THE DIVING BELL

JEFFERSON EADS HAS been busy, viewing and cataloging the rough cuts of his film over and over. The quantification, the inventory of every external item in his world, soothes him; from order comes control, and he is no longer uneasy.

He's not always uneasy. At many points in the day he knows a great peace, sometimes earned through his work and other times descending on him like the weather, not generated through his own efforts but bestowed from afar, and unrequested, like grace.

Other times, however, it's as if a switch flips, and his agitation comes not from all the external factors he seeks to know and control, but from within. There is a disynchrony between him and the world, one that can only be calmed by numbers and their smooth, intricate, dependable precision: the way they always interlock and balance, no matter how challenging the enumeration may seem, or how difficult the equation. An equity can always be obtained, and once it is, no further changes can occur: the problem is balanced, and in that balance, the problem is controlled.

Whenever he is focused on one problem, he stays with it until it is solved, working through his agitation and unknown fear until the end; and when the problem is solved, he knows a deeper and more satisfying peace, one that cannot be gotten any other way than through his committed labor, and the feeling of control and relief is as sweet and powerful as it is brief.

Some of the other children in his school pity him his isolation and eccentricity, which seem to them to be willful, a rejection of the homogeneity toward which the others aspire and labor, and that therefore he is deserving of their ridicule and abuse—though there are not as many of these kinds of children as might be imagined.

Some, as the world begins to open before them, are beginning to realize they're a little afraid of him; not that he would alarm them, but simply afraid of what they're just beginning to understand might be an almost limitless depth, a bottomless difference—that already he knows and does things that they will never be able to. As if in his genius he has purposely chosen to distance himself from them, choosing his mind over their companionship.

He doesn't have any friends. This is not unprecedented in the other children's experience, but what is unique is that he doesn't seem to want one. He's not just pretending; he is happier when he is alone, reading up on whatever his next subject of inquiry might happen to be. Rockets, paleontology, military history, it doesn't matter; every few months, he sets up an encampment in a new land, usually one of the hard sciences, and then inhabits that territory with the commitment of a new lover.

He is happier when he is alone, or if not alone, safely distant from all others. The people he tolerates best are the ones who don't try to get too close to him. Often these are individuals who are either focused on themselves or do not want him around. It's complicated and entirely neurological, and he understands that he is different, and understands why, and accepts himself the way he is, and is grateful to have his intellect.

Later in his school career—and soon—his classmates will get over both their teasing and their fear and will accept him as he has accepted himself, and will come to take a huge pride in him, and will come in some ways to think of him as their captain. But not quite yet. Right now, they are mostly afraid, and he knows this, though it does not touch him, exists instead only at the perimeters of his consciousness. He perceives and understands that other people are concerned with what people think of them, but that simply isn't his world.

What it feels like to him sometimes is that he is in the service of another master, one whom he cannot see and about whom he knows precious little yet seeks to approach. Some master who lies far below, and whom—if only enough knowledge can be gained—can one day finally be met, and the master's power and essence more fully ascertained. It was a surprisingly long time before his parents realized more fully the nature of his gifts: his hunger for the facts, his insistence on being precise. For a long time they considered their love for him as being only their own special perspective, distanced from the world's; it was not until he was four or five that they began to understand that the indulgence of their perceptions was actually accurate, and that if anything, they had underestimated things. His recollections of all events and utterances was profound, as was his capacity to connect facts and in that manner proceed further into the depths of knowledge.

They would not have classified him as a loving child, but again, the indulgence of their own love for him made that disparity insignificant; they protected him with it, sent him out into the world with it, and though they knew the odds were long that he would change the world, they knew without a doubt that the world would not change him whatsoever, and that in that obstinate fixity, there was rarity and beauty, as there was in their own acceptance of that fact.

His mother, Louise, had been a schoolteacher for a few years before retiring; his father, Brad, managed a construction company. He, Jefferson, could have come from anywhere: he was as sudden and remarkable as their own lives had been unremarkable.

He and his mother had been shopping at the Piggly Wiggly when he had seen Maxine's note. He had been standing off by himself while she pushed her cart up the aisles. There had been nothing about the note that would have given any clue as to its provenance with greatness—no syntax or diction, or even, really, any boldness—but he had gone straight to it, had been standing there in his own reverie, looking up at the bulletin board while his mother shopped. Out of boredom, he had been mentally arranging and cataloging all the various hand-lettered postings, inventorying them by subject and their chronology, but no matter how he looked at the board, to him there had been no question. The small blue note might as well have been illuminated: somehow, he recognized it for what it was and was drawn straight toward it, with the same assurance and certainty with which he addressed all of his decisions.

The bonds of his affinity for such shared isolation, and such gift or talent, were as invisible as those of any other affinity—the call to shared companionship between two lifelong friends or the unseen but irrefutable bonds between hydrogen and oxygen, or mother and daughter, father and daughter—and he stood there for a long time beneath the note, comforted simply by being in its presence.

To have been so unremarkable in their accomplishments—and so lacking in notoriety of any sort—his parents were remarkable in other ways. They had learned to support wholeheartedly his ventures, whatever they turned out to be. They had learned to trust him and his place in the world.

Jefferson Eads returns five days later, with a clipboard, a storyboard, in hand. He informs her that her task that day is to go back to the grocery store—films her palsied efforts, successful at least one more time, to get the car backed out of the garage and onto the sunlit street, and then, like a great schooner setting out on the most intrepid of journeys, off into the heart of traffic. With some humor, amazement, fear, and grim satisfaction, he films the near misses, and the faces of the other motorists.

Everything he's filming is from the now, which makes Maxine uneasy; she wants to tell about the glory days. Even though it's a documentary, she wants young people to dress up and reenact the good years, though simplifying the journey—omitting the depression and alcoholism, which she has not told him about. "Couldn't you do a regular movie, too?" she asks. "Don't you know some young people you could cast as us?"

Jefferson shakes his head. "No," he says, "actually, I don't have many associates. It's just you and me. I do have some ideas, though."

She listens carefully, thrilled by his attention. All she had to do was wait; her every wish has always been delivered to her.

Totally unselfconscious, Jefferson Eads films her shopping: the slow hitch of the walker, her clumsiness with the frozen foods. The cold brick of a chicken slips from her grasp and skitters across the linoleum like a hockey puck rapped sharply across the ice. The rock-hard bird slides into a stacked display of soup cans, crumples the pyramid with the efficiency of a bowling ball striking tenpins, and the expression on Maxine's face when she looks back to see if the camera is rolling is one of guilt tinged with confusion.

How is this a movie about greatness? she wonders, and wants to quit—not just the movie, but everything.

To his credit, Jefferson Eads puts his camera down after the chaos has come to a rest, and he picks the chicken up and puts it in Maxine's cart, then begins restacking the soup cans. He holds one up and asks if she wants one.

What passes for trivia or minutiae in the lives of others—bonds so hair thin as to be irrelevant, utterly insignificant—are sometimes as strong as a bond gets, for him: as if too much electricity flows through him along some circuits and almost none at all—just a sporadic trickle—in others. For him, this is one of his bonding moments, or as close as he gets to such things: helping an old lady.

It's new territory for him; it was not his instinctive reaction. It was almost as if he had to analyze the situation, watch himself watching her, and then direct himself to offer assistance, in the manner that he would direct a character in one of his short films to block into a certain position.

He did it, though, and now he feels the faintest shimmering of electricity along those unused pathways. For him, the trickle might as well be a roar, and the two previously separate and unrelated elements are merged, the pleasure of reassembling the disorganized soup cans and his relationship with Maxine: the kindness in his heart finding some outlet. He's grateful to her for giving him that opportunity. Sometimes his coldness is a little like being in a jail.

On the way out, he stops and films her bulletin board note, which is still posted, and now it's her turn to bond a little further with him, and to give him what is her own rarest thing, trust.

"Do you want to take it down," Jefferson asks, "now that you've got a movie being made?"

Maxine hesitates, playing the odds, and with some effort, decides it's better to have his full enthusiasm than to wish for another. "Yes, you can take it down."

And again Jefferson Eads feels new warmth, electricity flowing through new places in his mind, the river current of it a little wider, and a little wilder. This is what life is like, he thinks. It's enough to make you set down your camera. It's not common, but it's fine enough to go hunting for it, and to wait, again and again, for such pleasure's return.

They make it back to her house unscathed. Maxine uses the opportunity of having Jefferson Eads along with her and stops at the gas station to fill her car. A full tank will last another six months. What will my condition be then? she wonders. She hands Jefferson the money and he pumps the gas.

He's so useful to have around! In a way he's far better than Buddy. She feels a warmth in her old heart that is not unlike how it was when she was drinking, but this is better. It's similar, in that it makes her want more, but it's better, in that a little is better than nothing. Which is not how it was with the bottle.

They go back into her treasure chest room and he films her unearthing more memorabilia, explaining to the camera the significance of each ancient artifact. A poster from a show with Elvis, signed by the King. A locket given to her by Johnny Cash. Jefferson Eads burns through another memory card, and at the bottom of the chest, she pulls out a nondescript cassette in a generic plastic case. The small rectangle is hand-lettered in red marker, "John Lennon—The Three Bells," and is dated December 8, 1980.

"His widow sent it to me," Maxine says. "It was the last thing he recorded. He was playing around in the studio, did this, then walked outside and got shot."

Jefferson Eads watches her face as she speaks. He's filming, is holding the camera under one arm as if it's a football, and he watches her face for a clue as to what he should be feeling.

He knows that John Lennon was a big deal, was one of the Beatles, and he senses dimly that this is a very sad event, but that part of his brain just isn't firing, isn't blossoming with the illumination, the gold light of sorrow. Still, he detects something like regret—something he can't quite identify—in Maxine's countenance, and he decides to take a chance.

"That's sad," he says carefully, and for a moment he thinks he's guessed wrong, because Maxine's expression doesn't change, her reverie remains intact.

"Yes," she says finally, "it is," though Jefferson is confused, because it seems to him she might be referring to something or someone else.

They take the tape into the front room and she plays it for him. There's not much to it—the banter, the quick confident warm-up chords, and then suddenly Lennon's into the song, rocking out, singing about Little Jimmy Brown and a valley in France—and then someone walks into the studio and interrupts him.

We were all interrupted, Maxine thinks. She is the only one who has gone the whole distance, and then beyond.

"Do you want me to dig any more holes?" she asks. She's not joking, is resigned to the gauntlet through which she must pass to regain the center of fame, and would rather get the digging out of the way sooner than later, while she still has a few shreds of energy left.

"No," Jefferson Eads says, "but I do want you to do something tonight. I've been thinking about it a lot and I want to film you walking down the street at night with a lantern," he says. "I'll probably film it from a lot of different angles. I want you to wear something white. I'll film you from a long way away," he says.

"Sure," she says, and she feels almost like she did the time she listened to Jim Ed and Bonnie discuss the breakup, and the phone call to Chet: as if she's outside of herself, listening to herself from that same distance. As if his proposal makes perfect sense.

Jefferson Eads is nothing if not a fast learner; he remembers her discomfort with his earlier prescription of hole digging and tries to explain his latest idea with a little more diplomacy. "Don't you ever want something without knowing why?" he asks. "Sometimes—a lot of times—that's how it is for me with a scene. I just have to see it. I feel like I already have seen it and need to capture it."

"I think I might know a little what that's like," Maxine says. And for a second, she really means it; there's something vaguely familiar about what he's describing, something she feels she stands at the edge of now, where once she was closer to its center.

"I have a sheet," she says. "I don't have a lantern."

"I have an old one I got in a garage sale," he says. "I'll go back home and get it and come over later this afternoon." He looks at her with mild concern, if not actually love or affection. "Do you think you should take a nap?" he asks. "It'll probably be a pretty involved shoot."

"Yes," she says, wondering if he's hypnotizing her, for now that he mentions it, she can barely stay awake, feels that she might slide from her chair and lie down right there on the carpet and sleep for hours. "I think so," she says.

Her chin drops. He is rising and saying "I'll let myself out"; she is dreaming before he reaches the door.

When she awakens it is dusk, though at first she confuses it with dawn, and then, recognizing it as evening, thinks that she has slept a day and a night, has lost her movie. She panics, and not knowing what else to do, calls the operator to ask her what day and date it is, but still that doesn't do any good, for she doesn't know what day and date it had been to begin with. She doesn't have Jefferson Eads's phone number, tries to look it up in the phone book, but can find no Eads. She just has to wait. She's slept so long that even Buddy has come and gone.

Maxine has been sitting by the front window with the curtains parted a few inches, waiting and watching, for an hour, when she sees Jefferson Eads coming down the street pulling a red wagon with all his gear in it and some self-consciousness: as if he knows or believes that he is too old for wagons.

There's still half an hour or so before true dark, but he's been placing his paper sacks with the tea candles in each one in two rows, forming a lane along the sidewalk, and as she watches, he stops and places two more, then two more, and again, working his way toward her.

How far will I have to walk? she wonders, and then with even greater worry, Where is he leading me? Her night vision is worse than even her dimming daylight sight—she's functionally blind at night—and her old heart thunders again, though there is no question of not stepping forward toward whatever thin opportunity might present itself.

She squints, watches his slow progress—his precision—and she dares to hope again, just as she did when she sent off the recording of Jim Ed to The Barnyard Frolic.

Never, not for one moment, has she had the thought that at any point along the path, or any coordinate on the timeline, has she taken a wrong turn or made a single wrong choice. There has never been a choice to make: her every gesture has been inflamed by righteousness and non-negotiability, to the point where she wants to scream, to the point where she is terrified, to the point where she realizes she has become the most imprisoned person in the world.

She rises, leaning on her walker, raps on the glass to get his attention, but her rappings are too feeble; he continues with his labors, head down, adjusting each unlit tea light just so, lost in his vision not of how the world should or could be but of how it is, if even only for a short distance around him: the distance, perhaps, of each throw of radiant light once he lights the candles, and each next step.

Why are these people drawn to Maxine? What do they take from her, what do they need from her? Must she carry their weight for them? Why do they need, much less want, her darkness?

Now Jefferson Eads is working his way up her sidewalk, and she feels overwhelmed with the success of being loved or desired; she feels as she did when she was a bride on her wedding day, back when she thought Tommy was one of the answers.

I have never made a single wrong choice, she thinks. It has all led me to where I need to be: here, now.

Jefferson Eads knocks at the door. He has finished; he is ready to begin. She nearly leaps to her feet and shoves her walker toward the door so quickly that she almost falls down—for a moment she is running behind the walker.

They wait for even fuller darkness, visiting quietly. Then he wraps the sheet around her like a toga or a sari, adjusting it just so.

It's been a long time since she's been touched. Her annual visits to the doctor, when the nurse takes her pulse and blood pressure. The careful, professional ministrations of the physician's assistant as he moves the stethoscope around on her bony chest, as if searching for something he's not even sure is there, or is having trouble finding.

Jefferson Eads wraps and unwraps the sheet with the care of a tailor. He's lost in the work, has no idea of the pleasure, the relief, it's bringing her. Life was amazing once and will be again.

Finally he has it just right, and steps back to be sure. It's dark enough outside now.

"Can you walk without the walker?" he asks.

"Do you need me to?"

He pauses, then says, "One sequence with, and one without." He wants everything. He will weed out almost everything in the editing, but does that make the unused parts waste?

"Start without, then come back and rest, and we'll do it again with the walker." She recognizes his obsession coming on again, the heartlessness of his ambition; he could be talking to a dog, or even an inanimate object. He is looking right at her, but the little tendrils of his connection to her have short-circuited or gone cold.

"If you get too far away and can't make it back, I can put you in the wagon and pull you home that way," he says.

Like a commando or a one-man stage lighting director, he has brought two flashlights, one with green plastic taped over the lens, and the other with red.

"I'll need to shoot from a lot of different angles," he says. "Sometimes I'll be out in the street ahead of you, sometimes behind you. Other times I'll be in the hedges, or in people's yards. Sometimes I'll be right in front of you, or walking right alongside you. When I flash the red light, I'll need you to stop while I relocate, and the green light means go. If I flash the red light several times, it means slow down, and a rapid succession of green blinks means go faster. Okay?"

No, it's not okay, she thinks. I don't understand what you're saying.

"All right," she says.

He's so earnest. Here they are about to set off on a grand adventure, and he's not even smiling. At best he's feeling peace, or settledness. Momentary relief.

Perhaps from that platform of relief joy might come next, but first he must reach that elusive place where he can rest for a moment, and look around.

"I'm going to go light the candles," he says.

She stands at the doorway and watches him light the first pair of luminaria, right at the doorstep, clicking a cigarette lighter, and then the next, and the next: her path, her runway, becoming illuminated before her in that manner, like a fuse being lit, showing her where to go, and again she feels like a young girl—this is how it used to be—and she wishes intensely that Jim Ed and Bonnie were here with her, as well as Floyd and Birdie, Norma, Raymond, Elvis, and all the others who have gone away. If Jim Ed and Bonnie were here, maybe they could even sing, she thinks. She feels like she could. She feels like she wants to.

The lights are distinct, close in, but the farther he goes, the blurrier they become and the more they converge, so that at the outer limits all she can see is one white line curling into the distance, and she is eager to start, does not want to wait for his signal.

What if I cannot see the green light, or the red light? she wonders. What if he is signaling to me right now to begin?

He startles her, coming back up the walk. Of course: she's forgotten about the lantern. It's an old-fashioned liquid fuel Coleman, with ashen mantles; he pumps it up with a piston until it is hissing with pressure, then opens the valve and lights it with a quick pop! and a bowl of light surrounds them.

"Be careful," he says, handing it to her. "Don't burn yourself."

It's heavier than she expected, but she's running on adrenaline. She swings the lantern gamely, like a railroad conductor, and Jefferson Eads smiles. In the night like this, it seems to him somehow that there is not such a gulf between him and the world, and between him and others—here in the night, on a grand cinematic adventure, it feels like he's able maybe to inhabit the full range of steady joy—not yelping, leaping spikes of joy, but a continuous rolling current of it, like that which he imagines most others experience pretty much all the time.

He feels the deep plunge of it, the bracing exhilaration, a feeling something akin to the column of light that precedes an ice cream headache, the icy wedge-shaped dagger of pleasure diving down into the skull just before the spreading arrival of the pain—the light pouring in, the stimulation just before the pain—but then, as it always does, the joy shuts off, as if a cabinet door has been closed to that compartment, or as if a switchplate has been slid closed, and he's back to all business: calm and studious and ordered and controlling.

"Try not to be quite so merry," he instructs her. "If you must swing the lantern at all, do so on a more circumscribed radius. Try to make it seem like you're looking for something," he says. "Like you're lost. Walk slowly. Like you're looking for something you dropped."

"All right," Maxine says. "Like this?"

"Yes," Jefferson Eads says, "that's it." He stares at her and her small surrounding dome of white light like a raptor, a hawk beholding its prey, bewitched by the improbable nearness of success. "Yes," he says, "like that." He flashes the green light and then the red light to make sure they're working. "Go to the end of the candles," he says, "then wait there for me."

He shoulders the camera and dashes off across the lawn to the first location he's already scouted, beneath a young oak tree two houses down. Some distance away, a dog begins barking, and while Jefferson Eads is thrilled with the audio quality—he flashes the green light once, to get Maxine moving—Maxine herself is terrified, and wonders what kind of dog it is, friendly or angry, and if it is unleashed. She wonders if it might attack her as she navigates the row of candles. Wonders if Jefferson Eads would set the camera down to come help her, or keep filming.

She pushes on into the darkness, one pair of candles at a time. She's terrified of falling—the throw of her lanternlight yields an intense view of each next step: she can see the tiny cracks in the sidewalk, can see each paper bag, each little candle, but nothing else—and she peers intently into the darkness where Jefferson has disappeared, watching for his signals. She trusts him as she has rarely if ever trusted anyone, and seeing neither red nor green flash, she imagines that she must be doing fine.

How many candles? Eventually she comes to the end of the lane, and like an old draft horse she stands there, waiting—she wishes she had a chair to sit down in and rest—and when he comes bustling in from out of the darkness she's almost overwhelmed to see him, having started, for some strange reason, to believe he would not be coming.

"That was good," he says, "but can you go a little quicker?"

"Yes," she says. She turns and starts toward home, the lantern banging crookedly once against her leg.

"Be careful," Jefferson Eads says, "don't catch the sheet on fire."

She can see her house ahead of her. It seems a mile away. She misses everyone she has ever known, wishes she had her life to live over again. She feels the need to at least counsel Jefferson Eads something to this effect—to caution about wrong paths, sloth, squander, and numbness, the heartlessness of ambition—but she doesn't know quite how to say it.

The house, her refuge, her last stand, draws nearer. Her legs are jelly; she doesn't know if she can make it. He's still behind her, whispering, "Good job, keep on." More dogs are barking, and a lone toad hops across the sidewalk, stops in front of her, drawn by the hope of the moths that are beginning to flit against the lantern now; and so slow is Maxine's progress that it seems the toad might hop alongside her all the rest of the way, keeping pace and feeding from time to time on whatever residue might be gleaned from the perimeter of her passage. The toad is like something from a fairy tale, she thinks. Was hers a real life masquerading as a fairy tale, or was it the other way around?

When she reaches her house, she calls out to Jefferson Eads to give her a hand up the steps, but he hesitates, then urges her on, tells her she can do it by herself, and that she must. She stops at the bottom step, quivering, too tired even to turn around, and starts to ask again, but knows what the answer will be. Knows that his obsession exceeds her own.

She sets the lantern down carefully, and with that last little bit of relief—her burden momentarily lessened—takes the first step, gripping the wrought-iron handrail, and then the next, and finally, the third. She leans against the door, then goes inside, leaves the door open—Jefferson Eads keeps filming—and then he follows her inside.

There is a mercy in the world. It does not exist everywhere at all times, but is present in places, and moves in tendrils and wisps. Jefferson Eads decides he doesn't want or need the footage of her with the walker—that the images he got were good enough, were more than good enough, and that the walker footage would dilute the stronger footage.

He had originally intended to show diminishment but has changed his mind. He's not sure why, because it happens so rarely; once the electricity of a thought, a desire, a goal, starts flowing through him, lighting up some circuitry but leaving other circuitry dark, he follows it through to the end.

To deviate from that one slender course would create in him the most extreme form of agitation.

And yet: that evening he knows the momentary peace of completion. He's done with her: he feels he has pretty much inhabited, in a quick ripple of something, each of her long years, that he has an artistic knowledge of them now, even if he sometimes has trouble crossing the bridges to an understanding of other people's emotions and how those emotions govern their decisions.

Sometimes when he meets a person for the first time and is trying to get to know or understand that person, it feels to him as it did the time he flew to California to visit his aunt and uncle. He flew at night, flying across the country, looking out his window down at all the darkness below. The snowcapped peaks and glacial basins glowed dully in the moonlight with a dim and terrible coldness, and the dark furze of the forest lay farther below and beyond. Still farther on, there were a few lone lights of civilization, tiny amid that darkness; and even as the plane began to draw near to its destination, with more lights becoming visible and brighter and more concentrated—individual trails and ribbons of light leading quickly now toward some central ganglia—the nexus of illumination, the fierce glow of existence, seemed infinitesimal, vulnerable, ludicrous amid all that darkness through which he had traveled; and his response was to wonder, That's it? So much darkness to yield such a little concentrated cluster and spark of light?

Yet like all who choose to dwell among others of their kind, in such villages—even though he does not feel or consider himself to be like others—he travels to the edge of that light and looks in at it. He throws a few sticks onto the fire, partly to stay warm but also partly to help keep that light burning, drawn to it even if he does not quite feel or experience it like most others.

He's done with Maxine. He feels completed. It's all over now except for the editing: the cutting and splicing, the compressing and attenuating; the reshaping, as if he is some little god who has decided to give her a second chance.

Even now as he sits there with her, he feels his hard-gotten empathy, the connection of the human bond like the ones he sees in so many others, fading, and he fidgets, wants to experience it a little longer.

He tries to sit very still, as if through such concentrated stillness he might summon it. He thinks this might be what people mean when they use the word magic—and he becomes uncomfortable again, for he does not much believe in such things, if at all.

He looks over at her and sees how exhausted she is, how brave and resolute, and he assesses from that observation that he should feel empathy, and thinks to himself, I am going to say something empathetic—but the fire of that quick, thin connection is leaving him, is cooling.

He tries to hold on to it a little longer. As if not through calculation or logic but instead blind instinct, he casts back, beseeching help not from the future, but from older generations who he believes were more successful in such matters, and who brought him to this place: the success of his kin, moving through the centuries.

He begins to tell Maxine a story about his great-great-grandfather, for whom he is named.

He's not quite sure of the tangle of maternal and paternal registry, the wiring that got him to this point—his mother has explained it to him, but sometimes he forgets a generation or two—but in the 1860s, the first Jefferson Eads was a hydrologic engineer, hugely gifted in the math and science of the time, who studied the Mississippi River in the years when men were first considering trying to tame it, trying to control its devastating floods, which Eads and a few others understood were also life-giving.

Not only were there plans to build dams and locks and levees along it, but bridges, too, spanning its absurd width. Most engineers merely walked up and down the muddy shores, making maps and measurements, but Jefferson Eads went into the river itself and prowled its depths in a crude diving bell apparatus of his own design, having fitted a copper shell over his head and breathing through a hundred-foot-long rubber hose attached to a float at the surface. For ballast, he clutched in both arms an immense boulder with an eyelet drilled into it, to which he would fasten himself upon reaching the bottom, so that his hands would be free to take samples and measurements.

What he found down there was different from what coursed above. There were different turbidities, different velocities. There were places where the river bottom was filled with inestimable depths of muck, and other places where the substrate was scoured to white bedrock. Giant snapping turtles tumbled through the current, spinning in cartwheels like the astronauts who would drift through space a century later, and sometimes even Eads himself would be carried downstream in similar fashion, despite the boulder to which he was attached, and despite the chains around his waist, his tether to the mother ship above, the barge from which he dived.

"It's a miracle I ever got here," Jefferson Eads tells her. Maxine is rapt, is listening as intently as she can, but is finding it hard to stay awake. All she wants, all she needs, is a little rest, but the story is too compelling; she must stay awake a little longer.

Is he casting a spell on me? she wonders, feeling herself descending toward sleep.

As she listens, it feels to her that she is fitted with a crudely hammered copper diving helmet herself, is tumbling, being swept along by a force so much greater than anyone above can know. But you made it here, she thinks, imagining that she is speaking to Jefferson Eads, though she is far too tired to say the words. Like an emissary, the first Jefferson Eads made it through, and this new traveler before her, his coincidental namesake, has made it. There is a line, a continuum: the journey can be completed and the connections made, no matter at what level, no matter whether at the surface or in the depths.

"There would be all these giant logs surging past," Jefferson Eads says. "None of them ever struck him or I wouldn't be here, but he'd feel them go rushing past, like battering rams. Sometimes they snaked along the bottom. He would try to grab hold of them as they swept past and ride them for a while, almost to the length of his tether. He had fashioned little numbered metal plates that he tried to tack onto them with engraved instructions, asking whoever found them to write him with their final location, hundreds or thousands of miles downstream—but he never heard from anyone. Maybe we will yet."

"Other times he would feel the logs surging past him, riding some upswell of current, some reverse vortex, which would hurl the logs straight up to the surface, propelling them into the air like rockets. Again, he passed through all these unharmed. Was he chosen, or was he lucky?"

Maxine's eyes are closing, her chin bobbing. Am I being hypnotized, she wonders, or is he trying to awaken me?

She sleeps. Jefferson Eads helps her lie down on her couch and pulls a blanket over her. He sits beside her and thinks about his great-great-grandfather. Was it true passion that sent him down into the depths, or was it only the place where he best fit the world and its destinies? A forced move in a designed space, the one lock-and-key fit where his enormous discord found brief respite.

No records or diaries, no testimonies exist, only artifacts, and the facts of his survival. His progeny, and the various histories of all their days that followed.

Jefferson Eads leaves one light on in the kitchen and gathers his gear, calls his parents to tell them he won't be staying over at the nice old lady's house after all—that he wants to come home and start working right away. It's about nine o'clock, on a weekend.

"Be careful," his mother tells him. He hears his father in the background, calling for him to be home by ten.

He loads his camera gear into the red wagon and then follows the luminaria down the sidewalk, crouching and puffing out each little candle as if kneeling in prayer, following his trail backwards toward the increasing darkness. He can imagine how others might be frightened of such darkness. He imagines that for some it is hard to learn how to wait, how to be certain that some light will always return.