, I think of the fact that my mother damn near gave birth to me in the cab because she refused to believe she was really in labor and, determined, I say:

“One, please,” and reach for my purse as the ticket sticks out of the slot like a clown’s tongue, and I think: The great beast dies, and vestal whores …

“Thank you,” I say, taking the ticket—their breasts are bared and they are reaching upward, I can see them.

“Wanna pay?” says the woman in the glass cage.

I am flustered. “Oh, of course,” I say, and put the ticket back on the counter as a sign of honesty and good will and return my attention to my purse and snap it open and think: The great beast dies and vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted to the holocaust skies, raise up their arms …

It is coming, as my mother herself might have said, too fast, and I already begin to fear that my mind will not be able to reach the end, tethered, by the fear of forgetting, to the beginning, and I give the ticket lady a smile and say, “Shit. Excuse me,” and turn to walk briskly out onto the sidewalk.

The great beast diesov,

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies

Extend their arms …

And that’s it. With the pressure of decision off me, the thing stops cold. I know if I can jot these lines down, it will either continue or announce itself finished for now—but am I carrying a pen? You jest, my Lord. Can I buy a pen in the middle of Manhattan? Not unless I can find a blind man fast. There is, however, a tobacco nook on this block and dangling from the cash register on a tired string is the pencil for marking lottery tickets and a man—father of five, beats his wife, is frittering away the rent—is painstakingly carving the number of pages in Rousseau’s Confessions next to the number of movements in Haffner’s Serenade or whatever when I mutter my apologies and snatch it from him for a moment in order to scrawl what I’ve got on the little piece of cardboard in my Kleenex pack.

I get as far as “The great beast dies,” when the gambler finally manages to blink and say “Hey!” at the same moment—but that’s okay, writing this down is enough to let me know: it’s coming, all of it, and I’ve got to get home.

I hail a cab and collapse into the back with a sigh of relief: cabbies always carry pencils to keep their trip sheets with, and I am safe till we get home. Again, with the pressure lifted, the first lines of the poem just sort of float there on the surface of my mind like the first risen timber of a sunken ship. We sputter through the thick lunch hour traffic until we get to Park and then we breeze uptown.

I have been holding back, but as we turn onto 81st Street, I let myself go and am paying the man as I get—always going back to the beginning to make sure I haven’t left anything behind:

The great beast dies

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies,

Extend their arms

For the fragments of his body’s empire,

Falling and falling.

I am in the tortured throes of the realization that I am going to have to move the period back to empire and use falling and falling as the transition into my next thought or be caught in the prologue forever, when I step out of the cab and look up to see three—count ’em—three police cars with flashers swirling, crowded together in the space before the awning of my building. My muse—no fragile darling and generally startled into speech—is startled into silence as I run forward to investigate.

I have always, in these instances, an immediate assumption that whatever is happening has something to do with me which usually vanishes as common sense prevails. Common sense is prevailing when the doorman turns and sees me and shouts to the army of cops at die elevator, “Here she is.”

I am surrounded by our men in blue and am between beginning to fear that Arthur is dead and becoming absolutely positive that Arthur is dead when one of them says,

“Are you Samantha Clementine?”

I’m positive. “Yes,” I plead.

“Do you know a man who calls himself God?”

My mind snaps clear: The great beast falls … “Yes.”

“Would you come with us please?”

“Of course,” I say firmly: Falling and falling until this eye, this shattered eye …

I am in the back of the patrol car and off we zip, sirens blaring. I have never been in a police car before, let alone with sirens. It is fun.

“What’s happened?” I call to the two men in front: dark-haired, heavy-bearded veterans both. This shattered eye has sprinkled on the grass.

The cop in the passenger seat calls back to me: “This guy God walked into a daycare center an hour ago with a high-powered rifle and started screaming. He’s got two teachers and nineteen two and three-year-old kids in there, and he says he’s gonna kill ’em if he doesn’t talk to you.”

The cop driving shouts back: “He says he’s gonna kill ’em after he talks to you, too.”

I think: Has sprinkled on the grass, yet nothing is in fragments that we knew … I think: Oh, shut up.

“You got my name through Lifeline?”

“Yeah,” says passenger cop. Traffic is stopping for us and we are speeding across the 59th Street Bridge toward Queens with a cop car before us and one in back for escort. It is quite thrilling. “Hey,” he says, “you’re not Andy Clementine’s wife, are you, in the D.A.’s office?”

“Yes,” I shout. “Arthur.”

“Yeah, right, Arthur,” he says, and smirks at his partner who smirks back.

In my hyper-attuned state, I somehow understand this joke at once—with the same sense of excitement and clarity I felt when halfway through The Ambassadors I realized that Lambert Strether was so named because he was a proxy Christ and the two Mary’s and his selfless mission and everything all fell into place and, anyway, the point is that if Arthur is Andy, Jones is Amos, and this is New York’s finest’s revenge for their work in indicting their grandma-killing confrère. When the thrill of revelation dies—fast—gloom descends: I am in hostile territory, among dangerous men. Arthur is traveling from meeting to meeting. Elizabeth is waiting in the airport for the three o’clock flight to Geneva. I am alone.

Belligerently, I jut my chin and think:

The great beast dies,

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies,

Extend their arms

For the fragments of his body’s empire,

And ceremonies will begin at noon

To obscure the faded thrill

Of his falling and falling.

This eye, this shattered eye,

Has sprinkled on the grass,

Yet nothing is in fragments that we knew,

And where his phallus fell,

There grows a naked tree,

And you and I, we scrambled to the top like monkeys …

We are in Queens: I do not know where we are. All Queens is divided into one part to me: two-family brick houses with little yards and laundry fluttering on the lines between one woman’s daydreams and another’s despair. But then, we are on a Main Street, a long business district. I am struck for some reason by a store that sells Indian saris and home appliances. And then, we turn a corner, and there are four million police cars, and policemen and women in uniforms and plainclothes crouching behind the cars, and many of them are pointing rifles at a little white two-storied barracks across the street that has a large picture window on the second story, and a door on the first with a rainbow painted on the sign above it and the words, “Rainbow Daycare Center” in different colored letters.

Everything happens very fast. I get out of the car and am whisked in a squadron of policemen toward a small grocery store across the street from the center that is apparently being used as command central. I see the faces of women—the mothers—drawn and sorrowful, skim past me. Then I have only time to feel the heaviness of fear sink down on top of me as I pass close by all those guns: pistols and rifles. There is something very substantial—untheoretical—weighty—and fatal—about a gun.

I am in the grocery store—swept through the door—and a man is introducing himself as Captain Cerone. He is short for a man, about two inches taller than me: a substantial piece of black suit with close-cropped hair and worried eyes, and the scratchy jaw that seems to be a requirement for joining the force. Something, come to think of it, about all these men—men everywhere—big, burly men—with guns no less—is beginning to make me feel very beardless.

I brace myself by checking on my poem: it is still there. The captain has me by the elbow and is guiding me with a sort of weary chivalry past the tomatoes and the dairy freezer to the deli counter behind which is the phone. He is giving me instructions but at this point I am in a daze—depressed, frightened, girlishly inadequate, frightened, teary, frightened, frightened—and can’t make sense of them. Cerone is reassuring me and I hate him for it, but then he calls me Mrs. Clementine and I feel reassured. I try to think if I have heard any of his instructions: I remember I am not supposed to promise God anything and to keep him calm, but that sounds like the Old Testament to me. Then—too quickly, far too quickly—someone is putting the telephone receiver—and the lives of nineteen babies—into my hand.

I hold the phone to my ear. Someone guides me to a stool and I sit down behind the butcher’s block. There are yellow legal-size papers scattered before me and a few pens. I eye the pens hungrily and lick my lips.

“Hello?” I say.

There is a long silence. I see men’s faces intent all around me—bodiless, floating, judging. Then: “Sam?”

I feel myself relax at once. There is only the phone—the darkness of the phone and voices—there is only me and God. I am on familiar ground.

“God,” I say, trying to take on my usual tone of control, “Sweetie, what are you doing?”

“Well,” he says, “what I thought is I figured I’m going to first kill all these kids and these two teachers and then myself.”

I fight off the urge to scream something sensible like “What?” and say: “Okay. Why are you going to do that?”

“It’s just time,” he says—and there is an authority, a self-assurance in his voice that I have never heard before. That and the fact that I do not hear any children crying in the background turn my heart into an anvil. “It’s just time to stop all this nonsense,” he says, “and do the job. She shouldn’t have hurt me and the missiles and I’m going to stop it and bring it back.”

Paralyzed, I’m brilliant. “You sound very upset,” I say.

“No. The world’s a daisy. Don’t pull that Lifeline shit on me, Sam.”

I do not apologize. We are battling for control of the situation, he and I, and I care about God, and if he wins, he loses.

“All right,” I say, “then why do you want to talk to me?”

“Well, if you don’t want to, hang up.”

We both wait a bit, and then I say firmly: “Why do you want to talk to me?”

And another beat, more dangerous. If he answers my question, he cedes a little authority to me. I half expect to hear the shots go off. I sit there like a statue.

“I wanted to say goodbye,” he says.

“I think maybe you want me to forgive you,” I answer.

“I don’t want to die alone, Samantha.”

“I don’t want you to die at all.”

He yells—but it is a yell of anguish, which I take to be a good sign. He yells: “I can’t! I can’t! I have to! I have to!”

I don’t know what this means—perhaps, in the stress of the situation, I have forgotten—and in the absence of an answer, I think: Brimstone vapors pluming from the gaping lips and curling through the canyons of the ear that lies there on its side …

“Sam?” he says softly.

Reflexively, I reach for a pen and begin to snap its point in and out with my thumb.

“Yes,” I say.

“I think I have to go now,” he says.

“I think the first thing we have to do,” I say quickly, “is get those kids out of there.”

He is silent.

“Okay?” I say. “They have nothing to do with this, God.”

“Oh, Sam.” His voice breaks. “I’m sorry. Forgive me, okay?”

“I’m your friend, God.”

“You’re my only friend.”

“We have to get those children out of there before they get hurt.”

He yells again, crying now: “That’s all you care about. What is that, the fucking maternal instinct?”

“Well—” I say steadily, “do you think it’s right to kill children?”

And I realize by the swiftness of his answer, by its tone of rehearsal, that this is what he’s been waiting for, this is the crux of his self-justification. “It is when God does it,” he says.

My own stupidity, and the petty pleasure he gets out of catching me up, makes me mad. “Damn it,” I say, “I’m not so thrilled when He does it, and you’re not God.”

Cerone’s eyes expand to the size of Frisbees and he gestures at me with both hands to calm down. To hell with Cerone.

But he’s right. I have blown it. The situation falls apart in my hands like a mouldy rose. God starts ranting: “The rage of Marcodel released … The triumph of Death … Now is the moment …”

And, panicked, I am fighting to stop thinking: … the canyons of the ear that lies there on its side, have poisoned several of the parks, and yet the hideous thunders …

God has worked himself up to a fever pitch. Cerone’s eyes are pleading with me. All around the grocery, men’s eyes are turning to the picture window across the street, waiting, waiting …

“God,” I shout, “stop this right now!”

He stops. The entire room is a held breath. We are all now waiting, our eyes on nothing, our ears pricking, waiting for the shots.

I take a big swallow. “Look,” I say, “it’s time to come out. Come out to me.”

I hear God crying, fighting for air. “Why should I?”

“Because I’m your friend …”

“Oh yeah.”

“And I love you. I’m your friend and I love you,” and I am and I do, “that’s why.”

Grimly, finally, he answers: “I don’t know you, Samantha.”

“That’s not true, God. That’s not true and you know it isn’t.”

“I don’t even know what you look like.”

“Come out, then, and see.”

“I don’t even know what you look like.”

“You know what I am like.”

He screams, raging, crying: “I don’t even know what you look like!”

I am about to describe myself when I am suddenly as sure as if it were the written thing that if I do, the massacre will begin.

Instead, I say, “If I show you, will you come out?”

And, like a sulky child, he answers: “Show me.”

“Hold on,” I say.

I put the phone on hold and set it down.

“What?” says Cerone.

I am staring at the paper on the butcher block, clicking the pen in and out in my hand. Should I write down what I have beforehand, just in case? Does it matter? When I have fears that I might cease to be …

Somebody calls quietly from further down the deli counter: “He wants her to go out there,” and I realize, with a sense of violation, that someone else has been listening to the call.

“I have to show him my face,” I tell Cerone.

“No,” says Cerone.

“There is no no.”

“There is no, and it’s my no and it’s no,” says Cerone. “Talk to him some more.”

I look up from the paper. “I can’t reach him. He’s gone beyond me. I have to show him my face.”

“No,” says Cerone.

“He’s about to start,” I tell him. “I know him. He’s about to start. Methodically. Calmly. He’s not even upset anymore. I could talk to him when he was upset. He’s calm now—I calmed him down. Now, he’s going to kill them.”

Cerone turns to another plainclothesman. “Get them ready to go in.”

I stand up.

“No,” says Cerone.

“I won’t talk to him anymore.”

I look in his eyes. Damp, worried eyes. He is, I realize, a nice man. Somewhere behind the deli counter, I hear another man murmuring, talking to God, telling him to hold on, to wait for me. Cerone considers, shakes his head: “We’ll talk to him.” Then, apologetically: “Listen, Mrs. Clementine, you’re the A.D.A.’s wife, you know?”

“Yes,” I say, “I know. Believe me, I know whose wife I am. And if I don’t show God my face, he’s going to start—he’s going to start any second.”

We are studying each other—looking into each other’s eyes—trying to find out everything about each other in the space of a second. But I am certain of only one thing: I have nothing more to say to God.

Then someone calls: “Captain, I think she’s right. He’s getting ready to blow.”

Cerone takes a deep breath. Quietly, he says: “Okay. Tell him she’s coming.”

And it happens in a moment. Cerone has me by the elbow, he is marching me outside—mothers’ faces, cars, cops’ faces, guns—all are rushing past me.

“Step out in front of the blue car,” Cerone is telling me. “I’m going to count to one and grab you.”

I feel he is propelling me out there—as if I had not demanded it—against my will. Don’t make me go, I am thinking. We are passing one car after another, and then there is the blue car coming closer and closer and beyond it the open street before the daycare center. We are there.

“I love Arthur,” I say.

“I’ll tell him,” says Cerone.

And then I step out in front of the blue car, and I am standing about twenty yards from the center and the blank-faced picture window, and I am—I feel I am—I am sure I am—eyeball to eyeball with Marcodel.

Later, the reporters will ask me what I was thinking when I stood out there. When I stood out there for that one long moment, when finally, finally, my imagination grasped what I am, what this is, this Samantha, this temporary machine, this eternal consciousness a trigger-pull away from nothing. When, finally, I knew, if he shoots me, I’ll die; if a bullet the size of my thumb tears into me, I will be sod and pavement. No clarity of soul appeared in that moment to manifest its divergence from even the curling of my pubic hair; no billion cells called out their independent lives; no time proclaimed itself an illusion. Only this one moment of Samantha arose with its possibilities for every good thing. That was all. They will ask me what I was thinking, and they will already have asked me the name of my book of poems, and there will be TV cameras and everyone will be waiting to write down what I say, and the simple fact is: I will succumb. I will tell them I was thinking: I’ve got to do this for those kids.

I am thinking: Here I am please don’t kill me God here is my face don’t kill me please God here I am don’t kill me don’t kill me God here’s my face don’t kill me …

And then Cerone grabs me and pulls me back behind the car.

I am, I guess, in shock. I am in a daze and my eyes feel as if they have been propped open with crowbars as Cerone marches me back past the startled gazes of the policemen crouching everywhere.

Within seconds, the bright summer sun is extinguished—we are in the grocery again—and I am standing in front of the phone. I stare wildly at the phone. I stare wildly at Cerone. Cerone’s face and his collar are drenched with sweat.

“Lady,” he says, “you’ve got balls.”

“Let’s not discuss it,” I say and pick up the phone.

I start to speak and then I glance down and see the pen is still in my hand. And suddenly it all breaks loose, breaks loose in its completeness, irresistible.

The phone to my ear, without saying a word, I begin scribbling on the legal pad as fast as I can.

“Captain,” someone calls, “He’s not saying anything.”

“What the hell are you writing?” Cerone asks me.

Helpless, I laugh.

Someone shouts: “Captain!”

Everyone—me included—glances up at the front of the store. Across the street, we see two women peeking cautiously out of the day care center. Then, they step onto the sidewalk and all at once, they are followed by a swarm of toddlers in bright summer clothes. Chubby little boys and girls with inquisitive faces are everywhere and their legs are rising and falling clop-clop in a drunken march as they waddle into the sunlight. I hear the cries of women nearby, and men’s shouts of thanksgiving. Then, policemen are rushing forward to drag the babies out of the line of fire. I am glad.

I continue writing:

The great beast falls

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies

Extend their arms to catch

The fragments of his body’s empire.

Ceremonies will begin at noon

To obscure the faded thrill

Of his falling and falling,

But still, we see:

This eye, this shattered eye

Has sprinkled on the grass,

Yet nothing is in fragments that we knew,

And where his phallus fell

There grows a naked tree—

How we scrambled to the top like monkeys!

Brimstone vapors pluming from the gaping lips

And curling through the canyons of the ear

That lies there on its side

Have poisoned several of the parks,

And yet the phlegmatic thunders

Of the legs falling and the arms falling

And the trunk severed at last by the vaginal incisors

Falling and falling

Did not make of our lake a fire:

We still are diving there as we did once,

Naked and white and clean of hair,

Nor have we forgotten the old men’s stories

Of the child who drowned in the sludge at the bottom,

Nor have we ceased our seeking him,

Skimming over the bass-woven underweeds

As we watch ourselves from the tops of the branches,

Hearing the splashing and the laughter and the cries

Carried from where we play to where we play

On the bare bosom of the old spring breezes.

It does not seem very long, and I cannot tell yet whether or not it is good. All of them seem good at first, but most of them end up buried in the drawer. At any rate, I am free of it. I am done scribbling by the time God comes out—a tall, fat man in a gray sweatshirt stained with grease. A long face with the jaw hanging open stupidly as the cops frisk and handcuff him. Sad, idiotic eyes searching for me over the top of a car, before they push him face down onto the hood.

They would not let me talk with God before they processed him, except to assure him I’d be with him later, which I did. He nodded dumbly, dazed. I don’t think he knew who I was.

After the press and a lot of thankful parents blessing me, the cops drive me back to Manhattan, and I ask them to drop me off at the Plaza so I can walk home. They tell me they have been trying to reach Arthur and have finally caught up with him in Brooklyn somewhere and he is on his way which I am glad of because I figure I have a solid two hours of hysterical tears coming to me.

I walk under the canopy of trees beside Central Park, giving my purse a Lanskyesque check every now and again to make sure my poem is still in it. I have just reached the museum when I see a cab pull up in front of our apartment building and Arthur gets out. I cannot make out his face where I am, but I can tell from his gestures that he is harried and frazzled—he is worried about me. I cup my hands to my mouth and give him a rebel yell.

Arthur turns, sees me—and runs out in front of a downtown bus, three crazed cab drivers and a stretch limo. They miss him: this is my lucky day. I am running as fast as I can past the museum toward him, already gearing up for my well-earned tears.

Then Arthur is on my side of the street and he is running toward me calling my name and I am running toward him, past the fountain, with my arms out and then—

Then—when we are about fifteen steps away from one another, a drop of water from the fountain flies twirling into the air between us, and I see it as it catches the sun, and I feel my body wash into it and I feel Arthur’s body wash into it, too, and for a second, for a second in that drop of water spinning and flashing in the sun, there is nothing at all but the solid flow of my body into his and his into mine and ours into the body of everything, the solid, flowing, fleshly mass of everything forever. Just for a second, not even a second, except that there is no time, no time or space, just matter, matter forever, matter in love with itself, matter in love with itself eternally, and even when it is over, even though it is over in the very instant of infinity in which it began, I embrace my husband, finally, not in tears, but with a surge of crystal, pristine, perfect faith, thinking:

Come to me, come to me, Arthur. Come to me, all of you—all my darlings. I am Samantha Clementine, and it is going to be all right.

Trust me.

Trust me.