Azoguera

　

　

1.

Milton, the prospector, was walking with his old dog behind the Chinese buffet in Pagosa Springs. It was mid-April and the roar of the river flooding through the village was deafening. Expensive restaurants featuring Alpine fondue and wild game lined the watercourse, the concrete terraces where the "Golden Horde" of summertime visitors were invited to sit outside now half-drowned in the torrent. The Chinese buffet was a block uphill from the river, a building that had once been a pharmacy, and Milton sometimes found caches of empty soda pop and beer cans in the rear alley. The old dog cocked her ear and, then, skittishly approached the buffet’s dumpster. Something inside the garbage bin alarmed her and she danced back away from the big metal crate, tugging at Milton to lead her somewhere else. Milton set down his sack of cans and pried-open the dumpster. Two big crows exploded upward, black and feathery rockets momentarily darkening the air above him. The crows circled, thanking Milton with hoarse, high-pitched barks. The Labrador, startled by the birds, barked in response. And a block away the river flexed its muscle and roared over slabs of marble between marble boulders dragged down from the peaks by ancient floods.

After his second hospitalization for pneumonia, Milton spent winters in Pagosa Springs. His niece owned a trailer-house in a park a mile outside of town and, since she had been assigned active duty in Iraq, the place was vacant. He kept the plumbing from freezing in the winter months, but returned each May to his cabin in the mountains on the ridge between Blanca Peak and the Sangre de Cristo massif to the north. There was no plumbing in his cabin to be kept from freezing. He had fallen several times in the preceding autumn, a mishap that was uncharacteristic for him, and he was afraid that, if he slipped and hurt himself badly, he would be helpless. His other Labrador had died in September, knocked into a coma by a stroke, and, so, he thought it best to spend the icy and wet part of the year in town.

In the first week in May, Milton reckoned that the high ridges exposed to direct sunlight were sufficiently clear of snow that he could reach his cabin. He wondered how much damage the season’s snow-load had done to the old structure. His surviving dog was sick and, when he took her to the veterinarian, the doctor told him that the animal should be "put down." Milton wrapped the dog in a horse-blanket and brought her back to the trailer. In the late afternoon, he drove up toward Wolf Creek Pass, stopping near a particularly lovely overlook. He carried the dog down into a gorge filled with ferns and echoing with little cascades pitching themselves from the moist rim of the canyon – deadfall trees leaned against grey boulders or tilted overhead, spanning the gorge, and, in the tight stone-walled enclosure, the sound of his rifle-shot was deafening. He found a little muddy soil at the foot of a cliff and buried the dog there, still wrapped in the horse-blanket.

Back in town, Milton stocked his niece’s trailer-house with flour, sugar, coffee, and a couple of twelve-packs of Coors. He filled up her pantry with canned beans and vegetables. Then, he wrote a thank-you note on a sheet of paper and set it on the kitchen table – her deployment was supposed to end in August. He hid her key outside under the welcome mat and, then, drove his ATV up the ramp into the back of his pickup truck.

Milton drove over the pass, weeping a little when he passed the overlook and box-canyon where he had buried his dog. He rubbed vigorously at his eyes and accelerated, as if to go around an obstacle planted in his path, ascending upward to the shining mountain peaks. Mid-afternoon he was lurching up the crooked jeep trail toward his cabin. A mile below the ridge, the track dived under a white field of snow. Milton parked the four-wheel-drive pick up and, then, tried to cross over the great apron of snow hanging from the mountain on his ATV. The all-terrain vehicle sunk into the soft snow and couldn’t make it across to the eroded gravel slopes beyond. Milton lifted his sack of groceries and, then, plunged into the snow, sinking in, at first, hip-deep. He plowed a path through drifts up to the place where the jeep track re-emerged, trudging uphill toward the dilapidated head tower and sluices on the top of the ridge. The mine structures were mostly squashed flat against the stony hill, although here and there a big creosote-stained timber jutting up at the sky. Below the ridge, in a protected hollow, Milton found his cabin embedded in more snow, the conical peak of spoil nearby adorned and glittering with shards of fool’s gold. The lean-to attached to the cabin had collapsed but it would be a simple enough to rebuild that structure.

Four days later, Milton went down the hill and found his ATV high and dry, resting on a pavement of gravel and granite slabs. The ice-field had retreated several hundred yards up the mountain side, its pale skirts dribbling little fingers of cold, silvery water. Milton retrieved his pick-up and, with some difficulty, drove it over the steep ridge slippery with loose gravel to the hollow holding his cabin. He took a shovel and repaired some parts of the jeep-track. Then, on the weekend, Milton went into town, driving down to Mosca, to buy a couple hundred dollars worth of additional groceries.

For a few weeks, Milton explored the old mining trails and ruins north of his cabin, ultimately circling Crestone Peak and searching the high basins for signs of ore. He found some "float" in the pour-offs high on Crestone, but nothing significant. Several times, he slipped on wet stones and fell. When he landed on the hard rock, Milton called for his dogs and was confused for a few moments when they didn’t come to him. Once, at high altitude, driving his ATV on a ledge just below the summit on Crestone, his vision suddenly turned to shadows and he could make out forms but no detail. He stopped the ATV and hastily dismounted and, as he gazed down at the desolate little lakes in the stone basin below, the edges of things returned and their colors and the episode passed.

Milton thought that this would probably be his last season prospecting and, so, he decided to make one final search for Blanca Peak’s old Spanish mine.

　

　

2.

When his father was away at the War, Milton was very happy. He lived on a small ranch with his baby sister and mother, an acreage in the rolling foothills above Del Norte. Milton couldn’t recall his father, although there were pictures of a skinny grinning boy in an army uniform in the house. The ranch house was old but sturdy, warm in the winter and built behind trees that cast their shadow on its shingles in the summer. There were tame horses, baby sheep and foals and chicks, a disagreeable old rooster with a sharp beak, several dogs and innumerable cats. Next to his mother’s big bed with its tubular, tarnished brass frame, there was a framed wedding picture. Milton’s mother looked shy and serious in the picture. Milton’s father was next to invisible beside the bride, her cheeks and strawberry blonde hair hand-tinted, swirls of creamy white fabric enveloping her like the icing on a birthday cake.

Milton’s father was fighting in the Pacific and he sent cards from places with outlandish names. Milton imagined his father killing many Japs and he sometimes held a broom to his shoulder like a gun, shooting down Japs hiding around the ranch house and outbuildings. Then, one day, the war was over and Milton’s father returned from overseas. He was much bigger and broader in frame than the pictures showed and seemed to be very sad.

Milton’s father changed everything about their home. He put pigs in the barn instead of sheep and ponies and, once, when he was angry and drunk, shot one of the tom-cats that was stalking a bantam chicken. He quarreled with Milton’s mother and, sometimes, struck her. Milton feared and hated him and wished that there would be another war so that he would have to go away again.

But there was no war. Sometimes, Milton’s father took him hunting in the high mountains. He disliked the long hikes and the heavy packs, the uphill climbing that took away your breath and the long slippery slogs downslope that wracked your knees and joints. Sometimes, Milton hunted with his father in the snow and it was very cold – once, he had to go to the doctor because of frost-bite to his toes and the tips of his nose and ears.

When Milton was in High School, his father and mother separated. Milton enlisted in the army to show his father that he could be brave as well and fought in the snow in Korea. When he was overseas, Milton’s father shot himself in a roadside motel in Alamosa. Because he had been a soldier and a great outdoorsman, his death was determined to be accidental, some kind of hunting mishap when he was cleaning his guns.

After returning from his military service, Milton enrolled in the School of Mines in Golden, his tuition paid by the GI Bill. While he was a student, he married and was happy with his wife for a few years. After graduating from the School of Mines, Milton took a job as a mining engineer working on Baffin Island in northern Canada – his employer was cutting uranium out of the tundra. Milton’s wife moved into company housing near the mine but she couldn’t tolerate the cold and isolation. When a polar bear killed several dogs in the company town, Milton’s wife said that she was going to move back to Denver. She was pregnant at that time, but miscarried back in the States. When Milton completed his contract, he returned to Denver and found that his wife was living with another man. Milton wasn’t surprised. He didn’t bother with a formal divorce because the couple had no children – ten years, later, he was served with papers but ignored them without consequence.

Milton took a job in Saudi Arabia and, then, worked in northern Saskatchewan at nickel and copper mine. For a time, he lived with a native woman and had a child with her. But when his employment contract was concluded, Milton returned to Colorado and never saw the woman or his daughter after that time.

In the late sixties, Milton worked in a factory in Pueblo, smoked a lot of marijuana, and went into the mountains to prospect on the weekends. He found that during a good month, he could pan enough "float" gold and silver to buy groceries and keep gas in his pick-up truck. One weekend, Milton stumbled on the old mine site with the abandoned cabin on the saddle between Blanca Peak and the Sangre de Criston mountains to the north. The land was adjacent to a big ranch owned by a rich man, but located on Bureau of Land Management territory. Milton began to take long weekends, often missing work so that he could remodel the cabin and make it habitable. In the early seventies, he homesteaded the land and, even, acquired title to the place.

This tract of land was where Milton was living when Tetch’s foreman brought him to the big house to look at computer images of the dead Sasquatch. Tetch abandoned his mansion and moved back to Texas. Milton remained living behind the high windy ridge, next to the dome-shaped pinnacle of tailings glittering with quartzite crystals. He was old now and afraid of falling and spent his winters in the flat lands, at Pagosa Springs. His dogs died and Milton thought that he would not be able to live much longer at his cabin. He recalled the Spanish mine that he father had once shown him – at least, he believed he had memories about the place – and thought that it would make him very happy to find that mine before he became too old to ramble through the peaks and valleys. So, one morning, before dawn, he put some dried food in his backpack and set out to circumnavigate Blanca Peak.

　

　

3.

A scatter of stars decorated the sky and the white pebble of the moon clung to the arched back of the mountain. It was cool and a chilly wind blew down from the heights. Milton thought he would contour the mountain at the tree-line, a little below 12,000 feet, on its north, east, and west sides. Because of the escarpments overlooking the San Luis basin, he would have descend into the canyons slung over the sand dunes in order to traverse that part of the peak. At the tree-line, he wouldn’t have to either climb or descend and, so, could save time hiking around the peak. The scattered vegetation would provide him shelter if there were a storm and, also, a clear view up toward the summit, the best vantage he knew to look both up and down the mountain for the lost mine.

While it was still dark, Milton crossed the drainage between his ridge and Blanca. He hiked along the fence-line marking the rich investor’s land, following the wire and posts up through the cacti and aspen to a jagged dike where the terrain was broken and the fence ended. Just as the first grey light was rising behind him, Milton found a path through the dike with its steeple shaped pinnacles and, then, emerged on a stony terrace treeless because of overlapping slabs of pinkish granite. Another stand of aspen, smaller and more wind-bent, stood at the edge of a talus field a few hundred yards above him. He climbed to the aspen. Water was trickling down through the talus and he heard a thousand tiny streams drizzling through the tons of heaped rock. After another half-mile, Milton found a tree improbably growing sideways, its big trunk cantilevered about 18 inches off the pebbly ground. Milton knew the tree as a landmark, a sort of natural bench where he could sit and watch the sun rise. He was mostly carrying water, but wasn’t thirsty. Nonetheless, he knew that it was best to drink before prompted by thirst and so he took a deep draught from one of the jugs that he had packed.

His father had taken him elk-hunting on Blanca Peak when he was boy, perhaps, nine years old. The mountain was open, then, not posted against trespassing. They lurched uphill in his dad’s pickup until the road ended and, then, they bounced across meadows for another couple thousand feet, parking at last under a peculiar shaped knob extruding from the mountain, a black fluted column thrust up above the adjacent slope so that it looked like a preacher’s pulpit. His father gave a Spanish name to the feature that Milton didn’t understand and, then, they carried their guns and packs away from the truck and bushwhacked their way through some wet willows and marsh into the bare and tilted open country above. His father didn’t say anything and moved at a rapid pace and, since Milton’s gun was about his size and very heavy for him, he fell behind. Sometimes, his Dad sat on a tree-stump or a rock waiting for the boy to catch up. When Milton, huffing and puffing, caught up, his father, then, silently stood up and gestured higher on the peak, and so they continued upward, climbing and climbing until the little boy had tears in his eyes at the exertion. They stopped by a ribbon of water that slid down a face of stone. "In the islands," Milton’s dad said, "if you fell behind, the Japs killed you. You couldn’t ever fall behind. So don’t do that now." He chewed some tobacco, spit, and, then, lit a cigarette. "They didn’t just kill you," his father said, "they cut out your innards while you were watching them and roasted your guts on your chest." Milton blinked at him in the bright sunlight. "In those islands, I tell you," Milton’s father said. "I prayed and prayed that I could come back here where it’s cool and there’s plenty of cold, fresh water. It was so hot there and the water was like a hot bath and filled with bugs." Milton didn’t know what to say. He didn’t ever know what to say when his father told him about the war.

They climbed some more and, around noon, Milton’s father sighted an elk, a fat cow grazing among the flowers in the high meadow. They spent almost an hour crawling on their bellies around the elk, Milton’s father waving and gesturing to the boy where he should go. Then, his father took the shot and the elk crashed over on her side. Milton ran up to the animal and saw her sides trembling – he bent down and watched as the light went out of the elk’s eyes.

"Now comes the fun part," Milton’s father said. He took a knife and a small axe and hacked the elk into quarters. "I’m doing this gutless," Milton’s father said, "because we got to get the meat down and dressed before it spoils." Milton’s father hacked out the spine and cut the backstraps and tenderloin. He hurled the scraps of meat into pillow cases. Blood and yellow gobs of fat were scattered over the rocks and wild flowers. The meat was steamy to the touch, but it cooled very rapidly. A murder of crows gathered on the fallen timber and boulders around the kill. The crows called hoarsely to one another.

Milton’s father took three pillow cases, each containing a hooved quarter of the elk, and strapped them onto this back pack. He lifted the soggy sack filled with backstraps and other cuts of meat and slung it from his chest so that it hung down over his belly. The fourth quarter, Milton’s father, belted to his son’s back. He slashed through the elk’s throat bones and put the head of the animal atop Milton’s pack. "You’ve got the trophy," Milton’s father said.

They staggered slowly down the rocky slopes. Milton saw purplish spots before his eyes and fell down a couple times. The back side of his body was cold and wet with blood seeping from the pillow case holding the quarter that he was lugging. His father moaned and grunted with each step and it seemed that it took them a long time to drag the meat from the meadow down into a tangled warren of small notches and gorges cut into the side of the mountain.

At last, they stopped. Milton had fallen again and couldn’t go any farther. It was so difficult to carry the meat on their backs that Milton had turned his eyes to the ground, watching his father’s slow steps and trying to adjust his gait to put his foot where his father’s boot had been. For forty minutes, he had not looked above the height of his father’s knees and, so, he didn’t how they had come into the little cleft in the mountain where they were now resting.

A steep-walled ravine ran downhill between two symmetrical piles of broken rock. The chunks of rock glittered with quartz and fool’s gold and had been heaped about eight feet high. Beyond the stone piles, the ravine broadened a little and there was a low, fallen wall shaped like a figure-eight making an enclosure against one of the overhead cliffs. Milton’s father sat on a bundle of rotting timbers with his boots on what looked like a round mill-stone embedded in the gravel.

"An arrastre," Milton’s father said. He kicked a stone across the gully to another circular mill-stone with fragments of wood still lodged in a cleft in its center.

Milton’s father gestured uphill, toward the headwall of the little canyon. A black opening, like the mouth of cave, was cut into the stone. Milton could see rough-hewn timber beams, like pry-bars, holding open the incision into the mountain.

"Spanish mine," Milton’s father said, panting for breath.

Now as Milton remembered this, he was always a little unclear whether he had seen this place or dreamed the Spanish mine, or been told about it, or, maybe, even read about the workings in one of his textbooks when he was enrolled at the School of Mines. Parts of his memory were clear, but other things seemed vague. When he cast his eyes up to the cliff tops enclosing the excavation, Milton couldn’t tell if he saw trees there, pinon pine, perhaps, or aspen, or, even, spruce. This was an important detail because it would tell him whether the mine was at an elevation below the tree-line or higher up the slope of the mountain. He knew that black crows had dogged them every step of the way down the hill from the meadow where the elk’s blood and fat and bone were strewn about. So, as he recalled the place – if it were a place and not something that he had imagined – he looked up to the sides of the rocky gorge but couldn’t tell if there were trees above or merely the black shapes of the crows crying out at him.

Milton’s father lit a cigarette. He reached into his back pack and found an apple. The fruit was a little foul with blood, but he wiped it off with his handkerchief. He tossed the apple to Milton and scowled when the boy bobbled his catch.

"The Indians working this old mine were slaves," Milton’s father said. "The Spaniards worked them to death." He exhaled some blue smoke that made a globe around his red face.

"They set up a post here," Milton’s father said. "A high post downhill, by those corrals."

He gestured at the scatter of flat rocks arranged in a figure-eight shape.

"At the top of the post, the Spaniards stuck a big, old cross with the dead Jesus nailed onto it. The Indians were supposed to bow to this post, this image, I guess, and, if they didn’t bow, the Spaniard’s took a whip and lashed the culprit until he was dead. This kind of thing happened in the war too, all the time when the Japs took prisoners on those islands."

Milton nodded his head.

"One time, a big Comanche chief was brought all the way up here," Milton’s father said. "The chief and his little son were standing right in this gulch, right where we are now. The Chief didn’t pay any attention to the cross with Jesus nailed up there – he didn’t even look at it, and, when someone called out and pointed up at Jesus hanging up in the sky, the Chief just muttered something and spit on the ground. So the Spaniards dragged the Chief’s son over by that shaft and had him stand there with an apple sitting on his head. The mine overseer asked the Indian Chief if he thought that his hand was steady enough to shoot the apple off his son’s head. The Chief was very angry and his glare was like a sharp knife gouging at the cruel Spaniards and he said, "yes, yes, I will do it, I’ll fire an arrow that will rip that apple right off my son’s head." So the Spaniards stepped back and the little boy walked forty paces away by the mineshaft and stood there still as could be. The Indian Chief took careful aim and his hand was steady and it didn’t tremble in the slightest. And, then, was a terrible silence, a silence all the way from heaven come down to earth, and, not even, the leaf of a tree trembled..."

His father’s eyes glinted like a rare gemstone plucked from some dangerous height or depth.

"The Indian Chief drew back the bow and he took aim and, then, the air went flying as soundless as a thought and it caught the apple at its center and lofted it back away from the boy into the darkness of this ming. The Spaniard mine overseer stepped forth to commend the Indian and, even, extended his hand in congratulations and, then, he saw that the savage had another arrow clutched close to his belly and ready to be notched on bowstring. – What is that for? the Spaniard said. – For you, if I missed, the Indian chief said. It’s a true story. Do you think so?"

"Yes," Milton said.

"It happened right here, in this dry-gulch, round about four-hundred years ago. Do you believe me?"

"Yes," Milton said.

"Put that apple up on your head, balance it there, and, then, let me take a shot with my rifle," Milton’s father said.

Milton lifted up the apple and looked at it for a moment. Then, he set it on the tousle of hair over his eyes.

"You’d have to walk forty paces away, back up to that old mine shaft – that way, if’n I miss, I can just topple your dead body down into that hole," Milton’s father said.

Milton took a couple paces toward the mineshaft, but the apple was still on his head and it dropped on the ground and rolled slowly downhill.

"I’m just teasing you, son," Milton’s father said. "I’m just teasing. You think your pa would do something like that."

Milton shook his head. "Eat the apple, son," Milton’s father said. "You’ll need all your strength for the rest of this hike."

"Do you think there is still silver here?" Milton asked.

His father groaned a little. His pack was bearing down on him. "I don’t know," he said. "It depends on why they stopped operations here."

Milton didn’t recall much about the rest of the day. Somehow, they climbed out of the ravine containing the mine and, then, walked very slowly, pace by pace, down the mountain. Milton couldn’t recall any other times when they stopped to rest. It must have been agony, but mercifully enough, the pain hadn’t left any mark on his memory – he recalled the dead elk and the blood and fat on the meadow and, of course, the Spanish mine and, then, at last, they emerged from the mountain the way a man might emerge from a cavern or a battlefield. The pickup truck was a few hundred feet above them, perched on a stony shelf, and Milton thought that his father cried with rage, shaking his hot tears onto the rock beneath their boots. "It is one thing to walk down from the kill," his father said, "but, now, to walk uphill..."

That was the last thing that he remembered from that afternoon long ago – his father cursing and, then, saying that you always want to position your kill and your vehicle in a such a way that you carry the carcass down to the vehicle and not uphill.

Then, his father was gone and Milton was an old man sitting on a tree that the wind and blizzards had deformed so that the trunk didn’t grow upward but was parallel with the ground, an awful sort of deformation if you think about it. His knees and shoulders hurt but that was just the ordinary indignity of old age and, so, Milton set off again

While he was fresh from his rest, Milton climbed the side of the ridge, following the edge of the talus field and, then, zigzagged up the switchbacks of a game trail to a barren prominence where waist-high clumps of krummholz, like grazing sheep, formed a little exposure. Beyond there was a big cleft in the mountain, dark with shadow and echoing with falling water. A headwall of eroded snow stood at the top of the canyon, the ice melted into pinnacles that looked men squatting on the rocks wearing white dunce-caps. From this point, Milton could see down the whole south slope of the mountain. A choker of black green pines encircled the contour below and rock falls had cut channels in the forest, some of the heaps of stone coiled around little green lakes like eyes staring up at the sky. Beyond the forests, the slopes of the mountain were brown with chaparral and Milton could see the road rising up over the swell of land to the chateau where the rich man lived.

It took him an hour skidding and sliding in the loose rock to cross the cleft and, in the deepest part of the notch, a stream was battering itself against lichen-starred boulders. Green moss made pompadours on the loaf-sized rocks in the creek bed. Milton knew the moss was very slippery and, so, he avoided stepping on the rocks, immersing his bare feet to the knees in the pools next to the stones. Beyond the creek, he laced himself into his boots and climbed slowly out of the canyon. About midday, Milton reached a reddish knife-ridge above the drainage. This was the corner of the mountain where it turned toward the high, brittle-looking ramparts overlooking the rumpled badlands above the big sea of white, glittering sand to the west of the peak. He picked his way down the slope to meadows toppling into twisted, red-stone canyons. The stands of pine at the edge of the meadows were oozing sap in the heat of the day and the smell was heavy, buzzing with insects feeding on the sticky ribbons spiraling around the tree trunks. Milton was tired and had been walking for eight hours or more and, so, he decided to rest for awhile on the brown bed of decaying pine needles. Some juniper berries had fallen into the needles and he crushed them with his body, smelling the sweet gin smell rising like incense in the warm air. The trees reached up for the sky very straight, narrow columns forming ranks and corridors in a woods that was both shadowy and transparent – he could see for a long distance between the trees but the branches overhead hid the sky.

Milton drank some more water and, then, said to himself: "It’s getting downright warm." He positioned himself among the trees so that he could look up at the high escarpment crowned with snow above him. For a time, he watched tiny puff-ball clouds skate over the top of the cliff and, then, he fell asleep.



4.

The mule train came up the gorge. Bells tinkled and the pack animals snorted in the warmth of the afternoon. Where the hill had slumped down, a crystal flood of water slid across the rocks and the animals hooves splashed in the water.

"It is downright warm," someone said. Milton’s father sat on a boulder streaked with a lead-grey vein of argentite. He had taken off his long pants to inspect a wound just above his knee-cap, a deep, crooked gash that smelled strongly of spoiled meat.

A wooden sluice ran down hill from the mine’s adit, draining water into a patio reservoir sealed with bitumen. Two donkeys with raw rotting hooves staggered in circles in the reservoir, turning a sodden wooden paddle. Naked men carried sacks of ore on their backs, emerging from the entrance of the mine, blinking at the bright sun and, momentarily, blinded so that they lost their footing and slipped in the muck fanning out downhill from the mineshaft.

Milton’s father looked up from his gangrenous knee and said that the quickening agent had come, brought by mule train from the harbor at Panama or shipped oversea from Almaden in Spain, The leather pouches borne by the mules were imprinted with the royal insignia and the burro train was guarded at head and tail by men carrying long lances fitted with hook-shaped iron halberds. The soldiers wore breastplates like convex mirrors and the sunbeams shone on them and reflected against the naked rock walls overlooking the ravine.

"It is getting downright warm," Milton’s father said.

The Azoguera rode a delicate horse with sad intelligent eyes and a slender muzzle. He sat on the horse side-saddle like a girl and there was a parasol stabbed into his saddle to protect the womanish-looking man, very pale and emaciated, from the sun. Milton saw that the saddle was edged with fine silver in filigree, bit and bridle tinkling musically as the animal zigzagged up the switchbacks to the mine. Some soldiers limped up the ravine among the mules and a barefoot boy led the way.

"A quinto, or one-fifth, is due to the Crown," Milton’s father said.

"I know," Milton replied. "I read that in the books."

"And this is calculated on the consumption of quickening silver used in the amalgamation process," Milton’s father said. "The Crown has the patent on the quicksilver as well."

The mules train came to a halt next to the patio lagoon. The Azoguera or "Quicksilver Man," accompanied by a tiny and naked Indian boy, decanted quivering globules of mercury from the　steel womb-shaped matraces borne in the side-saddles of the mules. The donkeys with rotting hooves screamed like human babies when the mercury was poured into the sludge under their feet. At first, the ore in the Argentinite was asleep, eyes closed and snoring. Then, mercury infused its veins and the metal opened its eyes and came to life, sitting up in its granite bed. Snow fell as sleet, dampening the eyes and forehead of the silver. It was time for the miner’s to rest. The naked men smeared with red clay from the pit sat under a ramada made from interlocked willow branches and ate beans and chili rolled into corn tortillas. Night fell and the demons from the snow fields slouching between the peaks overhead descended to the mine in the gorge and killed some of the workers there. At dawn, the shadowy leaden darkness in the narrow canyon was adorned with small fires, red as rubies clutched in tight fists of furry-black smoke – the air was heavy and smoke did not diffuse. The dead were stretched naked and raw and stiff on slabs of stone glittering with quartzite and the crows and ravens came close to them. Some of Indians pitched pebbles at the crows to make them keep their distance. Milton looked down at the dead men and tried to read the mystery written in their eyes. Then, the corpses were bound up in cloth and carried somewhere. Milton thought that a priest clad in black feathers sang a mass for the dead over the larva-shaped corpses, but, perhaps, this was only a crow calling out indignantly overhead.

At the edges of the ravine, half-hidden behind the mounds of spoil, were a lean-tos propped against the boulders and fronted with a dwarf-wall of adobes. Men wearing leather waist-coats guarded the breaches in the adobe wall. The guards carried iron swords and it was their duty to kill or mutilate any Indian who dared enter the enclosure. The mine had been troubled by theft and the heads of several criminals were displayed on posts on the rim of the gulch. The Azoguera from la Real Villa de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis emerged from a globe-shaped tent made from bison hide inflated around wicker. He spat and tried to piss against the adobe wall, but something was wrong with his genitals and he cursed and spat again and, then, the naked boy who was with him, led the man to a bench built into the clay-brick wall and spanned with a half-hewn log of cottonwood. The boy massaged the Azoguera’s ankles, kneading his feet where the feathered wings had been amputated, and, at last, the man stood up and roared at the sky and pissed in a mighty jet the color of the red clay that the Indians were hauling from the mine in wicker baskets crushing against their shoulders and mid-spine.

The captain ordered that the Azoguera be fed and the soldiers brought him a clay cup full of a stew made from pozole and dog meat mixed with a scrapings from a tenderloin cut from one of the mountain demons that had ventured too near the encampment and been shot with a bolt from a cross-bow. Without the Azoguera, the chrysopoeia – that is the transformation of base metal into noble ore – could not be accomplished. The Azoguera had learned his trade in Potosi itself, in the antipodes, and it was said that he had been tutored by John Dee and Maestro Lorenzo, the Dutchman himself, a man said to have learned the composition of the reagent, the magisterial, in Satan’s academy. No one knew the　Azoguera’s age, and he seemed to be one that was perpetually dying – his mouth black and empty except for a few charred-looking teeth, his eyes wild in their dark sockets, his belly and breasts swollen up and strangely similar to those of a pregnant woman, prone to fits of melancholy in which he howled like a wolf or barked like a dog. Under his protuberant guts, the man wore a silver pendant shaped like the emblem for the hydrargyyrum – the symbol quicksilver as a living being, a creature walking the earth and metamorphosing all that he encountered. The pendant diagrammed the landscape of the mine, itself, a cross rising from the cleft of two female buttocks symbolizing the foothills, then, the bulbous dome of the mountain reaching into the heavens, crowned like a bull-bison with a scimitar of horn.

The Azoguera walked unsteadily, leaning heavily on the little naked boy and his staff, a rod made from polished wood with its knob carved into the heads of two rattlesnakes. He approached the patio where the burros with their scabrous and rotting hooves where churning the brine and mud slurry. The little boy knelt and scooped up a morsel of the pasty mud and the Azoguera tasted it, his tongue darting back and forth behind his blackened lips. He ordered that more salt in the measure of a half-bushel be poured into the brine. Then, the boy cupped more of the brine in his hands and held them up for the Azoguera to lick again. Nigredo, the Azoguera said and some other words that no one understood, and, then, gesturing that the mine overseers and the Indian foremen look away, he squatted, to defecate in the paste. Then, the little boy helped him rise again and he inhaled the stink coming from the patio enclosure and called for one of the leathern saddle-bags to be opened, revealing an iron flask with long slender neck. Carrying the flask as if it were a precious idol, an overseer, half Spanish and half Indian, made his way through the entrenchments and mounds of spoil, carefully passing the flask to the Azoguera as if it were a flaming baton. The Azoguera measured out a cup of quicksilver and, then, poured it into the muck, the metal extruding itself like a glittering snake to vanish in the filth of the patio slurry.

The Azoguera said that he come down from the mountain top and that the hydrargyrum was the tablet of the law and that all world’s regulation was inscribed on it. The overseer who has half-Spanish shook his head and replied that the Azoguera had come from the valleys, along the royal road from Santa Fe and that their visitor was an emissary of the crown far away across the sea. The Azoguera shook his head in disagreement, and announced that he was come like Moses from the high places of the earth to celebrate the chymical wedding and that he would take the dead ore and raise it like Lazarus. He said that he had come from the moon where that wandering planet’s face weeps tears of quicksilver. He said that he had come up from the underground, winding his way upward through the dark passes that led from Hell to Earth. The Azoguera said that every night he died and went down to the dead and that they gave him their blood in the iron, long-throated flasks and that he, then, carried that substance to the surface of the world to make the vulgar metals come alive so that they could speak and gesture like living men.

The quicksilver, the Azoguera told the gathered men, was the child of sulphur and salt and the grand elixir that accorded immortality to all things bathed in it. He said that the quicksilver was a living creature and that it dwelt exactly between day and night, between heaven and earth, and between life and death. Then, the Azoguera asked the men to come forward so that he could roll a tiny globe of the silvery stuff onto each of their tongues so that this would give them strength and cure their ailments and the workers and overseers bowing to him formed a line so that he could anoint them in this way.

Then, the quicksilver man called for the little boy to go to the bison-hide tent and bring forth the casket of the magisterial, that is, the reagent that acted with quicksilver to give life to the precious ore. He made everyone depart from the patio and said that anyone who glimpsed the magisterial or the proportions with which it was mixed would be blinded because this was the arch-secret, the secret of secrets required to animate the silver and make it come forth from the womb of the earth. The men all backed away and many of them hid themselves in the mine and, then, the Azoguero crossed himself and dosed the patio and, having finished, the overseers and Indians surrounded him again and carried the quicksilver man back into one of the lean-to huts so that the King’s portion could be calculated from the amount of hydryangyrum and magisterial apportioned the slurry in the patio.

A mound of leather sacks filled a low crater cut into the mouth of the ravine and Indians squatted around the pit guarding the ore in chalky amalgam filling those bags. A half-dozen burros would be cut from the mule-train that had carried the mercury up to the mine with the Azoguera. The bags of ore would be sent down the mountain and over the camino real to Santa Fe – this would be accomplished each day until the Azoguera’s administration of the chymical wedding was complete and the cinnabar wed, at last, to its bridegroom of silver, and the ore-bearing stones crushed into powder by the arrastre mill-stones all expended. The mine was too high on the mountain to be operated year around and, once, the ore-bearing rock extracted from its depth had been amalgamated to silver, the soldiers and the overseers and the accountants with their leather-bound registers would withdraw from the heights and the naked Indians would return to their pueblos for the winter. This was the life of the mine, a periodic frenzy of activity, then, a season of ice and frost in which the workings were all buried in the snow.

The next morning, the Azoguera rose up from his bed of rabbit-fur and buffalo-robe. The little boy had vanished. Someone saw enormous foot-prints in the mud leading up to the balloon-like tent where the Azoguera and the boy had spent the night. The footprints were bipedal, not like a coyote or a wolf or mountain lion, and they led to the Azoguera’s tent and, then, away from it down the stony ravine where the path could not be followed. The Azoguera had no one to massage his wounded ankles and so he roared in pain like a wounded bear and could not piss. The Indians fanned out around the encampment and, around noon, found the boy half-eaten in a crude grotto made from stacked stones. The overseer and the mine foreman agreed that a snow-demon had entered the camp and stolen the child and eaten him. When the boy’s remains were borne back to the camp on a dog-travois, the Azoguera took an axe and killed several of the Indians and, then, ran uphill to fortify himself in the mine. When soldiers approached the adit, he sallied out and struck them down, infused with super-human strength. Since it was impossible to dislodge the madman from his retreat, the overseer said that the Indians should wall the Azoguera in the mountain so that he would not emerge in the darkness to attack them. Big rocks were rolled down from heights and piled in front of the mine shaft cut into the mountain.

After midnight, the soldiers heard the rocks by the mine entrance shifting and, then, they tumbled away from the opening and crashed in a landslide down the slope. The people in the camp were much afflicted with mercury-belly and mercury rot in their joints and teeth and, therefore, very weak. In the black melee, they ran amuck, stabbing and clubbing at one another, and, by dawn, half a dozen of the workers were sprawled dead in the poisonous mud. The Azoquera was found lying face up in the slurry of the patio, his belly split wide open and his guts, like a mass of venomous snakes, spilled out of his body. The dead man’s face was that of Milton’s father and his eyes were open so that the crows fled from the corpse and, then, snow fell as icy sleet and whitened the cinnabar-colored slurry and made the dead man’s brow seem to sweat.

Milton felt the touch of cold water on his face. A raindrop had burrowed through the pine trees surrounding his bower. He heard thunder and saw a pillar of black cloud standing overhead, about to throw itself onto the mountain. Very high above on the escarpment, there was a climber, someone embedded like a tick in one of the cracks in the cliff. The climber was clad in nylon, bright as a child’s balloon. The cloud smashed against the mountain and, for a while, rain fell very hard and there were flashes of lightning around peaks’s crescent-shaped summits. The climber was hidden by the storm-clouds and Milton pitied him on that slick, naked face of rock. Milton himself was soaked to the bone.

A half-mile from the evergreen bower where he had napped, Milton discovered a jeep parked among some house-sized boulders in a shallow canyon at the foot of the high western wall of the mountain. A light drizzle was falling and, so, Milton sat front-seat of the jeep – it was unlocked – for an hour, napped some more, and, then, was aroused by the late afternoon sunlight shining through the windshield and making the upholstery hot as an oven. He climbed out of the truck, stretched his limbs, and, then, began to climb the flanks of the mountain once more.

　

　

5.

Milton ascended a moraine spiky with cactus and angular, desert trees. It was slow-going because the trail was faint, sometimes beckoning him aside to overlooks where the footpath digressed into a tight place sealed-off by bald, hot boulders. The moraine was made of big shattered chunks of mountain and was so stony that there was very little shade over the steep footpath. The piles of rock were hot and radiated warmth like an oven and it was sweaty work to scramble up the path, crawling upward on hand and knee in some places where the trail faded into a ladder of hand-holds made from twisted roots and unsteady stone steps. At last, he reached the top of the moraine, some ribbons of water flowing over the stone rim and, then, darting like serpents into dark nooks and crannies in the rock-fall. The valley dammed by the moraine was occupied by a long, completely still lake, a sheet of silvery reflecting glass that led eerily uphill between barren ridges of rock. At intervals, aspen or pine stood in clefts in the ridges, little deltas of green at the base of the naked side walls overlooking the tub of silent water.

Behind him, the sand dunes glowed with pale phosphorescence, a tangle of glowing crumpled linen caught in the stone hoodoos and pinnacles at the base of the mountain. He knew that the way was level along the lake and that there would be another terminal moraine in a mile or so, another harsh ascent zigzagging up the pebbly dam trapping another lake higher on the mountain. Soon it would be dark and, although Milton could manage the path in the night, there were risks and so he looked around for a place to make a fire and rest for the night. Half-way up the steep stony rise to the second, higher lake, Milton found a narrow trail blazed over a stone shelf traversing the loose gravel escarpment and leading to a chute lined with twisted dwarf trees, each displayed as an exhibit in niches in the stone hollow lit by the white jet of a small cascade billowing down the dark shaft at the back of the notch. There was horse shit on the narrow path to the waterfall and more dung decaying into hay on the room sized slab next to the dark pit through which the water was ceaselessly falling. Milton took some light canvas from his pack and pitched a low shelter, angled to keep rain away from him if it stormed. He piled up some twigs and lit a fire, but it was only fitful, a bit of orange twitching in the immense night. On the tilted slabs of rock around him, there were thousands of wolf-spiders and they emerged from the crevasses to look at the fire. The sound of the falling water kept Milton awake – sometimes, he heard voices whispering in that noise, or rhythms like a heart-beat or the rustle of great wings folding and unfolding or, even, someone singing a sad song in Spanish. He was too close to the falling water to sleep and cursed the fact that he had made his camp in that place and the night wore on, alternately cold and feverishly hot and, then, at last, Milton saw a beam of yellow light embroidering the throat of the cascade, knitting a frayed white doily in the top of that jet of water.

Then, he fell asleep and, when he opened his eyes a few hours later, the wolf spiders remained immobile, each guarding its warm shard of rock, and the water fall was lit from base to rim like a candle.

Milton unstaked the canvas tarp protecting him and, packed his backpack. Then, he returned to the pack-animal trail up the rocky slope and, in a half hour, came to the level banks of the second lake, this one narrow and green and the color of milky powder, stone milled by the glaciers slumping down to dip their toes in the tarn. A couple of small, frigate-shaped ice-bergs, floated in icy, chilled water. Milton used a hook and bait to take some steelhead trout from the lake. He make another fire and roasted the fish. Some abstract tubular reeds adorned the edges of the lagoon. After eating, he hiked along the ledges above the lake, following knee-high conical cairns heaped at two-hundred yard intervals. Within a half-hour, he reached the pass, looking down to the sliver of lake below him. The big white mountain rose without proportion or measurement beside him – it was impossible to estimate distance because there was no distinction between large and small. The steepness of the naked slopes tilting into the basins glittering with webs and threads of draining water couldn’t be assessed either – were those hillsides level enough to walk across or would you have to scramble on hands and knees upward to make the ascent or was it a matter ropes and crampons or pitons?

From the cleft in the bare ridge, Milton looked down and could see the little hilltop above the morada, the spike of a thorny-looking cross set in crack between a pair of smooth upturned domes like a woman’s buttocks. A little to the north, he saw the pimple-shaped heap of spoil sheltering his cabin. He had completed the circuit and, after an knee-jarring descent, he would be back to the exact place that he had started.

"My life is a failure," Milton thought. "I am back where I began."

He looked down to the prairie and the intersections dark with imported trees and, beyond that, to the great white horizon where the sun was busy igniting the windows of little scattered house and the steel that made up grain elevators and casting its radiance along the long, slow fuse of the freeway running along the rim of the earth.

Overhead, the jet stream slowly shredded a couple of con-trails high overhead.

Milton thought that he had spent his life searching for something that could not be found, the Spanish mine lost in the crevasses and canyons of the white mountain.

He ambled down the gentle slope to where a tiny fountain billowed up between fist-sized stones. The cool wind poured into his eyes. It would be good, cool sleeping weather at his cabin. He sat on the earth and it was springy with moss and a little moist and there were blue columbine flowers all around him.

"I have wasted my life,’ Milton said.

Tsisnaajini

　

　

The People were not ancient. A grandfather’s grandfather could remember how they had been born.

Far to the north, there was a big lake surrounded by reeds. Near the lake, a tall rock jutted up over the cold water. The rock looked like a man’s thumb and, at its base, there was a cave. The earth breathed through the cave and made a sound like a man snoring. Within the cave, there were seven cavities or wombs, each domed with rock. The seven clans comprising the People were born in those wombs and, when their men and women were fully formed, they crept out of the earth and dwelt for a time beside the lake. When all the fish were taken, and all the turtles and frogs killed, the people were hungry and so they set out on their long march across the prairies.

At last, the People came to a place where there was a towering rock humped like a bison bull and bearing two pointed horns. This rock stood in the middle of the earth. The People lived between four mountains occupied by the holy ones. These mountains established the boundaries of the People’s land and established the laws that governed them. All things that had meaning and that endured had come from those mountains and dwelt in their shadow. The peaks were named Tsisnaajini, the dawn mountain adorned with white shell, Tsoodizil, the south mountain adorned with turquoise, Dook ‘o ‘ooshid, the sunset mountain, adorned with abalone, and, lastly, Dibe Nitsaa, the north mountain adorned with black jet. The mountains were living beings, the wisest in the Fourth World, and, if one were to walk to these peaks and abide in their shadow, the mountains would give counsel to that pilgrim.

Atsidi was a young man who was a member of the Bitter Water Clan. He came to grief over She Rises, a girl from the Rivers coming Together clan. Atsidi met She Rises at the willow spring, a place that she went each day to draw water. Through her cousins, the girl sent a message to Atsidi that she would meet him at a certain place after dark. She Rise’s brothers learned of this and kept her from leaving the hogan. The next day, Atsidi was exhausted from waiting all night at the place assigned for their meeting. He went to the willow spring and sat by the fountain of clear, cold water all day long, but She Rises did not appear.

A couple days later, while playing the Ball-Stick game with young men from the Rivers coming Together clan, one of She Rises’ uncles lashed Atsidi with his stick. Atsidi hurled himself on the man and threw him to the ground. The other players pulled the two young men apart. After the game, everyone was hot and grimy and, so, the older men built a sweat lodge on the edge of the playing field and lit a fire to heat some rocks. Atsidi went with his brother to the willow spring to haul water back to the lodge. At the spring, he glimpsed She Rises. She pretended not to see him and ran away in haste leaving her water vessel at the edge of the spring. Atsidi took left his pot beside the spring and filled up the vessel that She Rises had abandoned there. He carried that pot back to the sweat lodge.

She Rises’ brother recognized the round water vessel, glazed with the forked pattern of the Rivers coming Together people. But he said nothing. When Atsidi entered the sweat lodge with him, the girl’s brother asked him about the pot. Atsidi lied, boasting about his relations with She Rises. There was a fight and the two men rolled over the hot stones so that they were both burned and, then, knocked down one of the tripod poles holding up the pelts and blankets from which the sweat lodge was made. The fabric snuffed out the fire and lifted a plume of smoke over the wrecked lodge and the two men toppled down the side of the hill and tore their flesh on the sharp spikes of some yucca plants growing there. When the other men finally separated them, She Rises’ brother’s shoulder was dislocated and both of them were cut and bleeding and burned by the hot rocks.

The fight was a scandal because of the things that Atsidi had said and due to the place of the combat, the sweat lodge where men were supposed to be friends and put aside their differences. A very old man whose blood flowed in the veins of both the Bitter Water people and the Rivers coming Together clan met with Atsidi. The old man burned some herbs to purify Atsidi and sang a song to make the malicious spirit in him leave the boy. Then, he said that there was anger among the two clans and that this was unacceptable and caused him physical pain since he was father to both groups of people. The old man said that all of his joints ached with the enmity that Atsidi had made and that amends must be made. Atsidi sat with the very old man in a hogan alone on a hilltop, a place where coyotes came to howl at the moon. The smoke from the old man’s fire spiraled up through the hole in the roof, sweet and aromatic with the herbs that he had burned. The old man pointed to the door, built so that it faced east and the dawn. He said that the dawn was like an arrow fired from a fine bow – it was the day’s intention and that the motives comprising that intention must be carefully aimed and the arrow released in the proper way for it to reach its target. In the east, from which dawn came, there was a white mountain called Tsinaajini, the white shell of the morning. The old man told Atsidi that he should walk to the mountain and burn sage there and peck into a stone a certain image. The old man used a sliver of bone tipped with ocher to sketch the image on a rag of deer skin.

The old man said that the image was Mother Buffalo Woman, a stick figure with her legs spread to give birth to the good things that human beings needed in order to live. Above her outspread arms, her head was a circle round as the sun bearing a crest of horns like a crescent moon turned on its side. The old man said that he had gone to each of the four holy mountains during his life-time and that the mountains had not disappointed him but, instead, had always been true and honest and of good counsel and he said that White Shell mountain was the most beautiful of them all because it was adorned with the dawn and represented all righteous intentions.

Atsidi asked: "Grandfather, how do I get there?"

The old man told Atsidi to walk to Filthy Ghost canyon and find the house of the great gambler. Then, he was to climb to the rim of the gorge and take the great north road to Pots for Heads. At Pots for Heads, a big river rolled across the green plain with its source in the high mountains. Atsidi should follow the river to a fork near its headwaters and, then, go over the peaks walking due east until he came to a long misty lake with rafts of snow floating in it and, then, another river flowing down from the lake and the high country. When the river reached its basin, he would see far away a place where snow seemed to have been shed from a mountain top and lay draped over the desert – this was the big sand place, white as a dove. The tall peak behind the big sand was Tsinaajinni. "Then you must be very careful," the old man told him, "because it is sacrilege to climb too high on the mountain, although you must, nevertheless, ascend the peak to a certain distance, just the right height where you will stop, and contemplate what you have done in your life. Don’t tarry on the plains below the mountain because this is the home of the Fierce People and you should avoid them at all costs. When you have formed true and honest intentions, come down from the mountain and return to the people."

"How far away is the mountain?" Atsidi asked.

"Thirty sleeps," the old man said, "unless a thunderbird carries you in his beak."

Atsidi went to his hogan and said goodbye to his mother and father and brothers. Then, he packed away some dried juniper berries and corn and, before dawn, left for the white mountain.

The morning was chilly and Atsidi walked rapidly, proud of the strength in his legs. Shadows accompanied him – figures at his rear and side that he glimpsed from the corners of his eyes. He walked among fields freshly planted and hoed, giving distance to the scattered hogans so that the dogs would not be aroused and bark at him. After a couple of hours, when the sun was in the sky, he came to a watchtower built from mud and clay at the edge of the wilderness. The tower was empty, although there was a fire-pit and circle of stones for a lodge by its side. Once, soldiers had occupied the tower, watching for ghosts coming across the barren land from the canyon – but it had been a long time since the last spirit invasion and the tower was no longer needed. Atsidi climbed to the parapet and looked across the plateau. The figures that had been following him approached. Atsidi greeted his uncle and grandfather and they handed him a sharp knife with an obsidian blade and a sack filled with smoked meat. "We watched," his grandfather said, "to be sure that no one would ambush you before you left home."

From the crumbling parapet of the watchtower, Atsidi looked across the wasteland to the Filthy Canyon, an opening in the grey and brown plain twisting like a snake across the featureless plateau. Little clouds were drifting past the sun overhead and their shadows skittered across the plain like fat black flies crawling over a carcass.

Although he could see the Filthy Canyon from the watchtower, it took Atsidi a day and a half to cross the plain to reach its rim. The canyon was not very deep. From its rim, Atsidi could see the dry, white sand of the stream bed cutting through the bottomlands. The Ancient Enemy had made dams at the places where the creek bed turned sharply, low piles of flat, stacked rock intended to impound the water, and there were small irrigation canals cut into the river banks, tracts of cultivated land where a stalk of corn or a squash plant still survived in the cracked gravel and parched dirt.

Atsidi skidded down a gulch eroded in the canyon’s side and, then, followed the dry river, walking over its paths of smooth stones, toward the high, dark butte at the head of the watercourse. Black thunderclouds were butting at the scalloped tops of the mountain and fringes of rain hung in the sky.

He did not want to be trapped in the Filthy Canyon after nightfall because that was when the spirits of the dead came forth from their ruined cities and, so, Atsidi trotted along as fast as he could, following the meanders of the dry stream bed that, in turn, followed the twists of the gorge. Long shadows were flung from the cliff-sides and Atsidi heard voices singing in the hollows of the side-canyons. He thought that if he did not come upon the Great Gambler’s house very soon, he would have to flee from the canyon – if need be, scaling one of its crumbling reddish cliffsides. But, at a crook in the gorge, he saw the house, a maze of chest-high rooms, all roofless, like the inside of a cave full of interlocking chambers and passageways exposed to the sky. Some high walls still stood, fortifications and round towers, and a great kiva opened downward in the dusty, packed earth of the plaza like a socket from which an eye has been gouged. Other kivas, miraculously round and deep, wounded the earth between mounds of bricks and stone where outbuildings had once stood. As if in judgement upon the audacity of the Great Gambler’s house with its five-hundred rooms, a part of the canyon rim had split away and crashed down onto the ruin, an immense dull-club of stone taller than a tree that had pounded flat a dozen chambers in the structure.

Atsidi gave the ruined city a wide berth. He walked on paths trampled into the edge of fields, once irrigated but now bone-dry. In niches in the canyon heights, he saw granaries, small walls of stacked stone sealing off caves in the cliff-side. Atsidi knew that the place was infested with ghosts and that the ghosts were unclean and carried every kind of infection and sickness in their rotting flesh and, so, he made haste to a muddy abscess at the base of the cliff – an ooze of water from a spring. Pecked into the cliff-wall were hand and foot holds. Atsidi knew that the Ancient Enemies had occupied houses on the flat plateau overlooking the Filthy Canyon as well and that their women had come down to the spring to carry water and that, therefore, he could climb out of the gorge at this place.

The holes chipped in the rock were placed at exactly the right intervals to make it easy to ascend the cliff and, if you didn’t look behind you, it was not hard to make your way upward and out of the gathering shadows to the sun-drenched prairie on the rim. Scrambling upward, over the crumbling edge of the canyon, Atsidi saw another ruined city, this one knocked flat so that not a stone was standing upon another stone, kivas indenting the plain here and there, but half-filled with sand. Next to the city, there was a ghost-road – it was straight as an arrow, as wide as a man is tall, and neatly curbed with flat slabs of stone. Thunder sounded behind him, high on the shoulders of the black butte.

Atsidi walked on the ghost-road toward the distant mountains. The road ran without deviating to the right and left across the flat plain – if there was a boulder in the way of the road too big to be shoved aside, the path led straight up and over the rock, toe and finger holds neatly chiseled in the stone. Where there were stream beds or ravines, the ghost-road crossed them as if they did not exist; it was a line incised into the plain that was purely abstract, like something that children might mark in the sand as a starting line or finishing place.

The way was hot and a little dangerous because the level road was easy walking and encouraged Atsidi to a pace that was impossible to sustain. At night, he went aside from the road and camped near seeps of water, places marked by side-trails branching off next to cairns of chalk white stones. He did not want to be near the ghost-road in the darkness because Atsidi could hear in the night the armies of dead men marching on it.

After a week, Atsidi reached Pots for Heads. The tangle of low walls were burned, the tops of the ramparts covered with soot and the kiva at this place, broad as a waterless lake, was half-filled with immense charred timbers. In the midst of the heaps of rubble and grey, dusty thorn plants, Atsidi saw bones, a skull with yellow teeth, a scatter of white fingers and toes like dice thrown down while gaming. The air smelled of sulphur and Atsidi was gripped with a terrible despair.

A half-dozen ghost-roads, each of them flat and straight and curbed with long, chipped slabs of stone, radiated away from the ruins. Atsidi wondered which road he should take to reach the river and the mountains. Shadows gathered and burned tops of the mud-brick towers gestured at him as if they were dying men. It was too late to leave the place and, so, Atsidi picked one of the ghost-roads and walked down it far enough to reach a point where there was a distance between the curbed paths about the length that an arrow could be shot. He camped midway between the roads and, in the darkness, the dead warriors who had lost their skulls and had pots placed on their shoulders for heads rose from the ruins and danced in their wrecked kiva – the giants with pots for heads were blind and danced very slowly and ponderously and the earth shook under them.

The ghosts danced all night and, only when the breezes freshened before the dawn, did they return to their graves. Atsidi set out before the first light, picking the ghost-road that seemed to point most exactly at the range of mountains lit like torches at their snowy summits by a sun that had not yet risen over the plain.

Below the mountains, foothills rippled upward, green and pleasant and well-watered. People claimed this area and, so, he walked cautiously, concealing himself whenever he came near a campsite. Flowing between two stony bluffs as through a gate, a wide river adorned with white water emerged from the hills. Atsidi walked beside the river toward the high country.

The Thieving People lived in the mountains, wretched and abject. They came out of the high country each Fall fleeing the deep snow on the peaks. In the Spring, they returned to their haunts among the barren summits. Atsidi followed the trail made by this annual migration, a wide trampled path that ran alongside the river. At intervals, he found campsites, ordinarily where fresh-flowing streams gushed down from the bluffs to join the river rushing down from the mountains. At the campsites, brush had been cleared and heaped neatly as tinder for the next time the Thieving People were at that place. In a couple of the camps, Atsidi even found caches of dried meat and berries in pits faced with river-rock and covered with slabs of stone.

The river valley narrowed and became a gorge and, sometimes, Atsidi had to scale high steep ridges to climb around narrow places where there was room only for the cascading water in the canyon. Once, he ventured too close to a bank undercut by the river and fell in the rushing water. The water was so cold that it numbed him immediately and he wasn’t able to pull himself out of the stream for a couple of miles. In that way, he lost half a day’s walk and had to retrace his steps along the river toward the high peaks.

One afternoon, Atsidi ascended a serpentine path next to a white, thundering wall of falling water. He moved in a haze of rainbows on a kind of goat path slick with moisture. Above the waterfall, a great meadow rolled between snow-capped peaks and the river ran through it, bucking and leaping like a stag. Herds of bison grazed on the slopes and Atsidi could see the ribbon of the river above him, falling like a silver thread through a treeless and stony gash between peaks. Above the trees, the river narrowed to a wild, vertical creek. When the sun came out, the boulders glittered as if sprinkled with mirrors and beaten silver and the river plunging down from above was a ladder of golden light. Atsidi reached the place where a powerful, churning cascade ripped a hole in the side of the mountain wall and crashed into the main course of the river. This was the fork and he had to ford the river to follow the tributary stream steeply uphill. Crossing the swift water, Atsidi fell and cut himself badly, but it was cold on these treeless heights and he didn’t want to be caught in this stony, wet notch after dark. He hustled up to where the river shattered into a hundred rivulets diving downhill from terraces and ledges of ice. A narrow chute led him up to the pass and, then, to a rocky slope leading down to a long and narrow green lake held in the arms of the peaks. After so many days of climbing, Atsidi’s knees were unaccustomed to walking downhill and, so, after a few hours, they locked and he fell forward cutting himself again and leaving a splatter of blood on the sharp stones. Wolves smelled his blood and he saw them creeping through the thickets next to the stream that he followed down to the lake.

The trench that the lake occupied was three sleeps long and it was very cold at night. On the first day, a crow accompanied him, flitting forward as he walked to squawk at him from dead trees tilted over the path. The next day, the crow flew back and forth, leading him downhill but also flapping noisily back to hover behind him. Atsidi thought that he heard something crashing through the brush and that night he made a huge fire and huddled very close to it and didn’t allow the flames to burn down until after dawn. On the third day, the crow was still present and Atsidi knew that the bird was guiding a bear that was hunting him. Sometimes, he could smell the fetid stench of the bear’s matted fur and he heard the heavy creature knocking down branches and shrubs as it followed him. Atsidi gripped his obsidian knife close to his breast and walked so swiftly that his breath came in starts and fits. Sometimes, the crow seemed to tire of its pursuit and it screamed at him, coming so close as to brush his hair with its black wings. The bear-stink made the close thickets and narrow trails almost unendurable.

Atsidi saw something ahead of him. A woman was squatting at the side of the trail relieving herself. He saw that she carried a basket and that it was full of roots and berries. The woman saw him and stood up, covering her face with shame. Then, she darted up a hillside, swift as a big-horned ram and Atsidi scrambled upward after her. She shouted something and, then, men came from between the trees and wrestled Atsidi to the ground.

At first, the Thieving People treated Atsidi as a slave and made him haul wood and water. The sister of the woman that he had surprised on the trail took pity on him and several of her kin befriended him. After a year with the Thieving People, hunting in the high country, and, then, migrating down into the valleys in the Fall, Atsidi married the kind woman. They lived together very happily for two years and, then, she became pregnant. The woman died having the baby and the child was sickly. It was early Spring, the hungry month, when the people ate bark and boiled grass for soup and none of the other women in the clan were nursing or had milk for the tiny child. One night, the infant’s piteous crying stopped and Atsidi knew that the baby had died. An old woman bundled up the little corpse and put it high in a tree so that the wolves would not eat the body. But Atsidi knew the cruel cunning of the crows and imagined them stripping the dead baby of its swaddling clothes.

When the snow was gone from the trails, Atsidi left the Thieving People and continued on his way to Tsisnaajini. He walked without thinking, as if his feet knew the way. Some days, the paths were straight and he crossed mountain meadows between peaks pushed up from the green like white hogans. On other days, the way was intricate with canyons criss-crossing one another and making his way forward was like solving a riddle. The mountains were empty and he saw no people. Even the animals seemed to have fled and, for a great distance, he couldn’t even find game-trails crossing the broken country.

Then, he came to a great basin and saw the waves of white sand blown up against the wall of the high, white mountain. Atsidi knew that the sand was a glittering snare and, so, he took care not to come too close to the dunes. At night, winds howled off the sand, driving sage brush tumbling across the prairie and scattering the embers of his fire.

On the south side of the white mountain, little streams flowed down from the peak, watercourses in the folds of the land rising toward the white dome of the summit. Atsidi walked in the creek bed, sometimes wading in the water, or making his way upward through the willows and shrubs beside the stream. A hatch of delicate greenish insects filled the air with swarms whirling over the places where the water paused in its downward descent, ponding between stands of old trees. Fish broke the surface of the smooth water, kissing the air. Sometimes, the banks between the stream pressed close together and the water seemed to gush from between rocks so that Atsidi had to emerge from the bed of the creek. When he climbed up from the stream, he saw that he had come to a place quite high on the flanks of the mountain. Above him, forests dark with green shadow encircled the mountain, making a ring around the peak. On the rolling brown plain below, complex with shimmering mirages, Atsidi saw a little whorl of moving dust – perhaps, this marked one of the caravans of the Fierce People. He hurried up hill, conscious that eyes might be watching him, and, then, descended into the cool gorge again, picking his way around boulders until he came to a place where the stream was overhead, a lacy foam of water falling from pinnacle to pinnacle. The forest was all around, quivering in the wind blowing down from the heights.

Fire had burned in part of the forest, a fast-moving blaze that had left many trees charred but upright. Atsidi knew that it was dangerous to walk among the corpses of the trees – from the edge of the woods, he could hear the dead trees groaning and cracking and, even, crying out like a wounded rabbit when the wind stirred among them. So he moved up the mountain on the edge of the burn. Green shoots were driving their way upward through the ash and dragonflies topheavy with immense iridescent eyes sailed above the cinders, sometimes wafted upward on the wind, other times darting side to side to duck the breezes stirring there. Above the burn, Atsidi saw a bare knob of rock, a fist-shaped prominence that was both part of the mountain, but, also, set aside, it seemed, from the peak. He was mindful that if he ascended much higher, he might inadvertently desecrate the peak and, so, he decided he would make his vigil at that place. He scrambled around the up-thrust wart on the side of the mountain, climbing to a place where he could look up to behold the great white crown of the summit. He cleared pebbles and prickly plants away from a terrace just under the top of the prominence and sat there, looking upward and rejoicing in the mountain, his back against a warm slab of rock. A short distance from him, there was a stony slit into the mountain, a narrow crack the width of his arm that exhaled cool air. This was also a good thing that gladdened his heart.

Atsidi waited without moving. The afternoon lengthened into night. Stars appeared above him and marched solemnly across the dark field of the sky. The white snowfields of Tsinajiini were luminous and seemed to glow with some inner light.

At dawn, Atsidi took a pointed stone and pecked at the rock slab on which he had been leaning. He worked for an hour carefully, taking advantage of the raking light of early morning to assess his work. He chipped into the smooth slab of rock an image of the Mother Buffalo Goddess, her round head crowned with horns. When he had pecked this diagram into the stone, he leaned back against the rock and, although he struggled to stay awake, he was soon asleep in the warm sunlight.

An icy finger touched his face and his shoulder. Atsidi opened his eyes. Who was touching him? He stood up so quickly that he was dizzy for a moment. A monstrous shadow was cast across the limitless brown plain, darkness like a spider spreading long, jointed legs over the land. Atsidi turned to see the direction from which the shadow had come but the mountain was gone. Clouds the color of a rotting swamp covered the peak and swept down its white flanks. The clouds bulged with breasts, teats on the underside of the storm as on the belly of dog, a half-dozen or more and all of them erupting in flashes of lightning. More cold rain fell, whipping across Atsidi’s face and chest.

A flash blinded him and, then, he was engulfed in a burst of thunder that dropped him to his knees. The side of the mountain trembled and, then, another volley of lightning crashed into the hillside. In the blasts of light, Atsidi saw every crystal in the granite around him, flaring as if it were a torch. The mountain was angry and its fierceness was now all around him. He threw himself upon the slit om tje rock and inhaled its cold breath. Somehow, he had offended the peak and the great white god, adorned with precious shell, was hurling thunderbolts at him.

It was hard to measure the time, but, after a while, the volley of lightning moved elsewhere and, although the mountain still quaked and spit fire, Atsidi was no longer threatened. The air was full of sleet that lashed at him like a whip. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes.

Three thunder-beings stood above him on the sleet-whitened slant of mountain-side. The thunder-beings were taller than men and naked except for reddish clotted hair covering their breasts and shoulders. One of them stood upright while the other two crouched against the hillside. The standing creature was bedraggled and looked at Atsidi with large eyes showing blood at their corners. Atsidi could smell the decay in their matted fur, a stench that made them seem impossibly ancient. It was odd that the thunder-beings had come to this place and, now, seemed to be imploring him to help them in some way. One of the two crouching creatures reached over to touch the hip of the standing thunder-god. Atsidi was not afraid of them – instead, they seemed curiously abject. But gods appear in all kinds of guises and they can shift shape in a heartbeat and, so, Atsidi did not doubt that these were very great beings, dwelling in the highest places where men can not go. As he stretched out his hand to the thunder-beings, the standing creature turned and loped away, running as swiftly as an elk, and the other two rose and followed him so that they were soon lost in the swirling mists of the ice-storm.

The mountain had spoken and Atsidi made haste to descend her long, slippery flank.

After awhile, the sun came out and, behind him, the great peak was draped in dazzling white. Every vein in the mountain’s skin gushed with water. It became warm and Atsidi was tired and wet and, so, he made camp on a hillside overlooking a hollow that was now a slough where flocks of birds rose and fell above the cold, fragrant water.

Sunset lit the very top of the mountain like a torch. The stars sped by. In the dawn, the peak was like fruit ripening in the growing light.

Atsidi heard splashing and looked down to see that a monster had come to drink in the water puddled below his camp. The monster was large as an elk, taller with huge sinewy hind legs and stiff-looking bony forepaws. Atsidi blinked and wondered if he were still asleep. The strange beast approached the pond, paused and, then, stooped so that its foremost head could dip down and drink from the edge of the slough. The monster’s upper head and torso remained upright, fused to the creature’s spine. Atsidi inhaled and held his breath so that he would make no sound at all. The creature’s upper head twisted slightly and Atsidi could see that the thing had man-like arms and hands jointed at shoulders below its skull and eyes. The great flanks of the beast looked shiny and glistened a bit in the light of dawn. Something disturbed the monster and it raised its long snout above the water, snorting and, then, crying out in a high-pitched quivering squeal. Then, the monster raised its front head upward, water drizzling down from its mouth, shaking a little and sniffing at the air. The creature had two sets of eyes – those on the sides of the monster’s cylindrical lower head were big as a man’s fists and black. The eyes on the second head, perched on the torso embedded in the thing’s back were small, piggish, and they rolled in their sockets, showing white around the pupils as the thing looked about. Slowly, the creature backed from the water and, then, cantered away, trotting toward the blaze of light where the sun was rising.



Every creature known to Atsidi had a single nature. But this beast seemed double and had the nature of both man and beast. Atsidi trembled uncontrollably and, later, was sick.

In due time, Atsidi returned to his people. He lived many years and was a great man among them. In the kiva, he often told the men’s societies about the holy mountain and described the thunder gods that he had seen. But he never told anyone about the monster that he watched drinking water from pool of melt-water at the base of Tsinaajini. It had been a bad omen, possibly a hallucination, and no one would have believed him anyhow.

Spukhafte Fernwirkung

　

　

1.

Someone had done him an injustice, but Dieter or Dieter’s cogito, or whatever you want to call it, couldn’t specify the harm he had suffered. Clearly, the injury had something to do with a loss of dimension, a diminution in Dieter’s material existence – he felt as if he had once been fully rounded, robust, stuffed to overflowing in all dimensions whereas now Dieter was much circumscribed in his physical being, limited, it seemed, to a glowing point somewhere adjacent to the merest fragment of desiccated flesh, hairy on one side and bald on the other. Dieter’s cogito bitterly resented this change in his corporeal circumstances – he couldn’t get over it and harbored an intense desire for revenge. But his desire for revenge was impotent because Dieter had neither hands nor feet, nor eyes, nor tongue with which to speak and call all out for help – he had been reduced to some kind of essence and, therefore, wished that he listened more closely to the Herr Professor in his Gymnasium philosophy class: certainly, the old fellow had said something that might help him in his presently straitened situation, but, for the life of him, Dieter couldn’t recall enough about those metaphysics lectures to achieve any solace with respect to these thoughts. Nagging worries afflicted him and a vague sense of guilt and he was embarrassed that he had somehow lost his body – his flesh was misplaced and he wondered where he had left it and the more he thought about his plight, the more angry he became at the injustice of things and the more his lust for revenge flared. Unfortunately, Dieter’s yearning for vengeance expressed itself as hunger and a burning thirst – he needed an infusion of some substance into his cogito that seemed in danger of shrinking into an ember of consciousness smaller than the eye of a gnat.

Sometimes, he smelled a sweet odor, tobacco burning, it seemed, almost as if a cigar were being smoked in his presence. He smelled this with his not-nose, not so much detecting the odor with his senses, but, rather, feeling the burning tobacco (and sage) as a kind of moral category, as a motion in his soul. He heard words spoken in a language that was most definitely not German, a kind of chant, also perceived not with his ears, since he no longer possessed that apparatus, but as another kind of fixed idea, an obsessional tendency in his cogito. Then, for a moment, his raging hunger was assuaged; he was no longer thirsty. A kind of moist, refreshing gruel seeped through the pores in his mind – Dieter felt gratitude and a sense of well-being and, then, he seemed to sleep for a time.

Did Dieter dream? Perhaps. He recalled the old town in Saxony where he had been raised, school-boy pranks, a ramble in the woods, Einsamkeit, certain lines from Goethe and Schiller, a girl in a white blouse that he had admired from afar, too shy to speak to her. He recalled the Christ child in His cradle, a Tannenbaum, some hymns fluttering in the air, half-heard among the cold December winds. Anger roused him from these pleasant memories. He had to be fed again. His slim and flimsy cogito twisted into a Moebius ring and his thoughts looped around and around: there were snipers in the trees someone said: snipers in the trees although how could this be since the trees were barren, leafless, and a sniper hiding in a tree would not be hidden at all? The intelligence was all wrong. Aus der Traum – this was the end: bomb-blasts against the horizon, a Himmelsfahrtskommando against the Ami who had snipers hoisted high into the trees – how could this be since the trees were leafless and a sniper hiding in a tree would not be hidden at all? Intelligence had this wrong. Dieter’s boots crushed down the snow which made a creaking sound underfoot. Somewhere the sap in a tree caused it to burst hurling wood shrapnel in all directions. Behind the advancing column, the tank floundered, gone mad, apparently, turret spinning aimlessly side-to-side. There were snipers in the trees someone said and, then, the Gefreiter standing at the head of the column went down, a torch of blood spraying out of him. Snipers in trees and a flash-bang and, then, Dieter wondered whether it could have been otherwise, had there been some other way out of the labyrinth. His rage increased and so he was ravenously hungry and thirsty although this was odd because he had neither mouth nor gullet nor belly. Then, someone whispered to him in an ingratiating tone, words in a language that didn’t recognize, and he was suffused with watery gruel and felt the tobacco as an inflection in the gruel and this dissolved his wrath for a time so that he fell asleep once more...

　

2.

Joachin Archuleta was a little boy when the warriors went away to fight in the Great War in Europe. He recalled that the old men danced in the plaza. A cedar pole twelve feet tall and studded with short, sharp branches was set in the earth near the kiva. The Country Chief responsible for the pueblo’s foreign affairs ordered that the "Old Things" be brought forth from where they were hidden. "Old Things" was a circumlocution – the Country Chief did not want misunderstandings with the White people or the Spanish villagers and so an euphemism was used for the relics. The "Old Things" were knots of hair attached to pads of smoked or mummified flesh. They had been cut long ago in battles with Navajo and Jicarillo Apaches and belonged to all of the people. The "Old Things" were hung from the sharp branches on the cedar pole and the old men danced and sang to them. Then, the men who had enlisted as soldiers approached the cedar pole and danced themselves. They offered the Things a paste of corn meal and water and, then, asked them to help the warriors show bravery in facing the enemy.

When it came time for Joachin Archuleta to enlist to fight the Germans and the Japanese, the Governor of the Pueblo was a Mormon convert and he was very strict about religious affairs. Joachin asked about the ritual involving the Things that belonged to all the people. The Governor told him that the Things had been destroyed, cleansed first by being left on anthills for several days, and, then, buried in caches located in each of the four directions. Joachin was not certain that this was the proper way to dispose of Things invested with such powerful medicine. He asked the Governor if he was afraid of being haunted by ghosts. "There are no such things," the Governor proclaimed, but Joaquin could see that he was not so sure of his confident words.

In the Ardennes forest, on a very cold morning, Joachin’s platoon ambushed a column of German soldiers. The tanks pivoted their great guns and fired them, knocking down trees. Men floundered through the deep snow and were killed by bullets, fire from explosions, and bayonet. Joachin cut a scalp from an enemy that he had killed. He wrapped the scalp in a blanket and carried it with him for the rest of the campaign. He was relieved that he didn’t have to cut any more scalps.

When he returned to the pueblo, the Mormon governor was absent –he was serving as a legislator in Santa Fe. Joachin consulted with an old man about the scalp that he had cut in Belgium. The old man said that no one could remember exactly how to perform the scalp ceremony and that, certainly, the scalp could not be displayed on a cedar pole in the plaza as had been the custom many years before. "You must keep the scalp nourished by feeding it a paste of water and corn meal," the old man told Joachin. "If the scalp is not nourished, the warrior from which you cut it, will hang around the pueblo and haunt you and cause sickness in the children and women." Joachin massaged corn meal into the scalp and, then, took it into the desert to be purified by the ant soldiers. Then, he went into the mountains alone and fasted for ten days, living only water and corn meal.

Luiz Archuleta was Joachin’s nephew. Joachin showed him the scalp several times when he was a little boy and teenager. He showed him how the scalp had to be fed with a paste of ground corn and water. Joachin said that it was a great honor to possess a thing like the German soldier’s scalp and that it burdened him with many responsibilities. Joachin kept the scalp in a small iron box with his war medals, some bullets, and a German hand-grenade that had been defused.

Luiz Archuleta volunteered to fight in Vietnam. The people danced in his honor before he left for Basic Training but there was no display of scalps. Joachin, who was ill, invited Luiz to his trailer house and showed him the scalp cut from the German. "I’ll ask him to help you," Joachin said. "The Germans were great warriors." "How will he understand me?" Luiz asked. "Don’t you have to speak to him in German." "He will understand," Luiz said.

In Basic Training, the other troops called Luiz "Geronimo" or "Chief." Luiz didn’t mind "Chief" but chaffed under the nickname "Geronimo" – "Geronimo was an Apache war-chief," Luiz told the other men. "My people are the enemies of the Apaches." The other soldiers didn’t understand the distinction and kept using the nickname and, after a while, Luiz became accustomed to being called "Geronimo."

In a firefight, Luiz shot and killed an enemy. His comrades sometimes cut off the ears and toes of dead enemies for souvenirs and they asked Luiz if he was going to take the dead man’s scalp. Luiz thought of how his uncle had fed the German’s scalp on corn meal and water at least once a week and how he had massaged the paste of cornmeal into the mummified flesh and he recalled that if these things were not done, the ghost of the dead warrior would loiter and be vengeful and, even, perhaps, sicken women and children. "It’s too great a responsibility," Luiz said and he left the body of the dead soldier alone.

The White Mountain

　

Andrew, with angel wings, hovered over an icy canyon. An avalanche made the canyon echo. Far away, there was a desperate high-pitched sound, as if someone were screaming. The white mountain rose on both sides of the deep blue canyon, faceted with glistening glaciers. The sun slid under a wet-looking cloud shaped like a ragged cotton swab. Icy snowflakes filled the air.

Andrew glided down into a little forest of evergreens swaddled in a hollow of the mountain. He came close to the trees and the flutter of his wings knocked snow off the branches. The snow clumped on the trees dropped heavily, and silently, into the drifts. Closer than the faint screaming, Andrew heard music – ZZ Top’s Sharp Dressed Man.

A little stream glided toward Andrew, leaping and splashing between tufts of snow. Andrew flapped his wings to fly next to the stream. Some playful otters with huge black eyes came out of the water and clambered onto the stream-bank. Andrew made a snowball and pitched it at the otters and they smiled at him and, then, tobogganed on their bellies down into the cold water. Their bodies were so sleek that they didn’t make a splash as they dove into silvery-grey stream.

A mammoth trumpeted above him, standing like a great monument on a pulpit-shaped hilltop apart from the white dome of the mountain. Andrew ascended to investigate. The mammoth also had dark, big eyes like a puppy and, when he approached, it wagged its tail at him. Andrew seized some of the falling snow, and kneaded it into a ball – then, he threw the snowball at the mammoth. The big wooly animal danced merrily in the snow and where it set its great feet, puffy avalanches plunged down the sides of the mountain.

Near the wooly mammoth, Andrew saw a little red door built into the side of an overhanging cliff. The door frightened him and, so, he climbed higher in the air, ascending to a point where he could look around and see the whole snowy world – the forests and the glaciers and the peak itself with its four-lobes like a lucky clover. Cradled in the mountain’s arms, Andrew saw a blue-green lake where an armada of small, wind-sculpted icebergs were floating. He descended, wings fluttering only a little, and, then, hovered over the chilly water. Playful otters were swimming in the water like small dolphins and they looked up at him. Andrew dropped down and, for a moment, slid through the water himself. To his surprise, it seemed very warm and was swirling and stank of medicine and bits of his skin sloughed-off so that he screamed. He rolled over on his back to look at the serene peak and the cold heights where the wind was blowing little gusts of snow about and this calmed him. Then, he was high in the sky again. A couple of wooly mammoth’s raised their black, leathery trunks to greet him. He dive-bombed the mammoths feeling the cold air rushing around his cheeks, then, dropped into a ravine where otters were sliding one after another down the mountain side. The little red door was in front of him. Although he tried to avoid the door, it loomed before him and, then, opened inward.

The nurse removed Andrew’s virtual reality headset. Another nurse shut off the music booming in the debridement suite. Andrew no longer had wings and, in fact, wasn’t Andrew any more. Now, he was just little Andy, a nine-year old boy who had been burned half to death in a house fire. He was crouching in a steel basin where water foamed around the places where his skin had been pecked away. A greasy pool of bloody eschar filled a stainless steel tray next to the bath. Little Andy trembled.

The nurse said: "Now that wasn’t so bad was it."

Andy’s neck was burned and his muscles exposed and it stung when he moved his head. But he nodded slightly: "Not so bad," he said.

Stylus

　

"Send more Chuck Berry."

Steve Martin (April 22, 1978 – third season SNL)

　

　

　

1.

The Beautiful Boy entered the country comatose and shrink-wrapped in an anti-viral cocoon. He passed through customs insensate, like a crate of bottled olives or a case of anchovies in tins. An ambulance brought him to the Children’s Hospital at the harbor. His treatment was sponsored by the local Shriners Club in cooperation with Rotary International. The child was famous: Hollywood celebrities had admired him on Oprah and there were pictures of him on the front pages of newspapers and his Discourses in a Time of Conflict was climbing the New York Times bestseller list. He was supposed to have stopped a war in some country where war was the only thing that the people had. Before he fell ill, the Beautiful Boy had been awarded a prestigious prize and invited to Oslo. But sickness overcame him and he came to America for treatment unconscious and not expected to live.

The Beautiful Boy was not beautiful when I saw him. He was tiny with blotchy brown skin, blemished as if he had been scarred by innumerable spatters of hot grease. His hair had fallen out in clumps imparting to his skull a patched and motley pattern. The boy’s limbs looked fragile, like the crooked appendages of an ant or embattled centipede. The top half of his face was wizened, ancient-looking with jaundiced eyes rolled back in deep purplish craters under his wrinkled forward. But beneath the crest of his aquiline nose, the boy’s lips had ballooned into floppy scarlet combs like those you see on a rooster and his cheeks were puffed-out as if he were hiding food in them. The boy’s abdomen was distended above the brittle cage of his ribs and his buttocks were covered with yellow, moist ulcers.

"It is kwashiokor," the hospitalist told us during rounds, "complicated by an idiopathic infection that we think is viral." Kwashiokor, the hospitalist told us, means "sickness of the deposed child" in the language of Ghana. Sometimes, the syndrome is called "the disease of the second child." This means that the nursing mother can produce only enough protein to successfully nourish one child – accordingly, kwashiokor afflicts the child ousted from her breast or, perhaps, the second child who sucks but doesn’t get enough nutrition or, I suppose, both children if the mother is unable to choose between them, a maternal decision that is one of life or death. "Thankfully, we don’t see this much anymore in developed countries," the hospitalist said.

"So he was nursing?" a female intern asked.

"No – in fact he was an orphan," the hospitalist replied. "He’s actually 13 or 14 years old."

"He seems to be only three or four," the woman observed.

"It’s the nature of the illness," the hospitalist said.

The room was posted as infectious and we gawked at the sick child from a distance. The nurses wore white masks and the respirator sighed with a sound like wind through a barren, leafless tree and, outside, fog covered the harbor and the city so that we could see only shadows and an occasional light rotating through the gloom.

　

2.

It was about this time that there was a disturbance in the realm of the Forms. By this, I mean that the Platonic essences hypothesized to give meaning and order to our world showed signs that they were weakening and losing their authority. Certain more complex theorems in Euclidean geometry no longer held true and could not be proven any longer. Things that had once been equal to one another now were subtly unequal and principles that we thought to be constitutional could no longer be imagined with enough clarity to be implemented. Critics and jurists complained that no one knew what justice meant any more and, although the word "truth" could still be spoken, the application of that term had become uncertain – it seemed to mean whatever each individual speaker intended, but there was no common understanding. In fact, many things held in common now could not be established or seemed to have gone missing. Distances fluctuated – sometimes, the odometer told us that it was twenty miles by highway from one town to another; but on other occasions, the distance was measured as 17 miles or 25 and no one could determine whether the defect was in the world or the measuring instruments. Because measurements had become unreliable, prices fluctuated in unpredictable ways and the value of things seemed to have become ad hoc guided by markets that alternately surged or imploded. Borders collapsed because the lines drawn to define them were no longer lines, but rather fields, geometric anomalies, contested zones irradiated by uncouth energies. The failure of the borders meant that our cities were filled with strange people who didn’t speak our language and couldn’t understand our customs. Some of the interlopers were summoned into court for deportation, but these proceedings invariably failed because durations had become unstable and it was difficult to know when the litigants were supposed to appear and, if by chance, people did attend court when required to do so the Judges couldn’t rule because the laws upon which they were suppose to rely could no longer be found or, if found, could not be understood.

The seasons switched places and some people aged very quickly. Others didn’t age at all. The dead didn’t return to life, but the sick were often restored to health with sudden, even alarming, speed. Conversely, birds in flight sometimes dropped out of the sky dead and, indeed, not just dead but corrupted, decomposed almost to skeletons. Tremors shook the world and, sometimes, it seemed that the solid earth was about to vaporize into patches of smoke and cloud. The seas developed currents criss-crossing the oceans in ways that disrupted commerce – cargo ships bound for Senegal found themselves docking in Singapore and the jet stream tilted upward to boost airplanes away from the earth and into orbits deadly to their passengers. Constellations on which men had relied for tens of thousands of years went into hiding.

Curiously, these effects didn’t disturb most of us. Life went on only somewhat more unpredictably than before. Children were born and lovers made love and deals were done and the old among us became bright-eyed and grimly prophetic because they had forgotten the past but could remember the future with the greatest precision. It was the great era of art on earth. The human imagination was freed from the bondage that it had suffered under the tyranny of the Forms. Everything seemed possible. A hundred Shakespeares were at work simultaneously and their creations illumined this new, restless and unsettled existence with an eerie brilliance.

　

　

3.

People in shabby coats two- or three-times too large for them gathered in the hospital waiting room. They were disciples of the Beautiful Boy praying for his recovery. Sometimes, this crowd was so great that the corridors leading to Urgent Care were blocked and gurneys unloaded from ambulances were delayed in transit to the ER. Then, the police had to be called and the Beautiful Boy’s followers were expelled onto the street where they sang hymns and prayed with hands uplifted to the sun and blocked the ambulances bringing the sick and wounded to our hospital. It wasn’t a protest but more of a vigil and the opinion of our lawyers was that the First Amendment didn’t apply to vigils although case authority for this was murky and couldn’t be researched because the definitions of relevant terms had become as elusive as quicksilver. Police cordons were established and the situation was managed as best as possible without recourse to the Courts.

As the days passed, more and more people read the Boy’s Discourses and the immigrants in their battered, ill-fitting coats were joined by new adherents to the sect: Hollywood movie stars sometimes could be glimpsed amidst the faithful and housewives from the suburbs with students, the sort of earnest well-meaning folks you might expect at a Black Lives Matter fund raiser. I suppose the breadth of people represented was inspiring in certain ways but it was a nuisance to those of us who had to push our way through the singing and chanting crowds to get to work.

During this time, the Beautiful Boy remained comatose, although this state was now maintained artificially in order that the physicians could use aggressive therapies to treat the boy’s various fulminating infections. Every couple of days, the doctors would rouse the boy from his coma, look into his eyes, and grip his little hands. The boy’s eyes were said to be startling, immense and the color of green jade. It was thought that the intensity of his gaze related to all of the suffering that he had witnessed.

The Beautiful Boy came from what the newspaper and cable networks called "a failed State." It was a tropical land with volcanoes and jungles and beautiful beaches of white and black sand that appeared in photographs as the backdrop for sodden, shapeless corpses washed ashore after execution at sea. Both the rebels and the government had helicopters, although not in sufficient numbers to defeat one another, and, after dark, both sides transported prisoners a dozen miles out into the gulf and, then, threw them overboard to the sharks. The sharks had long since become surfeited on human flesh, a greasy and insalubrious diet that they now rejected, and so the bodies washed into shore and could be photographed documenting the brutality of one side or the other depending upon the coverage of the moment.

As far as anyone knew, the perpetual troubles in the Beautiful Boy’s homeland had arisen as a result of a well-meaning program of foreign aid. Before the first war in Iraq, the United States government discovered that contractual obligations required the military to purchase 800 small white pickup trucks, durable workhorses equipped with four-wheel drive, from a Japanese manufacturer. The contract had been negotiated during a previous war and forgotten about until the Japanese firm demanded payment and threatened delivery. The State Department routed the trucks to the Beautiful Boy’s homeland where they were to be distributed to remote villages and used in the production of artisanal brands of coffee. (At that time, efforts were underway to reduce the amount of land in the country devoted to narcotics horticulture.) The drug lords commandeered the trucks from the villagers shortly after their arrival. The State Department urged the government to military action to seize the vehicles that had gone missing. Troops dispatched from the capitol made a few desultory attempts to retrieve the fleet of white pickups but the drug cartels were heavily armed and easily repulsed the government forces. Under pressure to deliver results from the field, the army commander uncovered (or, perhaps, manufactured) evidence that the villagers had illegally sold the trucks to the narco-traffickers. Villagers accused of this treachery were rounded-up, summarily tried, and, then, executed. The executions were high-profile and intended to deter the villagers from cooperation with the drug lords, but, of course, had the opposite effect. Many young men from the villagers joined the narco-traffickers and an armed insurgency took shape. Some villages opted to assist the insurgents – these places were attacked by the government and the men taken onto helicopters to be "disappeared." Other villages took heed of the government’s reprisals and, so, announced allegiance to the capitol. Those towns were raided by the insurgents and the young men loaded at gunpoint onto rebel helicopters to be "disappeared." And, so, it went for twenty years, an endless, futile conflict that resulted in tens of thousands of orphans, one of whom was the Beautiful Boy.

The Boy had been raised in an orphanage of tin-roofed huts built on high wooden stilts to keep out the ants and scorpions. The compound was surrounded by concertina wire fences to deter casual raiding parties and defended by boy-soldiers armed with machete knives and sharpened hoes. A wealthy Seventh Day Adventist from the American Midwest who had made his fortune manufacturing garbage trucks supported the place and provided it with teachers and, even, a couple of nurses. The orphans housed in the place were taught to read and write and do some arithmetic and the most industrious of them were exported to America where they were given Green Cards so that they could work in the Seventh Day Adventist’s factory. Compelled to the hellish blood-feuding in the surrounding countryside, the orphanage was relatively idyllic. The children were taught to pray and Seventh Day Adventist missionaries proselytized them at intervals, although Catholic and Lutheran evangelicals were also permitted access to the flock. Discarded red and blue shipping containers in the port city were hauled up into the mountains to provide administrative offices for the operation. Several of the shipping containers were equipped with pianos so that the children could be taught to sing hymns and the folk songs popular in their country. It was in those resonant steel chambers that the Beautiful Boy first showed that he was a prodigy.

The evidence is now posted on You-Tube for all to see. Somehow, the Boy learned to play the principle themes from Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto No. 2. You can watch a wobbly cell-phone video of him seated at a big, dilapidated piano, scarcely able to reach across the keyboard in the cavernous shadow of the steel shipping container. His jade-green eyes seeming to shift color and intensity, the boy bows over the piano and his hands move like spiders over the white ivory – the performance isn’t flawless, but was sufficiently accomplished to allow professors at Juliard and Eastman to identify the melody and counterpoint as composed by Bach. Other cell-phone videos posted on-line show the Boy pounding out the theme from Beethoven’s Cavatina for String Quartet (Opus 130), played in a hitherto unknown transcription for piano – the identity of the composer who had transcribed the Cavatina for solo keyboard remains unknown. The Boy also played a suite of themes from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, also in a transcription that was blunt, practical, and no-nonsense, a schematic diagram of the music but one, nonetheless, eloquent enough to convey the essence of the work. The prodigy played popular music as well, some hymns and show-tunes, a couple of Christmas carols, and, something, that sounded suspiciously like Louis Armstrong’s version of the "Melancholy Blues" mingled with riffs from "Johnny B. Goode." All of that music was recorded by admirers on their cell-phones and, of course, I watched a few of his performances on You-Tube, although I never finished any of them, and, most of the snippets in any event were fragments – people were sufficiently interested in the prodigy to record a few minutes of his playing but not the whole piece that he performed. The piano wasn’t perfectly tuned and, at least, one key didn’t work resulting in strange inflections when he played and the hollow steel interior of the shipping container that had once contained small white pickup trucks made the piano sound like the ringing of a bell in a deep and echoing cave.

In the dialogue Meno, Plato’s hero, Socrates demonstrates that all important things that we know are merely memories, recollections of things learned in earlier lives, or vague memories of our encounters with the Forms. In support of this argument, Socrates contrives that a slave boy with no knowledge of geometry prove aspects of the Pythagorean theorem. As far as anyone knew, there were no professional musicians associated with the orphanage where the Beautiful Boy was raised. And, so, people wondered where the Boy had learned to play his peculiar repertoire. No one, as far as I know, suggested that the miraculous child was merely recalling those melodies or that the compositions that he played had been learned in an earlier incarnation. Perhaps, this was because the Forms had begun to blur and loosen and no longer held sway over the world. The most commonly accepted explanation was that a specific world-class cellist, once a principal in the capitol city’s philharmonic orchestra but now long "disappeared" in the country’s civil strife, had taken refuge in the orphanage and, perhaps, led the choir there for a few years and that the Boy had learned from that man. But this theory was admittedly speculative.



4.

Would his skills as a musical prodigy alone have made the Boy a famous celebrity? I think that’s doubtful. The world seems pretty much crammed with musical prodigies, particularly in this recent flowering of the arts. No, the Beautiful Boy was famous because of an event that occurred in the war in his country.

About eighteen months before he was brought to our hospital, insurgent forces raided the orphanage. In the blaze of noon, a half-dozen dented and rusting pick-up trucks, formerly white but now painted over with revolutionary slogans and patched with decals of cannabis-smoking skulls, appeared at the perimeter of the camp. Heavy-caliber machine guns were mounted on tripods bolted to the trucks’ pick-up boxes. The insurgents shot down the child-soldiers holding their machetes and sharpened hoes, killed several of the orphanage administrators, and, then, dragged the nurses into the woods to be raped. The rebels offered the kids in the camp the opportunity to join the insurgency and, even, let them execute a couple of the matrons responsible for discipline in the facility. At an assembly gathering the orphans together, the Beautiful Boy stood up against the rebels and harangued them. The leader of the insurgent raiders, a one-eyed commander with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher awkwardly slung over his back threatened the Boy with an axe. He told the onlookers that he intended to behead the Boy for his resistence. The Boy showed no fear and calmly continued with his admonitions, delivering, it seems, a sort of sermon. When the rebel leader raised the axe to strike the Boy dead, someone shot him. In the cell-phone video showing this encounter, you can see that blood and brains from the rebel leader spatters the Boy but that this doesn’t stop him from speaking. He continues to talk in a swift, high-pitched voice, peeping like a little bird that will not be silenced. After a few minutes, one of the rebels hoists him up on his shoulders and teetering there the Boy continues to speak and, then, everyone is applauding and dancing by jumping up and down and the person holding the cell-phone tilts it to show rebels casting down their arms, rifles and grenades dropped in the dust of the compound as the Boy continues to speak.

The rebels carried the Boy in triumph to a nearby village and the child spoke there again, calling for peace and reconciliation, and, then, more weapons were cast aside and the rebels joined with other forces and made a procession to the provincial capital. From the provincial capital, the Boy was brought to the capitol city itself and, there, he spoke to a hundred-thousand people, maybe more, and so the war in his homeland ended, both sides pledging a cease-fire.

Critics have been quick to remark that the cease-fire hasn’t been perfect. It is true that both sides have breached the peace in some ways and there have been some reprisals. But, by and large, the war is over and the cease-fire has held.

Six months after peace was established, the Beautiful Boy fell sick and was transported to our hospital where I was part of the team caring for him.

　

5.

The immigrant lady that cleans my house had seen cell-phone pictures, posted on You-Tube, of the Beautiful Boy confronting the burly one-eyed rebel leader. "Do you know what he preaches?" she asked me. I shook my head. She reproached me: "You can not treat what you don’t understand." And so saying, she asked me if I wanted her to translate what the Boy had told the insurgent troops.

My cleaning lady is a sweet person, very kind and soft-spoken, and she doesn’t usually made requests and so I asked her to tell me what the Boy was saying. She turned on my TV and found the You-Tube video of the Boy’s confrontation with the one-eyed rebel leader. Squatting near the screen and tilting her head toward the sound, she interpreted for me, putting her words for what the boy was saying.

"He says we must not disgrace ourselves or the message will not be told. He calls us travelers, people on a mission. We are the grabacion de oro – that’s what he says. The grabacion de oro – it means the recording of something in gold. He tells the soldiers that and they ask him questions. The recording in gold. He tells us to be good because we are made good and messengers, yes, messengers, like angels telling of the good. Some of them believe but others don’t. So he repeats that he is not the only messenger, that they are all messengers, that everyone is like an angel. He says the recording will be heard. One day, someone will listen. Some of them shout that they understand him. The night is dark, he says. The ground is cold – that’s what he says. He talks to them about the night and the cold and, then, how the sun will rise and how its rays go forth and that this is also the recording of gold – that is, the yellow beams of light from the rising sun. That they must put aside their guns and their hate and be obedient to their message, because they are all, each and every one of them messengers —"

And, so, she spoke for ten minutes and I listened without listening because it was all, more or less, the same, the ranting of a street preacher in a language that I wouldn’t have understood if it had been English, but this was not English exactly, rather an outpouring in which the high-pitched squeaky voice was all entangled with her rich molasses contralto. I nodded my head to signify interest but the great disturbances in the world occupied my thought and, to tell the truth, I was tired of thinking of the Beautiful Boy, tired of implementing the doctors’ orders over his insensate form at the center of all those radiating feeding tubes and catheters, monitors and IV lines, a whole network of connections and splices of which he was the center.

Something had stabilized. I didn’t drive through any dark zones on the way to the hospital and the parking place designated for me, a spot that had migrated from one corner to the other of the ramp, was exactly where I had left it. The fog had lifted a little and I could see into the harbor where the ships and the piers and the overhead cranes were all locked together in a blue and rust-colored medallion swathed in cloud like bandage.

The Beautiful Boy was sitting upright, a small brown-yellow totem in the center of the big, sprawling and disorderly hospital bed. Two nurses were inclined toward him and he seemed to be teaching them. Two elderly patients walking with their mobile IV units stood at the threshold of the room gazing at the Boy and the nurses. The decontamination suits were lying on the floor, inert and stiff as two cadavers.

"What’s happening?" I said. The room was still marked as infectious.

"It’s wonderful," one of the nurses said. "He’s awake."

The Beautiful Boy beamed at me and I saw the vitreous jade glinting between his eyelids. He was transmitting once more and his signal was vivid and complex, even orchestral. There was an alarm in the hallway. Several doctors pressed into the room and orderlies appeared to lead away the elderly spectators who were now in the way and I stood there, baffled at this sudden turn of events.

More people pressed into the room, unmasked and without protection, even though it was forbidden.

The Boy spoke feebly at first and, of course, I couldn’t understand him although the nurse with the brown skin seemed to hear what he was saying. She rose to her feet. The Boy was whispering at first, but, then, his speech became more distinct and I heard that his voice was cracking a little, wobbling between two different ranges, slipping from falsetto down to a deeper tone. _– It makes sense, I thought, his voice is changing. Then, other overtones resounded in the room and, for a moment, it seemed as if a great multitude of voices were speaking through the Boy’s lips and throat: a thousand tongues resounded there and I heard sounds that were like ringing a bell. The auditory hallucination passed. The little boy trembled as if he were cold. Someone hastened to put a blanket over his slender shoulders.

Relays of doctors arrived. The infection was gone. The Boy was moved into another room in the general ward. The streets outside the hospital were crowded with well-wishers. People brought stuffed animals and Bibles and set them against the wall of the hospital. The dull green sea-water lapping against the piers in the harbor smelled of roses.

I talked to the brown-skinned nurse in the hallway. "Dark was the night," she said. "Cold was the ground."

"What is that?"

"His words," she told me.

6.

The Forms returned, wobbly at first and uncertain on their feet, and took their place on their thrones. If I looked at a church, I saw through it to the Taj Mahal or Chartres. Dolphin came into the harbor and showed us their bright and flashing fins and I thought I saw an elephant on a side-street. In the park, a very old man sat on a bench next to a young woman holding a pink newborn baby against her breast. Standing beside the bench, there was a young man flush with the pride of youth and a middle-aged couple with sad eyes. All people in the world seemed to be gathered before me. The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its radius became irrational once more, infinite streams of numbers not repeating in any discernible pattern and radiating out across the universe. What had once been intelligible became intelligible again. Calibrations were confirmed.

　

7.

The phrase "dark was the night, cold was the ground" referred to something, but I couldn’t recall the source of those words. I looked them up on Wikipedia and found that these phrases were the name of a song by a Gospel blues singer named Blind Willy Johnson. The song is played with a knife on a bottleneck slide guitar and was recorded in 1927.

The astrophysicist Carl Sagan put a recording of the song on something called the Voyager Golden Record. This record was shot into space to announce the existence of humanity to the universe. The plaintive song by Blind Willy Johnson was one of 27 musical pieces stored on the record as exemplars of human culture. The record was also encoded with images of art, landscapes, anatomical diagrams, and pictures of architecture. Mathematical equations, chemical formulae, and schematics showing the location of our Earth in the Milky Way and, also, in our solar system were made part of the presentation. The record is shaped like an LP, 12 inches in diameter, and made of an alloy of gold. Instructions showing how to play the record are inscribed on the disk’s inverse side and a golden stylus was, also, provided.

The Golden Record was shot into space on the Voyager One probe in 1977. A duplicate Golden Record was dispatched to the Universe on the Voyager Two probe launched later in the same year.

Carl Sagan was asked about the inclusion of the instrumental piece by Blind Willie Johnson. He said: "The song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without a man or woman somewhere facing a similar plight."

　

8.

Studies began in the last week of his admission. Therapy was replaced by testing. The chart at the Boy’s bedside was, now, restricted access and, then, replaced by a computer tablet encrypted against everyone except for the new chief medical officer, a neurologist imported from the Naval Hospital at Twentynine Palms. The medical officer was a lithe, dark-skinned man and he spoke Spanish in a very soft voice and he was always accompanied by two male nurses who wore dark sunglasses and had strapped to their hips small weapons. At first, the medical officer attended the Beautiful Boy’s care conferences, sitting to the side, away from the table where the participants were meeting. He took copious notes on a small silver computer that he unfurled on his lap. Each day, the content of the care conferences became less and less substantive and, finally, someone asked if there was another conference regularly convened in which real data and chart entries withheld from us were discussed. The medical officer from Twentynine Palms smiled and said that this was a matter of national security and, therefore, off-limits as a topic of conversation. The Beautiful Boy’s treating physicians within the Children’s Hospital protested and the military doctor said that he respected their position and would meet with them privately after the conference. Shortly, thereafter, the protesting doctors were assigned other patients in the hospital or, even, transferred to facilities across the harbor.

The Boy was moved from the general ward into a suite of rooms clogged with electronic equipment and computer terminals. Apparently, anomalies had been detected in the Boy’s metabolism. In the cafeteria, radiology technicians whispered that unusual imaging equipment had been installed to monitor the patient’s electromagnetic aura – his L-field or Life-field as it was called. "They are treating him as some kind of broadcaster," one of the technicians told me.

The technician pointed to an Asian man sitting alone in a corner of the dining room. The man was sending a text-message on his phone. "That is a quantum medicine specialist," the technician told me. "We are supposed to cooperate with him with regard to our studies."

"What is a quantum medicine doc?" I asked.

"You got me," the technician said. "Some kind of nuclear medicine, I assume."

It was rumored that the boy was a source of bioluminescence. He was said to be emitting biophotons across a broad spectrum. The biophoton field was reported to be of unusual density and extent.

A couple years later, a friend told me that he was hiking in the peninsular mountains forty-five miles away and, atop a windy ridge, came up some soldiers wrestling with a big convex dish. The dish looked like the sort of thing that you might use to harvest satellite TV signals. When the men were asked about their assignment, they shrugged and said that it was subject to security clearance but had something to do with measuring biophoton emissions from a source in the bay.

　

9.

I don’t know when the Boy physically left the hospital. At the time of his discharge, he was sequestered from everyone except the military officer’s immediate staff. I assume he was whisked away in the middle of the night.

Litigation ensued. Several collateral relatives from the country where the boy had been raised appeared and filed lawsuits in Federal Court. The Boy was still a minor and the motive was, perhaps, related to the income stream of royalties from sales of the Beautiful Boy’s bestselling book. Various child welfare agencies intervened in the cases consolidated in Court and, then, government lawyers filed pleadings seeking to move the matter to a military tribunal convened in the old interment camp at Guantanamo Bay. The ACLU and other watchdog agencies also initiated lawsuits and there was a barrage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.

You would have to be a lawyer to keep track of these cases and I can’t tell you the outcome except to say that the Boy emerged from protective custody, now sleek and healthy and wearing expensive clothing. He toured the country as a motivational speaker and promised a sequel to his book. The Beautiful Boy appeared on all the major talk shows and was a fixture on Oprah and his agents, even, found him roles in a half-dozen movies. He made an appearance as a voice-actor on The Simpsons and hosted SNL not once but three times. The last time I saw him on TV, he had become just a little bit stout and I detected a slight pot-belly under his belt.

While visiting Australia, the Boy was involved in a bad car accident and it was reported that he had died. A comedy writer in New York claimed that the Beautiful Boy had been a hoax from beginning to end and that he had ghost-written the bestseller. Celebrities come and go and most people forgot about the Boy. But I had been part of the team that sheltered and cared for him when he was first brought into the United States in a coma and so I kept his memory in my heart.



10.

In Reno, there’s a cult that worships the memory of the Beautiful Boy. At one time, there were several thousand members, but now the group is much diminished in size. These people maintain a website where you can read the story of the Beautiful Boy and see cell-phone videos of him playing the piano or preaching the Gospel of peace to the one-eyed rebel leader with the RPG. Footage of the young man joshing with Oprah or performing the opening monologue on Saturday Night Live is not available – those images are still exclusively licensed to the networks.

The cult’s website maintains that the Beautiful Boy was an entity equivalent to Carl Sagan’s "Golden Record." A great and powerful civilization felt itself alone in the Universe. The scientists in that civilization worked together to create a signal to announce their existence to other sentient beings in the cosmos. Everything that was important about their culture, they recorded, encoding mountains of data into a single-source emitter. The Beautiful Boy was that emitter, a being designed to broadcast a message to the all the galaxies and worlds in the Universe.

The civilization created the most complete record that it could of its culture and sent this monument forth as the Beautiful Boy. Wherever he went, the Beautiful Boy emitted the signal encoded within him, casting forth an enormous electromagnetic field comprised of reality-simulating biophotons. The world in which we live and everything around us is this signal emitted by the Beautiful Boy. Some powerful alien intelligence is now reading the biophotons played-back by the Boy. This is the reason that we exist.

I don’t know that I believe this theory. Some people did once, but their numbers are diminishing.

Dutch Colonial

　

A couple weeks after we moved from our apartment, the neighbor lady came to my house and sat on the porch with me. I set aside the book that I had been reading and looked at her. It was a nice Sunday afternoon with kids playing in the alleys and lawn mowers in the distance. The lady welcomed me to the neighborhood. Then, she told me the histories of the houses on the block. There had been several divorces and one foreclosure. She pointed to a couple homes and said that children had died in them. Although the neighbor lady was middle-aged, she wore her hair like a teenager, a long greying pony tail that fell to her hips.

One of the homes where a child had died was at the end of the block, five lots away, a big white Dutch Colonial. "It’s a sad place," the neighbor lady said. She didn’t say anything about my house and, so, I thought that, at least, no children had died there. But, later, I wondered if the woman was simply sparing me.

While the weather was still nice, my wife and I invited people to come to a house-warming party. Two days before the shindig, I hurt my back moving a couch and we had to cancel. We rescheduled for six weeks later, but, then, my wife miscarried and we canceled again. On this occasion, we couldn’t give any reasons for withdrawing our invitations and, I think, some people took offense. After another six weeks, we tried again to invite people over and, this time, there was no emergency. But only about a third of our friends invited actually came.

---

---

　

The Dutch Colonial house at the end of the block was vacant for more than a year. Every two weeks a crew of three swarthy men wearing baseball caps drove up to the place in an old pick-up truck full of rakes and shovels and lawnmowers. The men mowed the lawn and trimmed the trees and pulled thistles out of the flower beds. Once, I tried to talk to them while I was walking my dog. None of them could understand a word that I said.

The men came in the Winter as well and used snowblowers to keep the sidewalks and driveway clear. On thaw days, the snow piled up along the sidewalk melted a little and, in the evening, when I walked my dog, the water froze. Once I almost fell on the ice. The house’s big hipped roof reminded me a barn and its windows were always dark. The siding was fresh and new and I could see that the roof had also been recently re-shingled. I wondered if insurance money had been paid when the child died.

Night comes early in the winter in this part of the world and the house was a big, inert shadow, hulking over its lawn and the snow banks and the sidewalk that was sometimes treacherous. One evening, I thought I saw a light in one of the upstairs windows, but, when I looked more closely, it was just a reflection of a streetlamp down the block.

Houses need care. If you don’t take care of your house, it will topple down around you. I found out that there was no mixing valve in my plumbing. Sometimes, water flowed into my bath or shower that was scalding hot. My wife burned the sole of her foot and, so, I had a plumber install the valve. A few days later, I saw the neighbor lady. She had noticed the plumber’s van pulled up next to my home. I told her about the mixing valve. She seemed surprised and said: "You mean that was never fixed?" I replied: "It’s fixed now." She winked at me: "That’s good," she said.

When it was Spring, someone moved into the Dutch Colonial House. The first thing that happened was that a big truck marked with the name of an out-of-town landscaper arrived. The truck had a long flatbed used mostly, I think, for hauling sod. On the flatbed, a big boulder was sitting. I don’t know how the men moved the boulder from the truck onto the front lawn of the house, but, somehow, this was accomplished. The boulder was pinkish granite with a pale quartz ledge running around its mid-section like a belt. The boulder sat at the corner of the lawn, where the sidewalk made a right angle and it looked vaguely defensive, like a lion placed there to defend the home.

Next, the people in the house tore down its shabby little garage behind the hedges in the alleyway. A crew of workers came and erected a three-car garage and put electric lights in brass sconces between each of the garage-doors. The garage was the same color as the house with trim that also matched. It was a very nice garage and people speculated about what it had cost.

I never saw anyone at the house except for the lawn-crew or the men who built the garage. At night, the home’s windows were lit, but I couldn’t see into them. Earlier, I had noticed work-men installing new windows on the first floor. The windows were glazed with a white-finish on the glass so that you could not look into the house. This seemed odd and unneighborly. I had drapes – if I wanted to look out onto the street and sidewalk, I would open my drapes; if I wanted privacy, I would pull them shut. When I walked by the house with my dog at night, I could see into the upper rooms if the lights were turned on. But this was uninformative, a patch of white wall and a pale plaster ceiling.

____________________________________________________________________

　

Someone pointed out an article in the paper about an arrest for drug possession. The criminal suspect’s name and address appeared in the newspaper. I was surprised that the address was on my street and, so, I went down the block to verify that it was the Dutch Colonial house where the alleged drug dealer lived.



I don’t know how the criminal case was resolved. But, later, there was a "For Sale" sign posted next to the granite boulder on the lawn. I didn’t see any lights in the house after that.

The house was on the market for a long time. The owner must have been demanding an unreasonably high price. Then, the economy tanked. The crew of men who didn’t speak English continued to maintain the place and the property looked impeccable. A different realtor’s sign was posted and, then, another. After two years, the sign was taken down but we didn’t see anyone move into the house.

Three days after Thanksgiving, I walked my dog in the twilight. To my surprise, I saw that all of the downstairs windows on the Dutch Colonial house were brightly lit. Because the glass was opaque, I couldn’t see anything but the bright white squares casting light out upon the November-brown lawn and flower-beds. Very loud music came from the house. The bass was throbbing like a heart beat. It sounded like a dance party was underway. But, there were no cars parked anywhere near the house and, although a couple of upper windows were also lit, I couldn’t see anything but that patch of white wall and the plaster ceiling.

I stood for a while and listened to the house. When I walked away, I could hear the throbbing beat booming across the silent neighborhood, a sound almost loud enough to reach my own front porch.

My wife had left for the weekend and my home was dark and empty. I walked through the lonely rooms. Sometimes, I wonder what our life would have been like if my wife had not miscarried. When I turned on the faucet, the hot water steamed. Perhaps, the mixing valve at the center of the house had failed again. I had to be careful not to scald myself.