I was thinking about China on my way up in the hotel elevator. Something Toy Gee had told me about the old China was stuck in my brain.

"In old days, somebody knock you door and only woman inside, wife, daughter, maybe sister, she answer 'no one is at home'. You see? No one is at home," Toy grinned and chuckled mightily. Like it was his own private joke.

"Unlucky be girl in old China. Sons mean long life, success. Girls don' count."

Toy's words had popped into my head as soon as the elevator came.  The lobby had been almost deserted; couple of bellhops dozing, some all-night rubes reading newspapers. I was the elevator's only passenger. It came to a smooth, pneumatic stop and the door opened with a sibilant sigh. I looked down an empty hall of hotel room doors. I wanted 6321. Left corridor, Toy had said. I went for my pocket in front of 6321, slipped in the shim and heard the latch go.

When I slowly pushed the door open and slid inside, I saw the cat. It was lapping at something under the hand hanging off the bed.

It looked up startled, in that quick, then lazy way cats sometimes startle when you catch them unaware, hunkering on tense haunches, poised but no big deal. A breeze billowed the white gauze curtain at the partly opened window. Bathroom light on, harsh fluorescent. I moved along the wall toward the dresser.  A gray sharkskin suit hung like warrior's armor on a valet stand left of the bed. Expensive belt, rolled up, and an Oyster Rolex, unmistakable on a folded white handkerchief, on the seat. Black cap-toe shoes in smart order underneath. Somebody was a neatnik. When I turned back, the cat was out of sight. Under the bed, I figured. I closed the door gently with my foot, kept the Glock down along my thigh.

The guy was spread-eagled face-down on the bed, naked, his right hand hidden under the pillow. His feet were tied with a plastic bag. Another plastic bag covered his head but it didn't do much good. Wet, black, bloody hair had parted at a hole torn in the back of his skull. He was probably Asian, too dark-skinned for Japanese, too hairy; maybe Korean. I didn't want to turn him over, I'd have to peel the blood-soaked pillow off his face.

What looked like cigarette burns dotted his back, but bigger. On the left hand flung off the bed, the little finger had been cut off and a thread of congealed blood hung from the stump over the patch the cat had been licking.

Looking at the burns made me think of one choice instrument of no-nonsense torture these days: the piezo-electric lighters that throw a little flame jet hot enough to melt solder. Dope dealer's "gimme-the-money" pretty-please.  But cutting off the little finger was yakuza stuff.   This amputation ritual was pay-back for making a big mistake but you were supposed to do it yourself, to show respect.  Maybe Japanese after all.  Japo, as Lenny would say. Lenny's my former partner, from my former job, in my former profession: cop. I have lots of formers, including a wife, bank account, baby daughter.

The cat peeked out from the bathroom, green eyes flaring up at me in the light as I eased in. I didn't touch it.

The blonde was in the bath tub backward but she sure wasn't buffing her butt. She had the corner of a towel jammed in her mouth, constricting her whole face, definitely not Asian, once very pretty. No bruises. No signs of torture. But somebody had cut her throat expertly. That certain smile, we used to say, when we were hotshots who hadn't really felt this stuff like a spark to the balls. I debated calling it in, but why make trouble? Cops would hear about it soon enough, though I wouldn't want to get nailed for obstructing. I have pretty good relations running downtown, which can come in handy when I need a favor..

This had been a very good-looking woman. A hank of her hair--true blonde, well-kept--was wrapped around the drain lever, to keep her from sliding back into the crimson water, it looked like. Even disfigured as she was, she didn't have that hard, used look most hookers have. Young looking; hooker with class maybe. Rich men's daughters were taking it up for the thrill, for Chrissake. Or to feed habits. Yeah, whatta world, whatta world, Lenny would croon with his crooked, little grin.

The cat was gone again. Squatting, I saw it hunched down under the bed, green eyes glowing faintly. How the hell did the cat figure, I wondered? Not even Siamese by the look of it. I straightened up and swallowed a little spasm of incipient nausea. "Come here, kitty," I heard myself whisper tiredly. She didn't budge. Smart kitty.

A squashed, beddy-bye chocolate still in its foil lay beside the bed. The maid had obviously been by to turn down the bed before the mess happened, so the guy and his girl must've been out and come back. Somebody had been waiting around, in the hall maybe. Or he could have known whoever it was, could've let them in, before things turned nasty.

I wondered how much time I had to nose around. Unless he'd ordered a wake-up call or a room service breakfast before he was hit, I figured the room was good until morning, which wasn't far off. Judging from the possessions so carefully arranged on the dresser, this guy probably had an alarm clock in his head. But he sure wouldn't be needing wake-up calls anymore. I scoped the room for signs of what happened, who he might have been.

His stuff intrigued me. A little carbon-fiber push-dagger, the kind that gets through airport metal detectors, the hefty blade shaped like a little Angel fish. A matchbook cover from LuLu’s, a carioca joint that dealt in hot women for Asians. Two lubricated condoms with reservoir tips wrapped like big coins in green and red foil. They looked like some kind of gambling chips. And what's with the red and the green, I wondered? Different sizes? Different flavors?

Three business cards: one in Chinese, two in blocky Korean script, none with any English on them. The Chinese card was real vellum, creamy, slippery as bird's nest soup, expensive. The Korean cards were stock. A fancy cell phone no bigger than a candy bar lay in its snappy black leather case, flap unbuttoned.  These gizmos were just getting started.

I couldn't find the woman's bag anywhere. They usually carted along some overnight dreck, plus appropriate sex toys, the dildo, the teddy, the string of oversized pearls. The cheap tricks used poppit-beads, which tended to get lost up there, Lenny once explained to me, shaking his head at my innocence. Nothing shocked Lenny; he'd seen it all. Maybe even done it all, for all I knew. I fished through her clothes on the couch with the barrel of the Glock. They gave off a subtle perfume, nothing heavy, cheap.

Her shoes were Jourdan and the underwear wasn't any old Victoria's Secret. Somebody had taste, not to mention moolah. I went back into the bathroom for a second look. She hadn't moved. The clothes said "New York City" but the body had a tennis court tan, even in the shape she was in. I decided I'd seen enough. I pocketed the business cards. And the Rolex. Didn't touch the cell phone. Then I headed for home, which in my case is mostly the office.

For a change, I didn't have any traffic to fight going toward the Golden Gate bridge at three in the a.m. I stopped in the park and pulled in by the public pissoirs at the arboretum, though, after I thought I saw the same set of headlights for the third time in my rearview. By the time I got down to Lake and turned into my block, I figured I'd maybe imagined the tail.

Andy, my old green parrot, was pissed. I'd forgot his water. He gave me his best scolding squawks.  I flopped into the Salvation Army easy chair, and tried to get some sleep with Andy bitching from his perch.  The sun was trying to pry through the Venetian blinds when I opened my eyes.  I reached in my desk drawer for a can of tomato juice.  Then I reached for the phone and dialed Toy Gee.

Toy Gee was an old Chinese gentleman who owned tenements in China Town but had a house in Palo Alto too, off University Ave. I got the impression his friends and neighbors didn't know about the ritzy pad in Palo Alto. Also I wasn't sure his real name was Toy Gee. He had run a Chinese apothecary in his younger days, importing bull's pizzle, rhinoceros and reindeer horn, snake bile, dried beetles, pickled sea slug and a thousand other exotic remedies for Asian immigrants filling up San Francisco. With a profession that weird, nobody official in town ever bothered him.

By the time I got to know him, he was into all kinds of rackets, a regular self-made philosopher and entrepreneur.  Balance, he'd say, miming a man on a tightrope, making the "l" an "r". His hands'd go up, Nixon-style: China medicine was all about balance, yin yang. Keep the chi in balance. Chi was life force, energy. But from what I’d seen, Asians always searched for ways to beat the clock, chasing longevity, potency. Toy had to be about 101 but was still going strong and looked 30 years younger. Better brand of snake bile, he kidded me.

 His woman, Ming, told me Toy's secret was a blood tonic called ho shou wu, which translates as "Mr. Wu has black hair" and for Chinese means something like perennial youth.  Actually, Toy took shou wu chih--super shou wu, Ming related with a knowing nod, assuring me it was a miracle cure for both men and women with any problems of sex, fertility, general loss of libido, not to mention baldness or bad breath.

The latest panacea, Toy had told me, was what he called "baby-shiru," Fountain of Youth potions brewed from human embryos, given by injection. It was something the Swiss and Germans had done with sheep embryos years back in fancy health spas and hormone clinics. This particular new recipe, with its human ingredient, was a political hot dumpling even in Hong Kong.

Mostly, it started out being made from extra embryos bred in fertility clinics to be put into women who wanted babies but had troubles having them. One step better than test tube babies. Fertility doctors removed and froze many more eggs from these women than were needed. These spares lay frozen in clinics and hospitals all over the world. Scandals had cropped up over stored frozen embryos disappearing.  Then, word was that an underground trade in embyos from mainland China was becoming brisk.  The Chi Comms were pushing a one-kid policy and abortions were rampant.

  One thing the press picked up: in Asian countries, most of these extra embryos were girls.  "Big business, Charlie. Real big, " said Toy with his crispy, elfin chuckle that exposed the black edges of his teeth. "Call it 'Baby-shiru' in Japan. Like miso shiru. Baby soup. Stuff cost like dope, more even, much more for good stuff. Big protection game running now, everybody hurry scurry, blam, blam. Japs, K'reans, Chinese, Germans, all real interested. You get in it, you better watch it, Charlie."

Weeks later, Toy had given me the address, or rather Ming had passed along the message.

On this particular morning, she picked up the phone babbling in Chinese I guess, saying "Yeah?!" into the phone only after  whoever she was chewing out had enough.

"Ming, you always sound like you're trapped in a comic book," I said into the speakerphone back in my office. Ming’s English was colorful, to say the least.

"Hey Charlie, Toy tells me an' I tell you, OK. I don' make this stuff up. Where're you at, in cave somewhere? Sound like you trapped in cooking pot." She sounded hurt, tired. Ming made wonton that could heal throat cancer. Her laugh was like a cleaver on the chopping block when she butchered chicken. Thunk.

I backed off. "Ok, Ming, no English lessons for you tonight." I thought a second, adding "That's really what he said?"

"Yeah, Charlie, what he say. Tell Charlie take gun with laser. Could be real dark, hard to find, hard to hit. Cover his ass. He still owes me. Come back with holes, don't be cryin' to Toy and Ming."

"Well, you better tell the old Shao'Lin master for me that things got real screwed up, Ming. He'd a been there, he'd a stepped in it bad, Ming. But he sends Charlie and I'm not about to be the one to get the deep doodoo on my boots..."

She cut me off, "Hey Charlie, gotta go. Somethin's burning. Real bad smell."

"Somebody real dead," I managed to say before she hung up. "We gotta talk, tell Toy." Sounded like I had a mouthful of marbles. 
 

She was tall, brunette, dark-skinned but not Asian like him. She did a quick turn, taking in the bare walls and beat-up furniture. Nice lips but set in an ironic, somehow threatening smile now. She had on an expensive fawn, gabardine raincoat. Good legs. The hulk, arms folded in knotty defiance across his chest and lips zipped flat, stared at the Glock Nine lying on my desk. My hands were in my lap. I kept them there.

"Charlie," the lady said in a husky voice that could be Russian Hill here or maybe Beacon Hill, Boston, "you're in a whole lot of trouble."

"Oh yeah? Tell me about it," I said, trying to raise a little chuckle. I was glad I didn't have the Rolex on my wrist.

"We may have to show you," she said, her green eyes drilling steadily into mine. "It's too awful for words."

The big guy was moving towards me even as she spoke.   He picked up Andy, who snapped viciously at the catcher's mitt that crushed him like a beer can.  Then he turned to me with a big, gold-winking grin on his flat, greasy face....[to be continued]

MEMORY

In the  autumn silence, he remembers, wondering how he came so far.

When he was a boy, they hunted garter snakes in the spring, in a vacant lot humped with grassed-over rubble and thorny strangler vines. The warm sun sprang in where they lifted stones, startling the rippling knots of little snakes, sinuous backs dull green and brown. In the alley, they drew the snakes from their shirts to scare the girls, who screamed and ran away laughing.

An echo, this trilling laughter comes to him like an urgent dream.

Now, a man stands in the shadow. A man walks in the sun, marches the beach briskly yet pauses to look down at the sand, hunting something lost. A man sits in the kitchen chair, coffee mug steaming, watching the drying leaves and anxious sparrows outside. A man looks in the mirror, shakes his head, wonders how, when, this could have happened.

Behind the mirror, memory hovers. The man dreams: he can still see the boy. The boy peers through slats in the dark garage at the ice-man in the alley outside: face like a hard, red cabbage, a wet leather cape and cruel, shining tongs that grip his gorilla's shoulder like twin claws. He grunts as he boards his dripping wagon, iron-rimmed wheels scraping like hurt cries on the cobblestones.

And he can see the man he was, crouched under the glistening palm leaves, can hear the chatter of machine-gun fire, like chain streaming over chocks, hear calls for help in the soughing, jungle wind. He can do nothing.

And there is still the boy, crouched in the dark garage. He slips back in time, again and again, to the binding darkness of unfathomable episodes--the hurts, confusions, the broken promises of childhood. No matter how he strains, he cannot reach, cannot trust the hand stretched out towards him, reaching back in time to draw him into light.

His bonds are memory locked in time.  They exert a mysterious, fecksome, shameful attraction, these knots of dark experience still tangled like sleeping snakes, because we are not so much victims as captives, bound against the light. When these snakes of time and memory awaken, thrashing, seeking escape, the lost child crouches, hidden, hoping to blend in, unmoving, while something that never rests, whistling a distracted air but cradling awful weapons, creeps by, stalking.

1992

LAPS

By S. K. Oberbeck

"If there were the sound of water only…"

--T. S. Eliot

I

He swims laps, gliding through the water in smooth, even strokes, freestyle up, breast stroke back, deep-breathing through the snorkel tube. Usually he does a mile, maybe less. He does this for almost 20 years--at least three or four times a week, unless he's traveling or really sick.

By now, he almost meditates, looking to the bottom of whatever pool he swims in. He rarely lifts his graying head. He's in his medium. He is buoyant, rides flat, doesn't churn. "Blake, you make it look so easy," people say. "No splash."

Guess what animal he's always wanted to be? An otter.

As a kid, Blake hurls himself off three-meter diving boards, twisting and somersaulting in the clear summer mornings, savoring that weightless, static instant between rise and fall when he holds the whole, high bright perspective of turquoise blue pool and pale-green, new-leafed trees between his outstretched hands. Making no splash is an effort here, as he knifes into the water and reaches deep.

By the time he gets to high school, he's glad he's not a swimmer, almost pities the swimmers' ceaseless to and fro, the churning, grinding distances. Falling through the air on one held breath, he wins medals and a championship before college. He's in his thirties when has to start swimming.

Blake swims laps in many pools over the years, face submerged, smoothly flailing over the bottom's black tile lane markers glittering below with indoor lights or the sun's watery lace billowing against a white or sky-blue field. On one line-less, charcoal pool bottom in the Hamptons, he has to line up white beach stones to mark a path or lose his bearings. It's why in lakes or the ocean, he tends to swim in disorienting circles and why, for pools, he now carries a coil of yellow mason's line, a visible trace ready to be pulled taut between two jumbo lead fishing sinkers, along which he can guide himself.

His all-time favorite is an outdoor club pool--its crisp, black lines repainted each year--where he has special permission to swim early summer mornings. Just after sunrise, before anyone else, he steals onto the grounds, barely hearing the birdcall murmur as he savors the stillness of the glass-smooth surface, while beyond the pool the lawn sprinklers loft silvery, shimmering cascades in crimson, slanted sun.

He still enjoys feeling water ripple over his skin. Or wind. Even rain. He remembers his daughter's touch, the balm of her baby fingers grazing his hand. Even as a toddler, Susie shows surprising tenderness, to a kitten or a bunny, a deft empathy dispensed with a gentle caress. She grins her little two-toothed grin and brushes his hand reaching for the glass. There, daddy. Now it's all right. A language she speaks without speaking. And she crawls up onto his lap to be read to.

He has a silver-framed snapshot of Susie at three, sitting in his lap in the wicker rocker by the fireplace, giggling contentedly, obviously tickled by something he has just read to her. He looks pleased with himself. A pony glass full of ice and vodka sits on the old, hand-carved, trefoil end-table, and a shiny, oval English-brass ashtray with a cigarette burning. This picture he keeps close by. To remind him.

In the slide show he composes on his computer years later, he has other shots of Susie--as a baby-fat Buddha, a hint of rosy smile fading or forming, placid in her blue bunny sleeper; around eight, running full tilt down a steep beach towards the ocean, with her mother years later in front of a cheerily burning winter fire, Susie in plaid pajamas sprawled on the bright, worn Shirvan carpet doing dreaded French homework. Sandy, head down, sits knitting something; up one row and down the other, he hears the busy needles click, click, click.

When the computer idles too long or he waits for news to impact trading prices or volumes, the slide show activates automatically. But today he surfs the Internet, hunting investment facts and figures, digging, burrowing, cross-checking, charting, comparing dummy portfolios. This is what he does now. Well, part of what he does. He and a zillion others: Day trader. Cliff diver. Bubble rider.

Hard to remember when people had to call brokers to trade stocks. The web has cracked open research's inner sanctum; gimmicks abound. What used to be a broker's secret juju is now out in the open, available to everybody, a disposable commodity. Now sophisticated information comes in waves: stochastics, Fibonacci numbers, candlestick graphs, infinite portfolio permutations and combinations for comparison. He reads up on using parabolic trailing stops to limit loss and lock in profits on both sides of fluctuating security price. Security, he thinks, grimacing at the irony.

The West coast wakes up, people check account values, ready to jump on, take positions; cyber-waves congeal. Screens begin to drag; the little, hang-on hourglass icon bobbing longer. He glances at the black onyx desk clock. He practices letting go of time, like his meditating. Hard. He has been so conditioned to the idea of progress, moving ahead, pushing, getting there: arriving--no matter how.

II

He begins swimming laps in an overheated, indoor pool in a year after the fall of Saigon in 1975, because a spinal fusion fails to work. He remembers the date that way, the panic evacuations from Danang, a Huey's skids with people hanging on like black centipedes’ writhing legs, then the chaos, desperate crowds, sporadic gunfire, overloaded helicopters struggling off the embassy roof in Saigon. Stooping to pick one of Susie's toys out of the bathtub, he feels pain rip through him like rifle slugs and slumps to the floor. He has been a diver and skier, playing soccer, squash, paddle-tennis--all sports that stress the back. Now it has popped.

He's bundled, wincing, gasping but totally compliant, into an ambulance. They drip in painkillers for a week but his right leg starts to hibernate. They shoot his spinal column with dye, x-ray him and warn him to keep lying flat forever. Days later, they trundle him off for bright lights and nether darkness to the cutting room.

Six months after the surgery, the pain comes screaming back. Just bring it in again and we'll open you up and take a look, the orthopedic surgeon tells him, like it's some transmission job gone bad. They give him more painkillers and muscle-relaxants, which he drinks down gratefully with vodka or white wine. He finds that swimming laps also dulls the pain. He swims or he suffers. So he swims. Twenty years, miles and miles and a river of vodka, go by.

It's such a weird routine, he thinks, but it works. To save his neck, instead of lifting and turning his head, he swims with a snorkel tube hooked to his Speedo goggles by a rubber band. Face in the water, he goes back and forth, deep breathing. At first, he counts laps, concentrating on numbers to elude the pain. Laps, 36 to a mile; lengths, 72. Finally, since his speed varies so little, he just swims his mile in 37 minutes or so by his watch.

For as long as he can remember, he always seeks depths, which is strange because his mother tells him frequently that he nearly drowned as a tiny baby. Yet he swims on the surface most of the time now, except when scuba-diving. And here, as he churns along, thoughts, memories, images begin slowly to dart in and retreat like curious barracuda, streaking remnants in his life's wake, shadowing him.

At first it surprises him, pleases him even. His job--to screen movies and see gallery shows by the dozens, write about music, books, theater--is bound to fill his mind with pictures. They mix with his own past, his own imaginings, unfurling as he glides through the water, the outside world above him muffled by his breathing. My mind movies, he calls them.

They begin now almost as soon as he starts his watery beat. As the minutes blip by, the images morph into his own memories, glimpses of his life. He does not control them. They come and go as they please it seems, unspooling from different times, places, moods. 

Selected short subjects, he thinks. Time seems suspended as the images flick by. His beat is so regular he hardly has to check his watch. His favorite no-frills, black rubber Japanese sport watches rarely need replacing; they last almost forever.

III

In the university town where he lives now, he belongs to a group that meets weekly to study Carl Jung--several Jungian analysts, counselors with MSWs, various PhDs, a painter with a fussy Van Dyke, a sprinkling of sincerely perplexed men and women seekers who drift in and out, sampling. Snorkeling the collective unconscious, his friend Ernst laughs.

A shapely young woman, a Nordic-looking graduate student still new to the group, describes her dream image of a small, white unicorn, her slender, graceful hands shaping the flight of little birds that coursed around the unicorn's head. "Like bluebirds--or larks," she says. "But I guess I couldn't even tell you what a lark really looks like."

She swallows enticingly, chest rising, flipping her shining, flax-colored hair. "It seemed so funny, like I saw myself, dreaming this stuff out of, like, a book or something, right there in the dream."

"Central casting," laughs the painter, rarely underwhelmed by his own insights. He obviously has been taking her measure. The girl's ice-blue eyes go flat. He tries again: "Snow White?" he says to no one in particular. The girl giggles briefly but her eyes drop. Her hands sit stricken in her lap.

Blake looks over at Ernst, a university physicist who shakes his grizzled head and flashes a rueful grin. Ernst, too, has a daughter he is nuts about. They both nod sheepishly to each other over an impulse to protect the unicorn girl, even as they flirt with her.

Ernst is a wizened, prematurely wrinkled Polish refugee from both Hitler and Stalin, his pointy cheeks flushed and his searching dark eyes ever alert for insult. His Jewish mother died soon after he was born. His father, a Catholic and a chemical engineer, was dragooned into Russia after the war and disappeared into the Gulag. "Non-observant," Ernst likes to quip about his Jewish heritage, always, however, shaking his finger to add, "But only in religion!" Ernst sees everything, even things that aren't there, Blake kids him.

He and Blake have convoluted discussions about politics, religion, love--"All the win-win categories," they joke in unison when anyone asks, aiming index-finger pistols at each other. They are currently tossing around the possibility that the human brain is structured like a hologram, a notion which Ernst says particle physics inclines him to believe, as well as ruminating on the true nature of time. Ernst insists that time isn't sequence but flow--a never-ending continuum.

"The way we slice time into past, present and future like so much baloney… Einstein called that nothing but a stubborn illusion," says Ernst in a trumping tone. "His very words, 'a stubborn illusion'," he adds with a thrust of his sharp, bristling chin. Blake protests that people can't live without their comforting illusions and Ernst turns on him:

"Yeah, right," he laughs, "it's one unending continuum but sun comes up and sun goes down and so we have to live in perpetual superstition."

"People work," says Blake. "They sleep. They dream. They wake up. They make love."

"Ha," grouses Ernst, "they're asleep most of the time, even making love."

Though they reach agreement from different directions, like scavenging hunters returning from the hinterlands to home base, they respect each other. They have suffered stalemates, smoking anger to the edge of combustion but Blake admires Ernst's passion and his certitude. The physicists, neuro-scientists, biologists are on the march, his Polish friend declares, with nagging puzzles that old beliefs polluted with politics cannot explain. And it's not just "creationists."  It's a thing they call "intelligent design."

"They're really trashing Darwin. They laugh at Dawkins, like he's some Lysenko character." The evidence, Ernst insists, tells them that the complexity, the evolution of physical processes like blood clotting, the grand design of the universe implies an organizing intelligence. A number of these pioneering scientists, including Ernst, believe even the universe may be some kind of hologram. Ernst is an anomaly-a passionate scientist and believer in "the paranormal, whatever the hell that is," he always qualifies. His daughter, Drina, is a Divinity scholar, a fact Ernst always relates with a sheepish grin.

When Blake's daughter spends a student year between high school and college on an exchange program in Italy, he visits her in Livorno on the Tuscan coast, where she lives with her Italian family that has a pile of money and two spoiled, funny daughters, one quite beautiful, like her mother. Her Italian "parents" entertain frequently, have a walled summer villa down the coast, an Asian couple to cook and clean, a groundsman who keeps the lawns combed and a small fleet of Italian and German cars shining.

Laughing, keenly groomed couples arrive on the weekend, men outfitted in sporty, leather-trimmed Timberland clothes--quite expensive in Italy--fancy designer dock shoes, wrists freighted with glinting Oyster Rolexes. They and their sleek, sparkling, gray-hound slim wives glance over the candlelit silver and crystal on the creamy linen at his wrist, the cheap, black rubber Japanese sport watches he has swam with for years. They can't put it together, he notices. They see his Italian loafers are custom-made. He speaks decent French and pronounces what Italian he speaks surprisingly well, they assure him. He doesn't drink alcohol any more, hasn't for years. He enjoys that kind of dissonance, pieces that don't line up.

The next night, a Tuscan summer scorcher, Susie and her new sisters slink off into the throbbing beat coming like a hot sirocco off seaside dance joints, so her "parents" take him in a horrendous traffic jam up the coast to Forte dei Marmi--a seaside town of sumptuous, famous international designer-label boutiques and jewelers where it seems people do nothing but spend money shopping and loll in restaurants. He hates traffic and fashion bores him.

After dinner, arm in arm, they walk the streets, blazing with lights at midnight, full of people all chattering on cell phones as they window-shop the big-name Milan and Roman boutiques. Cell phones—telefonini--are just starting up big in Italy. Though he knows and loves the country, this glittering Midas mile strikes him as a different planet.

"Well, you finally got a rich daddy," he tells his daughter later. " I guess you might as well enjoy it."

Now Susie is in her mid-twenties, a blazing redhead, quite beautiful, sailing through youth, emerald eyes shining. Always in adventure mode, she leaves breathless messages from different cities on his answering machine. "'Sup papi?" … "Call when you come back, papi." " Unreachable for couple 'a days…But love you, papi," she signs off… "Later."  He worries she is an excitement junkie, though he knows worry can't do any good. He wonders if she is running from something. Susie is much under the sway of her mother. He has not spoken to Sandy in years.

How does it go, he thinks? Like lyrics he can hum but not quite remember.  Sandy is only nineteen when they meet, barely 20 when they marry, her straight black hair like an obsidian helmet, shocking green eyes you can't see to the bottom of, under the airy veil. He wins a fellowship for journalists to study and report on his field—the arts--in Europe. They live a couple of years overseas. He spokes out on trips from European hub capitals they use as home bases--places he has hardly visited—hunting artists using modern technology. They live in London, Amsterdam, Frieburg, Germany at the foot of the Schwarzwald, Lausanne, Stockholm. Sandy doesn't like waiting; she tries to speak the languages but doesn't keep up. She is smart but too scrupulous, always questioning herself. She tries some research on European zoos.  Behind the radiant smile is a black Irish grit, a steely determination--but he knows she doesn't want to stay in Europe: she misses her family too much.

He has been a journalist, writing about cultural subjects--art, music, movies, books--for a national newsweekly but a tandem flow of requests begin to come from his foundation handlers in Washington, quasi-government work, free-lance gigs with hidden undercurrents. They are on their way to Germany when Russia invades Czechoslovakia August 20, 1968. It is not a quiet year. Leftist students riot in major European capitals, radicals trash Chicago in what the newspapers call "Days of Rage." The Cold War grinds on.  And the Asian hot one flares hotter.

Susie is born three years after they return to the states. A decade later, he begins hearing Sandy’s disappointed, questioning tone. He seems moody, secretive, she complains, makes sudden trips at strange times and whispery phone calls she can't fathom, he overhears her telling a cocktail party friend. A distance opens. Storm clouds gather and the air between them grows still.

She finds his Glock pistol in a gym bag in his closet when he comes home late one evening, sits on the bed wordlessly with her head bowed, the angular, black weapon in her lap. Her hair glistens purple like a crow's wing under the bedroom lamp. She raises a drawn face with her hopeless look.

"Tell me," she murmurs.

"There's nothing to tell," he says. "I was at the range yesterday, to practice. I forgot to take it out." His blandest face. "Sandy, it's loaded, so be careful."

"Why won't you tell me? I thought you told me you gave it away when Susie was born, Blake. Now, this..."

"Sandy, it's nothing, really. No cops and robbers. Practice."

"It's starting again," she says, shaking her head. "I know it."

Sandy throws herself into motherhood and cooking, becomes expert, a virtual suburban legend. She moves deeper into a circle of comforting women friends. Loneliness for both of them grows like rustling presence in the house, the ghost of what's gone. He spends more time in town. She stops asking questions. The marriage finally falls apart like a crazed plate. Susie is at camp in Maine the summer they decide to split.

V

He remembers buying the Glock, the prissy Swiss shop keeper with a little Hitler mustache, precisely ranging the gleaming, sinister choices on the counter, like a proud jeweler. Back then, he loves shooting at the range in Lausanne, the best he’s ever seen: a wood-ribbed, resort-like building, sleek, modern, with sunny air-conditioned corridors where young men in gray uniforms stroll by with machine pistols dangling on slings; smiling women in tailored business outfits with assault rifles over their shoulders chatting as they stride along; squinting old guys who sight custom target pistols through a scope or a little lens hung from special glasses, pale hands wrapped around fluid, carved wooden stocks like sculpture by Brancusi or Boccioni.

He rarely ever shoots at any range anymore. His shooting earmuffs get more use damping the noise of barking dogs or traffic when he travels. Anyway, only high-tech, plastic guns make it through airport security these days.

Long after the divorce, in the university town where he attended college and the Jung group meets, he swims at the modern Olympic-sized university pool, an echoing, vast, water-floored arena where lithe bodies churn up waves and the leggy young women's suits seem to cover less each year. He always remembers the old, low-ceilinged pool and the night he and Katrine broke in to swim nude when they were students there.   He came within weeks of marrying Katrine.

He stays sometimes in New York with this still-stunning, still-single college sweetheart, who always trails a string of eager suitors. Her apartment in a hulking, famous Jacobean structure has open stairwells looping down in a vertigo cascade that reminds him of old German films. Across the street from her fifth story windows are a floor of dance practice studios, their tall windows always framing healthy, young bodies in leotards and tights leaping and vaulting past under strident, punishing light. He cannot hear the music but he senses its cadence in the dancers' changing steps and shining arms. Diamonds of sweat spin off their twirling bodies as they practice moves over and over, one after another, like follow-the-leader of his youth.

The drill is mostly ballet and sometimes musical comedy moves. An endless supply of concentrated beauty of both sexes streams by the windows where pigeons strut the ledges. He falls in love with slim, determined girls who loft swan-like arms to pose and run, just as he falls in love with serious, stunningly beautiful flute players and cellists in the college symphony orchestra where he and Ernst flash Groucho eyebrows at each other in the audience. This night, he stands smoking at two a.m., watching a lean black man in a white golf cap follow a floor polisher back and forth under the harsh light in an empty studio. The old man’s shoulders slump and he shakes his head to some slow music. The next time Blake looks up, the light disappears, the windows go dark.

He remembers the moment, so long ago, only 12 days before the wedding, when he whispers to Katrine that they can't do it, can’t go through with it. Engraved Tiffany silverware has begun to arrive, dishes, festively wrapped packages building up on the pegged-oak floor of her father's sailboat model room looking out over Long Island sound. She stands ironing a sexy, peach-colored dress that wraps around her willowy body and ties under her lovely breasts (or unties, he remembers most).   He slides up behind her and in halting tones begins to tell her they can't get married, can't go on. She does not turn, does not cry out; she does not draw away or even ask, why?

Their bodies touching, he feels heat billowing up. The rim of her ear peeking through her straight chestnut hair reddens. Her head bows and she continues moving the iron even as he murmurs softly. He hears it hiss crossing the cloth. Over her shoulder, he sees the cloth dry, then splotched dark with drops that hiss as the iron passes over, then dry, then spotted wet again and hissing. It takes him moments to realize she's crying; it takes him by surprise

A sense of feeling trapped has always kept him on the move. His curse, he sometimes feels, is he seeks novelty. He loves discovery, new places, strange settings, exotic foods and people. He'd jump out of airplanes if his back could take it.

He is always game to try new food--the sheep's eye at an Afghani festival he couldn't refuse, rubbery smoked octopus in an Algarve hill town, raw sea urchins on Elba, nutty-tasting fried bumble bees in Africa, smoked snake, sea turtle, stewed iguana once in Mexico, with its leathery, white eggs almost all a bright yellow yolk that they show him how to squeeze into the cooked broth and stir up.

He thrives on freaky music--melancholy Irish piper laments, breathy Japanese shakuhachi, Russian domra, the weepy edge of Portuguese fado, even ululations of North Africa tribeswomen wailing in the wadi. And he grew up on classical music. Classical is his sonic wallpaper wherever he goes: Bach, Sebelius, Mahler, Satie, the late Strauss of "Metamorphosen."

But he loves most being deep in the ocean, moving in tandem with bored-looking, boat-sized grouper and blinking barracuda down a steep, sun-rippling reef wall pocked with murky caves bristling ornate coral pots, waving odd, vaguely threatening flora in startling purples, pinks, shady greens, streaks of bloody red.

His first time diving, he feels so at home: buoyant, slipping almost weightless through the gin-clear depths, trailing a wake of pinging bubbles, awash in his own delighted effervescence. The coral reef wall trails down into inviting, flickering, green shadow. The woman he is diving with keeps trying to pull him back and shaking her finger in mock exasperation.

He is only supposed to go down 60 feet. He slips down to 100. He has a sense of an ancient, antic time that passes more slowly, dreamily in murky deep. Not like surface time; maybe a function of his buoyancy but not linear, not sequential. His rubber watch, however, clicks off the seconds unfailingly, unfazed by the depth.

As he looks back, his whole life pulses with underwater ambiguity, a suspect urge for depths. He sees himself years ago swimming laps in a turquoise pool in the Turks & Caicoes, after a morning's first scuba dive. He surfaces to drain his snorkel tube and his girlfriend, luxuriating on a lounger at poolside, grins at him over her book. When he raises his head again, she is gone.

VI

He is no stranger to sudden disappearance. He goes to Portugal in the mid '60s, where socialist swampfire smoulders alarmingly among unions, students and artists. A college buddy wangles an invitation from his aunt in Albufeira, a venerable old lady whose brother was a famous air ace. She also is a trusted friend of Salazar, the flinty, rightwing president whose citizen sons are obliged to spend six to seven years on duty in baking, mud-colored colonies of Angola and Mozambique, slogging around in cheap boots dodging revolutionary bombs and brush axes.

Like Franco in Spain—bogey man of Communists and Socialists--Salazar is said to rule Portugal with an iron fist. The old man is expected for a brief visit but ailing, sends an emissary:  smooth, severely suited Antonio. "Muinto prazer," he says, bowing smartly. The Africans, says Antonio, have caught "the Algerian disease," which tells Blake where he stands. Antonio's bushy eyebrows seem in danger of flying off his forehead as he feigns surprise at the conventional stuff Blake tells him about how the American news media operate, and why they automatically attack Franco and Salazar, why the word "fascist" drops so easily into a U.S. journalist’s story.

He catches himself gesturing towards his bent knee, about to ask Antonio if he knows the term "knee-jerk" but thinks better of it. "Like Pavolv's dogs," he says instead, making a little bell-ringing gesture. Antonio grins broadly, clueless. "Conditioned reflex," Blake smiles.

"We had many Germans here in the world war," Antonio says, shaking his head. "I was a young man but they were right about the Communists. They saw the danger."

After an hour of listening and answering questions, Blake feels both briefed and debriefed. Antonio's grin disappears; he grips Blake’s hand firmly, importantly: Muinto obrigado, he intones… They will meet again, he promises with a knowing nod. Count on it…Ate logo, senhor, he signs off with a dazzling smile. He never sees Antonio again.

Back in Lisbon, however, he meets a woman he supposes he is meant to meet, in her mid-twenties he figures; lovely, lithe, smoky body; a sexy mouth that laughs easily; lustrous, crow-black hair: Fernanda. Nanda works at the embassy in press relations--works, he gathers, an elastic, easy-going Iberian work day.

She seems super-available for a woman so vivacious, ferrying him around in a sexy little black Mercedes. She shows him where to eat, how to peg tourist joints, find choice dishes on a menu. A popular "national" dish she recommends--pork and clams cooked with hot sausage, small potatoes in a savory tomato sauce—has historical significance he never would have guessed, reaching back to the fifteenth century in a period of religious tensions when Portugal’s Catholics wished to antagonize both Jews and Muslims by combining forbidden ingredients. She shows him where to shop for leather, silk, especially in Rua Duoro, where gold jewelry and precious gems in the blazing shop windows look electrified.

They drive up along the sea to Sintra, once an historic, royal playground of exiled kings and princes, where up steep lanes that Lord Byron likely climbed, compact castles thrust ornate, phallic spires into a cloudless, azure sky. The vistas spill away verdantly, dotted with pine and cypress forests. They sit drinking wine on the veranda of Palace of the Seven Sighs, a lovely old, rococo hotel where garden swallows skim the lemon trees, shining leaves fluttering in the breeze like spilled silver in the late afternoon sun.

Her white, silk scarf snapping out behind her, Nanda drives him to Coimbra, an ancient university town, where in times past students by tradition wear black capes. Not many do now and those who do also sport zany, pastel tennis sneakers. He realizes the transistor radio, the sneaker, the tee shirt and the rubber flip-flop are changing the world. That night, students sit on the steps under an ornate portico of a university building, playing guitars in their black robes and singing fado, supposedly courting their ladies.

She shows him a private side of Lisbon, dragging him along through the Alfama quarter at one in the morning to a nondescript peephole door where a fierce, dark face appears after she rings the bell. They descend steep, narrow, white-washed stairs cut into rock to a vaulted hanger where well-dressed revelers sit or stand beside long refectory tables still laden with food and drink. Tourists they obviously are not. A knot of dancers, swaying to music he cannot hear above the din, is almost lost in the clatter. "Lisboa a noite," Nanda laughs, putting on a little pout and pulling his arms around her to dance.

About halfway through scrambled eggs and Constantino brandy, the lights go dark and a shadowed doorway bisecting the hall expels two musicians, with small guitar and mandolin. A sudden spotlight targets the portal and out steps a man in a plain, brown suit, chin held high. Abrupt silence spreads among the revelers as he tucks his left hand into his jacket; the instruments start a rising tremolo and he begins to sing.

"Adeus, Mouraria, adeus tradicao..." Good-bye Mouraria, farewell tradition..."  It is an old fado, lamenting and celebrating the ancient quarter in Lisbon, Nanda whispers. He remembers the seated players, throbbing guitar and plaintive mandolin, the singer erect in his plain brown suit, chin thrust out, profile shining in the spotlight like a Roman silver coin, hand lightly grasping one lapel. "Fernandez," Nanda tells Blake's ear. "Manuel Fernandez…Famous man!"

The boisterous, unruly crowd melts into perfect silence as the man in the brown suit sings. The blazing shaft of light picks up glints of tears among the quiet, smiling revelers and when each plaint ends, applause again erupts in the cavernous hall.  The man goes on for over half an hour.

It is his second time in Lisbon, just weeks before he meets the woman he eventually marries, Sandy. Celebration and lament are the themes of the poignant music, reflecting a Moorish nostalgia for houris, oasis, sand and camel's nose as the conquerors languished in a fabulous foreign land.  As they reemerge to the street, she tries to explain "saudade," the root feeling in fado, something like longing, sadness, a pleasantly astringent lassitude of heart, a hunger.

He decides to stick with celebration as he sits next to Nanda, a shapely, bare, brown leg peeking from her slit skirt, her foot tapping a little tango between brake and accelerator. She drives her gleaming, black Mercedes 220, he notices, too fast and too expertly along the road sweeping up the coast towards Guincho and Sintra. "Boca do Inferno," she points out, "the devil's mouth," as the road loops close to the sea: a blowhole in the rocks that booms and spumes in geysers silvered by moonlight.  They trade some preliminary kisses.

At the inn, she kisses his hands slowly, wordlessly, taking them to different parts of her body one at a time as her breath quickens and catches. Soon, they are into it, thrashing, ecstatic, exuberant. Later, he asks: "OK, what's the opposite of saudade?" Laughing, she pulls him back onto her, skin like watered silk. He still remembers the wine they lie drinking, naked in the rumpled bed that dawn burnishes the color of honey as it crawls from the sea up the hillside:  Geiras.

And another snapshot: a beautiful, young maid in a dark shift stands with almost blonde, wind-blown hair streaming, a wicker basket of clean laundry on her thrust-out hip, looking at the sharp sea the next morning in Guincho. A shy smile, respectful nod, secretive Madonna face shining. Her willowy body reminds him of a musical instrument. Nanda catches him looking at the girl. She shakes a shaming, naughty-boy finger at him, laughing. The inn, called Mestre Ze, sits like giant white sugar cubes, its angularity a contrast to the turrets and crenellations of the neighboring state pousada, where they go for coffee, decorated with stuffed birds and a noisy pastel Cabo Verde Afro flair.

VII

When he marries Sandy almost two years later, they travel well together. She is good with details, an organizer. She packs a suitcase like a Chinese puzzle box, juggles complex travel schedules like the Asian guy on TV who spins plates on sticks. She never gets the languages quite right but she is resourceful, ingenuously respectful. Foreigners find her lapses charming--and her trim, classic beauty attracts people.

Back home, Sandy organizes travel slides and snapshots, mounts them in albums and slide trays, edits and re-edits presentations.  But his own serried memories fly by, flashing images interleaved more by emotion, or mood, or import of the moment rather than by time or place. Years later, he scans pictures and builds his computer slide show this way:  random. He remembers moments, but they are streaks of feeling, clumps of emotion:

A crisp, sunny Sunday in Freiburg, lying on his back looking up at the shining gliders that career silently over green south German hillsides at the foot of the Hoch Schwarzwalderstrasse, ringing up in thermals and sailing off to bank and soar, diving dangerously close to the ground. A lick of fear crumples his composure: an old face grinning in a sudden, swooping windshield, an evil grin below mirrored goggles, like a Stuka pilot heaving into a bombing run from war movies of his youth, the moment incongruously punctuated by laughing, giddy children around him.

He recalls a night in Munich, weaving his way home from a bar to his hotel, watching a man angrily trying to push a hysterical woman out of his white Mercedes convertible without letting go of the wheel, the bottle-blonde woman, chunky in a silky white party dress, holding on desperately—now suddenly, grimly silent--to the open passenger door, nobody making much headway. Creeping, the car picks up speed, the woman's shoes rapping out a rising tattoo until she leaps away with a shriek and goes sprawling.

Minutes later, in his room, feeling loneliness that bites like a toothache, he looks out his double-paned hotel window to see a screaming drunk battering a steel light pole with something metal like a lug wrench, the glass muffling his cries and the dull, hammered-anvil sound.  A crucifix hangs above the bed; he flashes back on the sad, old Italian mother of a friend he fishes with on the island of Elba, a wizened black crow of a woman with hurtful eyes, forever crossing her breast.

VIII

People tend to tell him things. His faint, quizzical smile seems to invite intimacy, Sandy confesses. He feels he listens like a bird, head cocked for nuance. "Owlish glasses," they sometimes observe. True, sometimes he feels like a quiet bird of prey, waiting for something to come in range.

"You know, I think Crater'd be interested in that. Go see Crater," they tell him as a young man, a rising journalist in the '60s. They are a fringe group in a low-key club in New York where he eats lunch and nobody uses last names, many of which are famous. The notion being that important people already know each other and need no introduction.

"Yeah, see Crater," he is advised by a bristly man who looks into his smoking pipe bowl as if the words come from there. "Washington's the place anyway." Even then, Blake doubts Washington is a place where his talents might prosper.  New York has been tough enough to decode.

They contact him when he makes a visit back to the states after eight months tracking around Europe on his foundation grant, talking to artists getting into technology--computers, lasers, cybernetics, kinetics, random and programmed happenings, music made by stroking wet glass rods. A new foundation awards him the grant after a hard grilling by media luminaries winnows the competition down to two.

This is 1968. Europe, America are in tumult. The year begins with a Tet offensive in Vietnam, enemies reaching U.S. embassy grounds. It explodes into rallies, riots, in Paris, Chicago, New York, Miami. Martin Luther King, then Robert Kennedy are assassinated. A nuclear sub goes missing. Soviet tanks roll into Prague Aug. 20, backed by an aircraft armada, a surprise invasion that quenches nascent Czechoslovak attempts at freedom.

With Sandy, he lives in eight hub countries, spoking out on travels by himself when necessary. He ends up immersed more in politics than technology--and discovers how manipulated, how controlled, elements in the student movements have become. Suspicions and defensiveness from Vietnam setbacks peak at home. Blake is asked to listen closely, keep his eyes open in student protest circles—"a ‘student’ being a very loose term over here," they tell him, "anywhere from 20 to 40." 

"Extra vigilant," somebody else ends the session with a wan smile.

In Paris, ce beau printemps la, rioters tear up heavy cobblestones for missiles as leather-bound cops swinging limber truncheons lash open lanes in knots of screaming, surging protestors, batting men and women alike. Shreiking teenagers roam the streets streaming blood.  Blake watches shaggy, determined Italian students occupy the Accademia gallery in Venice, spilling over into Piazza San Marco, where they taunt nervous, young caribinieri, who level machine pistols at them as wary tourists look on stupefied under the gaze of the golden lions. In Amsterdam, disgruntled kids loll around the Dam, smoking hashish, playing guitars and harmonicas. Their protest banners lie haphazardly on the pavement.

"Who's behind it, Moscow, Peking?" Washington officials ask--meaning Vietnam, student unrest, world unrest, all of it. People looking for bad guys start talking like spy novels by this point. "Get me some goddamn commie money or shit like that behind this student protest thing," the raw-boned Texas president is reported to have thundered. Who pulls what strings? People talk to Blake because he has a regular byline in a national news magazine, from which he hastens to tell them he is on leave, though he writes for other newspapers and magazines, he adds.

He's busy, stressed, even happy. He realizes he listens even better than he tries to, hears undercurrents he hasn't listened for. It's not material to use for the record but it feeds a talent for intuition, for asking leading questions. He realizes he's meeting a lot of European "students" pushing forty who smoke incessantly and talk hunched behind their hands when conversing with "comrades." He watches their eyes narrow as they listen, tight-lipped, to questions he asks them.

But he tries to concentrate on the arts, creative people, novel ideas. A guy in Stockholm, with a background in state radio, is composing real-time synthetic, electronic music with metal thimbles on his fingers. Blake watches his hands rove nimbly over hundreds of copper nail heads banked on a console wired to racks of computer memory the station has made available. Each contact makes a peculiar, whispery music, like someone playing a saw, or a breathy Japanese flute, hypnotic in its overall effect, a weird sonic zephyer trailing back and forth. 

He meets a Polish emigre artist working with cybernetics, crafting a kind of backbone of cast aluminum vertebrae that do an electronic shimmy and flip around as he manipulates a primitive joystick. A Belgian woman, intense, dark-eyed and unsmiling, makes clever little spiny, tank-like, gray objects that crawl around the floor waving their loopy antennae like lost, wounded bugs. A Frenchman in his 30s fashions elegant neon chandeliers that twirl and wink and bob their pink and purple, fan-like appendages like electronic peacocks.

The coming technology, then only a hazy speculation, fascinates him. All these years later, pecking at his laptop, he realizes what they did then fits on a chip smaller than a bullion cube today. If he had known where it was leading, he might have stayed with the technology and forgot politics. His bank account would’ve been bigger. The sophistication of streaming information that comes over his computer to help him in trading never ceases to amaze him. His powers to manipulate it all make him feel curiously God-like--until an option or trade goes against him.

IX

But, more and more, he remembers, in those turbulent years, politics intercede. It has the feel of things coming apart, centers not holding anymore. Unrest simmers in East Germany in 1966 and Prague in 1967, soon after he arrives, seems to enjoy an unprecedented thaw in the usual cultural winter Moscow thrusts upon its East bloc children. Prague’s Spring, the media call it. Like runners sent out by alien spore in the darkness, dissidence suppurates, spreads with the headlines, the almost breathless late-night broadcasts he tunes in on the short-wave bands. He senses underground tensions building, barriers being tested.

He’s told what he knows might be helpful to his country. "Crater certainly might be interested in that," Bill says. Bill looks over those half-glasses down his patrician nose, head tilted exactly like pictures of President Roosevelt, and smiles his snake-lipped smile. Certainly might. Bill does that a lot. Mr. Oxymoron. He knows all the high-born spooks, is rumored to still be one himself. He zeroes in on Blake:

"Dubcek's man actually said that in front of you? No foolin'?"

Blake nods: "Off the record, but word for word." This was before the Russians rudely throw a manacled Dubcek into a van and bundle him off to Moscow.

"Remember what Lincoln said? 'The real news never gets in the paper'. Or was that Brady?" Bill jiggles the ice in his glass, eyes bright with innocence. "Yeah, sounds more like Brady."

When Blake finally goes down to Laurence Crater's surprisingly large, opulent office in suburban Washington, Crater doesn't seem exactly overwhelmed. Polite, cordial, that easy air of general dismissal, the aura of somebody used to having other people try to read the boss' mind. There's breezy, requisite small talk but it doesn't add up to much. Blake squeezes out all the details he can remember. An uneasy silence hovers.

"Yes, we heard that," Crater says finally, flashing the briefest of smiles. "From a different source, of course. Anyway, we really appreciate your coming down. A confirm from crossing sources is always welcome." It's about something else entirely, Blake thinks with a sinking in his gut. He takes the limp hand held out for him.

Yet things begin happening. He has an odd sense of meeting people not quite by accident. Some huddled lunches in New York occur, one at a crusty old men's club, everybody whispering and around 150. Small talk sharpens into probing. Later, when he's "in country" as they say with a grin, come requests to do certain "simple" projects, minor below-the-surface favors, just because he is going to be there, mind you, in that country, in that region, at that time, approximately. Just look up so-and-so.  Have a talk with this one or that one.  

As he runs around collaring unconventional artists and writers, contacts come at odd times, in odd places, almost as if he were on-call. Usually they don't use his name and never come through a hotel switchboard. "Got your name from so-and-so's office," they say. "Thought you might help since you're in town. Maybe we could catch a bite…" Conversations drop into the passive voice: "…it couldn't be discovered," "…there was no blame to ascribe," "…that has yet to be determined." 

"News from nowhere," Blake calls it.  Or "a definite maybe," as a Hollywood mogul often quipped.

The more he discovers, the less he likes. He supplies some obvious names, alerts on planned demos he hears of, but nothing that he thinks will put anybody up in front of a firing squad. He thinks many of these "revolutionaries" are overgrown kids, more interested in getting laid or reviewed well than making major mischief. Finally, a festering disconnect between what he does and how he feels about it prevents him from helping people he tends to distrust. Even being a patriotic watcher feels too uncomfortable.

He looks down this other road he finds himself on and sees two alternatives: life as a field hand, where a desk-bound policy decision can hang him out to dry in some twisted locus of bureaucratic boredom or political bloodshed; or life driving an LMD (large mahogany desk) in Washington, making those chicken-shit decisions. Like being caught in rapids, hard to stop once you start down.

X

He looks down at his hands on the laptop's keyboard, spots like peppered flecks of rust, and the swelling finger joint that no longer passes easily through the trigger guards of certain pistols. Two fingers, including the index finger, are missing from his other hand. "Childhood accident," he says when pressed, "long time ago." A surgeon once caught him on it at a cocktail party, incredulous the scars were that old. He remembers how long the phantom limb syndrome stayed with him, the itching fingertips. But they are gone now, like the wife and others.

He begins to walk every day, maybe five, six years ago--after a second back operation that is a blazing success compared to the first. He does three, four miles a day, 40 to 50 minutes if he pushes. And he pushes right along, regretfully aware of how much counting, marking off, partitioning, goes on in his life. Sometimes he feels like he ticks, the primal rhythm of the heart pump. A notorious, maverick French psychoanalyst he reads, as an adjunct to the Jung, believes we count to delay death, like stopping the clock, stopping time. Acting as if we're too busy to die.

Once, walking with a girlfriend's sister, a marathon runner whose ruddy, gaunt cheeks are etched in pain, he asks, "Are you running to or from?"

"From," she snaps quickly, flashing a kid’s go-to-hell grin.

"What...?"

"Life," without missing a beat. He understands.

He sees how much his idea of progress changes. One summer as he nears 60, he swims almost every day in a river in New Hampshire. Fed by mountain streams and brooks, it holds him almost steady as he strokes against its swift, clear current, accompanied by darting little fingerlings, shining against the sun-splotched gravel, and occasional curious, larger trout who shelter in the furry blocks of haphazardly tipped granite that line the river under a bridge. Almost immediately, the luxury of having to make no turns elates him; he swims a continuous 30-minute lap and barely makes any headway.

He also hikes that summer up steep, stony, rooted mountain trails, marveling that his feet--not young feet anymore--still work so well making the choice of each completely unique step, imagining the complicated instant feedback loops up the spine and back again between knee, ankle, foot, the brain measuring placement, angle, pressure, duration, release. For hours, picking his way with borrowed ski poles, he is enthralled by the physics--the combined sciences--of simple footsteps. "The eyes are the visual organs," he remembers reading, "but it's the brain that sees."

And after he stands on summits, he is struck by how much even his incessant upstream swimming is a repetitive, familiar, habitual exercise, while the climbing, taxing in a completely different way, is never the same.  Still, he wonders how far he has swam in his life, and laughs at the irony.

XI

If he taps a macro key, his computer launches its slide show, cycling through the snapshots, news graphics, texts and art objects he sporadically scans into image files. The sudden appearance of a familiar face or scene reminds him of what happens when he begins his laps. He chooses the "random" cycle option for these glimpses of his life, his loves, adventures, historical milestones, time out of synch.

"The computer banks build and you dissolve," he remembers a computer guru saying.... what, 25 years ago?…. during one of his $20,000-a-day briefings of business bigshots. And a brilliant Jesuit priest, Francis Lang, the guru's good friend, an oracle and scholar himself, who writes about time, light and grace and how knowledge is drawn out of our brains and into our machines, as they take over more and more functions in our lives.

An elf's grin, gray thatch in a band looped over his ears, eyes twinkling, Father Lang is almost central-casting, a big-shouldered leprechaun. He is no Luddite. "I hate to use such a highfalutin term as 'exteriorization,' but there it is. Do kids even know their elevensies anymore," Father Lang sighs, picking up a battered TI calculator.

"I call it the electronic vampire. Just slurps up our knowledge and runs inside with it. The more license we give it, the bigger it gets." He chain-smokes, talks almost in gasps. "More gets taken away...you dissolve…That's what he meant," Lang rasps, wagging the calculator like an admonitory finger.

"Yeah, but we can't all stay with the abacus, Frank," Blake replies.

"Yabbit, yabbit, yabbit," croaks the priest. "Try keeping your checkbook or doing your taxes with one of those new computer programs. Everything disappears into the blinking machine." He cocks his head and looks up through wire-frame glasses.

"Try checking the math. Better yet, try finding it. Oh, it's in there somewhere all right but not so's you can see it. Trust the program, they say, sure, just trust us," he snorts. "I'll take a plain old pencil every time. Damn site easier in most cases. Both ends work too."

He remembers sending the priest a snapshot from Berlin years before, on his way to Vienna. He and Sandy by the Wall, toasting him with coffee cups and munching on the cruller called ein Berliner. Frost's line, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall..." written on the back.

Father Lang waited for the fall of the Soviet empire, which he joked would take awhile, since God was either dead, according to the day's pop media, or otherwise engaged. "But, mind you, God will do the job, will bring back the salvation of freedom," he can still hear the old priest assuring him.

A card from Lang awaits their arrival in Germany several weeks later: a pirate, who looks a lot like Brezhnev, with the spidery notation: "Yo ho, blow the man down."

XII

He is in the middle of his stint in Europe on the two-year grant from the little-known foundation to research and report on art and technology, the new communications, on special leave from his magazine. August 12, 1968, eight days before the surprise invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact, he walks in a garden next to the U.S. consulate with a spook named Leon, a few years older than Blake is, whose card lists him as a cultural attache.

"Fewer bugs out here than in there…We think!" quips Leon, nodding towards the consulate's stone and brick wall. A light drizzle begins. He hears sporadic traffic, tramcar wheels screeching. They move in tandem as they talk, walking among tired, drooping shrubs and pitiful flowers. Beside crumbling stone benches stands a pitted statue of a girlish figure in a clinging gown, meant to be a white, rococo angel, eyes painted over in streaks of dark, chalky, weathered paint like misplaced tears.

Leon advises Blake not to go to Stalingrad--not as a journalist. Someone has written a denunciation of him in the Komsomolskaya Pravda, for writing in praise of two anonymous, dissident Soviet writers years back who produced especially withering anti-Soviet samizdat. He has never soft-pedaled his anti-Soviet feelings.

"So there's likely to be file on you, awfully small one maybe, but negative," Leon says with an owlish grin. "Slandering the state, fomenting dissent, running dog, that kind of crap. They'll watch you, that's for sure, make minor trouble if they can. They're always looking for something to trade. So, no reason to stir up shit, right?"

He shakes his head slowly. "And contact with those particular artists--and I use the term loosely--is a definite no-no as far as I can gather. Like these students running the Komsomol Pravda. Hell, most of them are apparatchiks over 40. Artist is a very elastic term over there." His Russian pronunciation sounds pretty good.

Still looking over the wall, he absently caresses the dark tears of the statue as if he has discovered something. "St. Pete, you'll have to see that town another day. Great vistas, though, huge. Squares big as a desert. Reminds me of Arizona, New Mexico, somehow. Wonderful light."

"Nichivo," he laughs. Never mind. "OK, some advice for your stay here in Praha," he continues, counting on his fingers. "Yugoslavian champagne, yes. Czech wine, no. Bulgarian yogurt, yes. Czech toilet paper, no. Cuban oranges, occasionally. Money changers, never. Steer clear of all Czech women who have that nice, glossy West Berlin look. They're either whores or honey-traps.

"Want to go native? Stand in any line you see. Cultivate the dismal hope of the truly deprived. People usually don't even know what's at the end… lemons, laundry soap, scrub brushes? Doesn't matter; it'll be something they're short of. They just join any line they see and find out as they go along. Amazing what you pick up standing in those lines. They're the national pass time."

Then Leon asks him if he'd ever been to East Germany, seen the Vopos, had to deal with them. He hadn't. "Even gloomier than here, but they're hard bastards, really nasty, like the Stasi." His hand cups the stone girl's head. "You've been to the Wall though?" Blake nods.

"Real consequences there, staring the Germans in the face," says Leon.  "Something the kids at home can't fathom, huh? We're spoiled. Very spoiled.  Even so, the kids' graffitti gets more and more humorous on the Wall.  Not something their parents can understand."

Blake remembers newsreel flashes of kids among stark ruins, sticks and rags, starving birds, bony faces one big question mark. His mother had knit socks, made wash rags, bundled up Care packages, old shoes, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and sent them to Germany in 1945. They got back heartbreaking thank-you letters, spidery, broken-looking writing in rusty brown ink.

He flies to Vienna August 18. And then to Lisbon.

Two days later, Moscow stages a supremely well-orchestrated Warsaw Pact invasion that takes NATO--takes the world--completely by surprise. The Soviets and their Socialist brothers stream into Czechoslovakia during the early morning in tanks and planes, one landing every few minutes at Prague airport. In 24 hours, Moscow hammers a nationwide iron mask on Prague's heady "Spring." But kids still give the Nazi salute to Russian soldiers lounging on their tanks in Wenceslas Square and one immolates himself in protest.

XIII

A year after the invasion, in November, he is staying in a friend's apartment in the Loretanski namesti above still-occupied Prague's Old Town, behind the Loreta, a baroque church where 27 carillon bells ring out "We Greet You a Thousand Times" almost every time you turn around.

They go on foot down towards the castle in the Old Town to talk. Jiri plans to begin a vacation in a week, leaving Blake alone to write in solitude but a young Czech couple had just been billeted to the spare room in Jiri 's apartment, after waiting years on a housing list. All over Prague, apparently, people wait for living space.

"Now look," says Jiri, "I don't know about these kids but there's nothing to be done. I'm sorry about the timing, but they're assigned the room and they waited a damn long time. Christ, they sit in the bathroom just admiring my Bulgarian plumbing fixtures... I think they're echt but you never know. They could be watchers for Bartolomejska." He means the big, drafty central police station in downtown Prague, its maze of tall, criss-cross brown doors padded with phony leather and doorknobs you turn and turn but nothing opens. Every visitor must go there to register, standing in long, eerily opposing lines that move silently now after the occupation.

Walking down in the thin, cold sunshine past the oddly bright, robin's-egg-blue tiles decorating the church's weathered, stucco facade, Blake does a double-take at the city-wide haze of gray-brown smoke hovering like a greasy bowl over steeples and bridges below.

"Maybe that cough's not those wonderful Czech cigarettes of yours," he says to Jiri. "Jesus H. Christ, man, what kind of lung cancer rate have you got here?"

"Nonsense," Jiri replies, as if truly stung. "It's a heavenly sight. A most welcome sight. It's miraculous, but there's no coal shortage. Which means we won't freeze this winter."

It rains in Prague all that cold winter after the invasion and some people freeze. Some people commit suicide, Jan Pallach who sets himself on fire, two renowned Czech comedians. People look pale, drawn, drugged. At a gathering--for party is not quite the word, even for the effervescent Czechs--he runs into the dark-eyed wife of a famous movie director, who happens to be off in Hollywood doing starlets, who looks like she is on the verge of doing something dire.

Russians in red shoulder boards drive around in closed, muddy jeeps, trying to keep a low profile, even pulling off their broad military hats when passing obvious tourists. Their caserne sits right around the corner from Jiri Starik's apartment, where Blake huddles in a glass-paned, interior study chamber, built by the pre-Soviet tenant, a physics professor, and does his work. He can hardly hear the big, German radio that the young Czech couple who now shares the apartment tend to play annoyingly loud.

XIV

And twenty-five years later, like old sepia-toned Minox prints scanned into his slide show, he sees them, through the open door, kneeling before the Blaupunkt radio, its votive ruby indicator lights throbbing, its golden logo glinting against oat-colored speaker cloth and brown, lustrous plastic. Enrapt, with their arms around each others' shoulders, they bob their heads to some jangling pop tune beamed from lustrous, rebuilt Vienna or West Berlin.

Years later, an eventual bumper crop of TV antennae--all turned west in East Germany--begin to sprout on rooftops, bathing the threadbare lives of Moscow's minions in images of the affluent West. Blake has always argued that television spawns junk but Father Lang shakes an admonitory finger: he is convinced that television and the Polish pope will bring down Communism.

"They used to talk about ghosts on the roof," he tells Blake one time as they walk through the Arboretum next to the Zurich See, watching squirrels foraging in the grassy, sun-splashed garden borders. The Mythenquai skirting the lake, which always reminds him of Carl Jung, stretches off to their right.

"Remember those last, wrenching pictures of the Romanovs," says Lang. "Such sad faces, the Tsar still wearing his military hat, and the little princesses still prim in little, lace dresses, all sitting up there on a rustic dacha's roof…" He shakes his sun-burnished head. "…before the Bolshie thugs shot them all to pieces in a basement one night not long after." The dome of the Urania Observatory glows orange in the distance like a orb as the sun sinks and a cold wind comes skirling off the lake.

"Of course, they shot everybody. Stalin had people shot just for being outside the Iron Curtain, for getting even a sip of life outside. One taste of the good life and they were gone, tainted. They machine-gunned their own people, prisoners the Brits and Yankees forced to go back over the line after the war. Party hacks called it 'contamination,' but it was only comparison, really.

"Now," he says, chuckling. "Lord above, the radio, television, the advertisements, God knows what else, fashion too, I suppose, blew all that away. Poor fools couldn't load the guns fast enough today. So think of the ghosts on the roof the commissars must imagine now when they see all those TV aerials pointing the other way," the old man snorts.

"Ghosts in the ether?" Blake suggests. Lang's face lights up with a sunny grin, nods emphatically. His elegant, papery hands jump together in silent applause. He's lost religious brothers in the Cold War, Poland, Latvia, Ukraine, some torn out of the underground by Moscow, tortured, broken, executed.

XV

Blake still marvels at Lang's prescient faith, remembering how he follows the Pope's triumphant peregrinations in his native Poland, excited as a fan in a sport's bar as the televised events unfurl. The video glow traces shining, teary trails around his shaky grin as John Paul conducts mass for millions in his native Poland--including outdoor masses for strikers in Gdansk's Lenin shipyard, where the anti-Soviet Solidarity movement springs up in his wake.

Months before his death, Francis Lang and Blake walk along the Limmatquai talking of the same war-cloud concerns. Lang rattles snow-dappled Zuricher Zeitung headlines under Blake's nose at the Kronenhalle, where they duck in for coffee and cognac: Warsaw Troops Menace Polish Border. But December passes that 1980 without another '56 or '68 invasion. On the day after a doped-up Turk shoots John Paul in Rome in May 1981, a million Poles dressed in white swarm into Krakow's square to pray for the wounded prelate.

And Blake remembers the old priest's insight about Pope John Paul's initial homecoming, a spidery message on a postcard Blake has buried in some book:  "They see that they are not alone, that there are millions like them, that the thugs have not exterminated their faith. 'Be not afraid,' he tells them--our Lord's words exactly, you see?  Just by his courage to celebrate the Mass, he shows them their courage too--and Jaruzelski knows it: We're living a heraldic moment, my boy. Thanks be to God… Love to Sandy! Blessings," it ends.

When, not too many years later, the Berlin Wall falls for good, it is said that technology--the copier, fax machine, computers--plays a large role in watering freedom from the seed of the Papal visits, Prague's Spring and Poland's Solidarity through the Eastern bloc. Father Lang almost lives to see it, but it comes too late. Blake happens to be in Zurich in that historic year. He sits in the Kronnenhalle, surrounded by modernist paintings, chain-smoking English Ovals over strong kaffe, and writes his dear, old friend a postcard anyway. He doesn't have to bother with a stamp. It's addressed to Heaven.

XVI

Years that follow make him grateful the old man does not live to see them--and sad he cannot savor their vindication. True, the Berlin Wall falls and millions of zeks--dazed, rag-wrapped ghosts--come hobbling on frozen feet from the brutal chain of labor camps called Vorkuta, Kolyma, Norilsk in the Soviet Gulag. Historians retreat to the Agonizing Reappraisal Department. A Bolshevik-induced mass starvation of five to seven million in the Ukraine, long overshadowed by the Nazi death camp horrors, comes to light. The post WWII slaughter of 4,700 Polish officers in Katyn Forest, always blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets, turns out to be another Stalinist slaughter.

Once-secret files made public in Russia and East Germany exposes the guilt of Americans accused of spying for the Soviets, who have never ceased decades of breast-beating, injured innocence. Revisionist historians discover that the WWII Pope always accused of turning his back on Jews secretly succeeded in saving many. These are subjects dear to Lang's heart, over which Blake remembers many heated words being spilled.

But Pot Pol combines the worst savagery and paranoia of Hitlerism, Stalinism or Maoism, slaughtering millions in the Cambodian "killing fields." In Chile, the Left moves the world with its indictment of right-wing General Pinochet's policy of "disappearing" people. There are rumblings of genocide--called "ethnic cleansing" now--as simmering Balkan rivalries begin to flare.

The autumn sun hot on his back, he peers at a Fifth Avenue window display of open photography books, newsstand images, video flashes he knows well: the wincing impact of a shot in the temple as a kneeling, grimacing VC guerilla suspect is executed; the naked girl-child roasted by napalm running screaming down the street; starving Biafran infants, bug-eyed with hopeless hunger; swollen, fly-blown, armless, legless Tutsi corpses in Rwanda; bodies frozen stiff in Bosnia, stacked like cord-wood.

All his happy computer nostalgia cannot offset these images; they come darting like fire-eyed barracuda that sometimes dog his dreams. People ask him why he allows himself to focus on such horrors. "It happened," he replies, shaking his head. "It's still happening, like some bloody awful continuous film loop we can't rip out of the projector." His friend Ernst is just like he is, nose in the shit no matter what. 

"Who can ignore the atrocities of governments," protests Ernst through clenched teeth. "I'm a Jew, for chrissake. We're programmed. How do we turn away?"

And yet Blake knows how to stop it. He has an artist friend who looks happily blank when discussion turns to the day's burning issues, many of them revolting. He completely shuns the media; newspapers, TV, news radio. Most of the time, he smiles a crooked grin of self-deprecation--solicitous, even slightly apologetic. He draws precisely the borders of his world. Yet he seems content, productive. "I can do the world…Or I can do art," he says. "Not both." Blake envies him, his resolve, his monk-like ability to let go. He knows it's no use, the flailing, the churning. But it's habit. In a way, his work.

A goofy, Day-Glo '60s decal on the studio wall catches his eye: "Turn on, tune in, drop out," it says --acid guru Timothy Leary's gospel: a lysergic acid ticket for inner space travel . Blake remembers that the Swiss police nab Leary, a fugitive from the U.S., at Villars, a ski station where he and Sandy ski for weeks one winter. Somewhere, he has a quote he cut out of the former Harvard professor's: "To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness…"

XVII

The whole damn world seems to catch his eye: a modern global village looking curiously ancient; old warlords, tribes, clans, locked in primal conflicts. Or it goes the other way: ragged, coked-up teenagers, kids even younger, all over Africa carrying AKs and pangas, careening around in machine-gun-mounted jeeps and pickups called "technicals," killing and raping and dismembering as an instrument of political terror. In fact, the tinhorn warlord of one wracked African nation advises his murderous counterpart in the next country to just hack the arms and legs off enough civilians and the "world community" will cave in and pay off to stop the carnage.

He wants simply to turn away, not look. But he can't not. The Muslim world seems to slide towards chaos. Tribal conflicts, ethnic cleansing breeds terror in Rwanda and Bosnia as savage in intensity as the predations of Mao, Stalin or Hitler. The Israelis continue to pound away at the pathetic Palestinians, compacting them into ever more miserable refugee camps--and the only intifada deaths the media regularly reports are those of unfortunate Israelis killed by suicide bombers. He avoids the movie "Black Hawk Down" for months, then gives in. It feels like a hammer blow.

Posturing politicians still clamor endlessly for "peace" and "cooperation" as they try to outwit and undercut each other. He remembers the nightmare of making phone calls across Europe in the 60s--patching through each country's proprietary PTT, its Postal, Telegraph and Telephone operation. That nightmare ends almost overnight. To invest in foreign exchange markets trading around the world 24 hours without stop, Europeans with differing communications standards have to get on the same technological wavelength. Bowing to that technological imperative may be the greatest example of global cooperation since the League of Nations.  Staying out of the loop helped sink the Soviet Union.  Pure profit motive, he suspects, combines the best of stick and carrot.

"You live in your head," an angry lover flings at him once. She is right. He spent his youth believing things can be figured out if only one thinks long enough and hard enough about them--or even talks earnestly and honestly about them. Now, he knows better. He wasted years in the kitchen trying to "explain" something to Sandy. Yet he finds it so hard to write the truth. "There are four kinds of truth," observes Ernst, whose sister is getting a divorce that sounds almost as bitter as Blake's. "There's his truth, her truth, the lawyer's truth...and the truth."

His parents are dead. His daughter is far away. He and Sandy never speak. He sits looking into his laptop, wondering what led him here.

"Let the world speak for itself," counsels a Tibetan monk he reads. He begins to notice how his search for truth may be an effort to sustain his own image of who he is, as something keeps licking away at his foundations, undercutting all he struggles to discover and understand. It dawns on him that he has a piece missing, something out of place, not properly seated, locked down. Laughably, his appetite for structured classical music, for the Germans, for Bach, Schubert, grows even keener.

He has an ear for endings. "I've got a hole in me, Blake," whines a more recent lover on the phone, the nurse. She has started to jerk him around, not calling, disappearing, a big help. He realizes they are wrapping it up, angrily, this incandescent, hopeful affair of less than a year nearly eight years after his divorce, three after hers. I've got a hole in me. Jesus. As if that were his fault. As if holes in your heart were grounds for splitting up.

"We've all got a hole, damn it," he replies testily. "Maybe you should try living around it rather than trying to fill it--or getting me to fill it."

"I do NOT," the nurse exclaims, her breathing a thousand locusts in the cell phone.

"Well, get your beautiful ass off that fucking nine-thousand-dollar bike and sit in it. I sure as hell do. Or maybe decorate the fucking hole, move in…"

But he doesn't have much fight left inside. He almost bursts out laughing to realize how this must sound. The fucking hole. Jesus, Lord, his true problem. But he's torn up, wounded. He sees them skin diving together, river rafting, hiking up mountains, laughing more than he has in years. They are happy, so content. Once, she whispers she wishes his daughter were theirs. And then she runs.

The other picture on his desk of his daughter Susie, looking like a baby Buddha, reminds him of the stormy November night he helps in her birth. A nurses' hospital strike in its second week leaves the obstetrician so short-handed, he dragoons Blake to help in the delivery. "You did La Maze, right," he asks, checking a clipboard.  Blake nods.  "Ok buddy," he says, as his graying buzz cut disappears under a white cap, "you scrub and gown up and follow me, come on:  hup hup."

Soon, Blake stands gowned in the harshly lighted delivery room, in his own surgical cap, awaiting orders. Poor Sandy has endured 20 hours of back labor and surrenders to a pain-killing shot only after the doctor assures her it does no harm.  And Blake hopes so as he edges up to her side, one arm under her neck and the other under her knee, breathing the La Maze tattoo along with her.  Sandy is a tall, strong woman, who gives up even minor vices while pregnant. She has had the baby's room all stocked and ready for months.

The black nurse on her other side creates a clash of metals as she bundles instruments in blue napkins, then hooks an arm under Sandy's other knee and grins at him across his wife. Blake feels her arm against his as she bumps up against the table to cradle the expectant, eager-to-be-delivered mother. She wears beaded, sparkly glasses that flash as she moves her head. She adjusts a glaring mirror that throws back the scene between Sandy's knees: glistening mauve and scarlet tissue surrounded by strained, wax-white flesh with a black crown barely showing. A vague machine hum rises and falls like a stifled moan. Alcohol and disinfectant odors mingle. The room feels meat-locker cold.

The doctor reaches in, orders Sandy, sweating, rigid, to push when he tells her, barks for what sounds like an "extractor" to Blake, as the nurse unhooks to hand him a blue-wrapped tool. "That one...Yeah, that's it... Gimme. Ok, push now, Sandy!"

Blake strains to hold her, sudden cords in her livid neck pop out, its bones crunching, her quivering arm seeks a hold at his side, the surging effort a faithless cry for help in folds of tented sheeting. "Ok, push more…more now, more…that's good…stop now."  Blake hears a metal click, sees a silvery flash of blade pass the mirror. The black nurse is looking up at him. He jogs his eyebrows and she smiles.

"Hang in there, just rest a second," the doctor urges. "Just a little clean-up, mama."  The white, steely walls seem to recede, replaced by a hissing, gas-smelling pulsation of brittle light. Crouched, clenched, his wife's breath whistling at his ear, his own blood spinning, he sees a dark, smeared head emerging--and the wisp of a curled finger, as if the tiny hand means to creep out and draw back the resisting bond and climb out on its own."Ok Sandy, one more time, now…push hard when I say." Sandy's sunken cheeks look like she's on a roller coaster. "Ok, big push now, BIG!"

She sucks in breath like a coin diver and his heart turns over as she strains to stifle her swelling, gasping cry, her back and spread legs under the thrown back sheet jittering like electric shock racing through and abruptly he feels her let go, her damp, shining head swooning back in a whistling sigh, her spent body limp. The edge of his glance senses the doctor drawing forth a shiny, slippery child…and then they hear Susie's first, affronted wail.

The baby stays with Sandy almost immediately because of the nurses' strike. Bullet-headed, battered-looking, her dark hair in wet spikes, her annoyed, little face is smudged like a purple aftermath of domestic violence. Her almost translucent left hand is tucked up by her nose as if sucking her fingers in the womb, the littlest finger settled into a tiny scar she never loses on her cheek. "Isn't she beautiful?" murmurs Sandy, lifting the questing bud of Susie's mouth to the milk-bead at her nipple.

Sandy and Susie come home two days later in a steady snowfall's flat yellow light. Blake has hired a Swiss housekeeper to make meals and help Sandy, who insists she can handle all. But she is drained by the long back labor. She gets up in the night to feed Susie, not waiting for the housekeeper's help, and drags back exhausted. In the morning, he brings the baby to her, arranges everything she needs from Susie's room around the bed and in bookcases pulled close enough for Sandy to reach without getting up.

Blake moves into the Susie's room, bedding down among the twinkling star and flying bird mobiles, sateen-edged blankets and enamel diaper bucket, and they both get sleep. In the mornings, he steals in to watch their daughter, twitching gently in her sleep, become the beautiful infant her mother has seen from the start. Her hair lightens; bruises vanish; her skin clears; her cheeks brighten. He witnesses the timeless Madonna-child scene, sees the clenched fist of Susie's face relax and blossom in a bliss of breast feeding. It's a time he envies not being a woman.

Weeks later, Susie sleeps in her own bed, but restlessly, waking often. Blake figures she misses the womb. He devises a plan. He will record Sandy's heartbeat and play it back to Susie as she sleeps. To record Sandy's heart, he cuts down a plastic funnel's spout and pushes in a tape-recorder microphone, both of them naked, laughing as he straddles her on the bed to position his contraption between her swollen breasts. He records her heartbeat on a continuous loop, phone-message cassette and plays it through a pillow speaker. Susie begins to sleep soundly with the beating heart safety-pinned to her pillow. Crude but effective: everybody gets more sleep.

XIX

Veni giu, veni giu…come down, Nilo calls up from the boat bobbing on a calm Mediterranean sea lapping the island of Elba's rocky cliff. Come down. Blake leaps out of bed, rolls into his jeans and, grabbing an orange, bounds out of the white-walled villa and down the steep, stony path. He looks back, waving up to a sleepy Sandy in the window, as Nilo and his father, an old man everybody calls Babbo, steady the boat. Wearing a black beret, with gray sideburns like dirty lambs' tails, the old man looks like he has slept in his clothes. Nilo steadies the rocking, sky-blue barca.

Blake hops into the boat, the little engine clatters and kicks over and they head away from the rocks. They are off to pull the weighted gill nets laid the evening before, pulling the dripping mesh over the gunwale with one hand and plucking out spiny fish and occasional octopus. Babbo, knotted hands like carved wood on the oars, mutters his usual grappa-soaked curses to San Benedetto, because the catch is poor. Pochi pesce… porca Madonna, he growls. They call him "Black" or "Blackie."

Blake and Sandy meet Nilo in a waterside restaurant kitchen, which all diners at La Pace make their first station of the cross, as he lugs in a dripping, wicker basket of fish from his boat. Lifting pot lids for them to peek inside, the padrona introduces them. Nilo, maybe 25, invites them for a ride. In Nilo's pigdin English and his Italian, they tool a slender friendship.  Then Blake begins to help with the nets, taking them in in the morning and paying them out in the late afternoon with the Tuscan sun swooning towards the cleft hills of La Biodola.

When Blake asks him why he and the other fishermen don't go farther out, to deeper water for bigger fish, he shakes his head. Non possiamo…We can't. Is it fear of sudden storms? Too small a boat? Nilo shakes his head. "Ci attacca dal fondo," he says, and makes a gesture like something big thrusting up from the deep. It attacks from deep down, he seems to say.  Babbo nods, rheumy eyes narrowing, and Nilo adds, e veramente pericoloso, Blackie…non possiamo andare piu lontano...it's really too dangerous to go out farther.  Most of the morning, they pick the spiny Mediterranean fish from the nets' mesh, with occasional octupus still struggling to wriggle free.

After beaching the creaking, blue-bottomed boat and recoiling the nets in the bow, they sip mid-morning brandy at Oswaldo's little quayside bar. Blake asks Nilo if what threatens them is a shark, or some kind of larger predator fish he hasn't heard of. He can't remember if killer whales reach the Mediterranean. Nilo can only protest that, no, no shark, no orca, no squid--something bigger, worse: Veramente, amico, ci attacca dal fondo, it attacks from down deep. Behind the nickel-plated counter, Oswaldo's wife, wiping little plates, nods in agreement. Blake wonders if they're putting him on, kidding the greenhorn. But they seem dead serious.

Nilo invites Blake to a dinner, for men only, of coniglio, hare shot in the Monte Capanne chestnut forests by the plumber and his brother.  Coltelli, the shy, lame man who runs the hardware store, Oswaldo the bar owner, Taki, the restaurant's padrone, and other men he doesn't know all gather at a big trestle-table and cheer as Taki hoists steaming platters of game, with wild mushroom gravy, broccolini, crisp hunks of torn bread. A fleet of two-liter wine bottles are parked around the table.  Nilo makes a little toast about those who cannot fish being reduced to hunting. Much laughter and hooting. The bearded plumber, who looks like the Schweppesman, is a great kidder and when Blake asks him about the peril on the sea, he smiles slyly, winks and repeats, "ah si, ci attacca dal fondo," and puts his finger alongside his nose.

XX

Blake's earliest memory is not of his mother. It's a fragment, clear as ice water though, of being hugged in the arms of another, warm, soft young woman. This one wears a silky, quilted, lavender robe and laughs as she squeezes drops from half a grapefruit into his own laughing, upturned mouth.  He still sees the scene, the laughing face.  She twirls as she holds him, almost falling he feels, her golden hair brushing his face, tickling, tingling with static as he arches back. Bunched into her hugging arm, he feels his bare feet crushed into her warm cleavage as they whirl.

After he quizzes her, his mother tells him the story . She catches him crawling ("backwards!" she snorts) down a one-story flight of outside, wooden, back stairs to get to this woman, the beautiful, blonde daughter--Sheila--of their downstairs neighbor: "Maybe she was 20, sweet, with such a terrible Texas accent but awfully pretty and she just doted on you.

"Oh, no, it wasn't the first time either. I'd look around and you'd be gone, just like that," she tells him, snapping her fingers. "And I'd find you down there, entertaining everybody, just having a fine, old time. Hell's bells, I almost had a heart attack!"

He always gets a kick out of that story, even if his mother admits a twinge of guilt for occasionally losing track of him (once, she misplaced him in a crowded swimming pool until some random foot luckily hooked him off the bottom). "You just slipped out of my arms when a bunch of kids playing crashed into me," she remembers. "I was frantic."

But his mother is gone now, hearing and answering other voices in a nursing home wheel chair, sinking finally beneath the pixie haircuts and purple nails the home's beauty parlor operators visit on her frail, genteel features. He cannot bear to look at her once-lovely, perfectly oval face in the open coffin, the undertaker's cosmetics also completely wrong. They made his father look like a clown too, with rouge and powder. When he looks in the mirror, he sees his father's somber likeness deepen as the years flick by, like a drowned man's face rising recognizably to the surface.

XXI

Even when his day trading risks are slight or he swims extra laps in the echoing college pool, sleep eludes him for days at a time. Then he slips into it magically, sinking like a stone or a feather. He has flying dreams again, with the recurring horizon-moving power themes of his high-diving youth. He steers not himself but the racing blur of fields, trees, streams, houses, streets and people as they streak past under him, where he hangs suspended, unmoving. His hands channel the rushing green landscape below, now this way, now that, like diverting a stream of water.

He dreams of flying on a round, wicker Chinese cushion Sandy padded a bamboo stool with in their first house, his legs dangling dangerously, his butt slipping off the edge, but fearless since a wave of his hand is enough to change direction abruptly and keep from sliding off.

One night he dreams he wears jet-propelled penny loafers and glides over an immense, glistening dance floor in a throbbing tango with a friend's wife he has always coveted. His feet part the shimmering water like prows, a sound like ripping silk. She is naked in his arms, golden, liquid, pliant, her neck bared to his lips. A moment later, he is Tarzan, swinging through the chittering jungle not on vines but chains.

And then one night, he dreams he snares a tremendous, powerful fish with bare hands, a monster that thrashes, twisting and splashing, to escape back into the lake that feels like Switzerland but also like a Michigan lake where he camped as a boy. Straining to keep his grip, he has misgivings about keeping this magnificent beast.

But it is such a beauty, many times the size of a silvery, fat Snook he took once in Florida when Susie was a baby. This one, too, has a racy, black speed-line nature has scrawled down its shivering, sleek side. Fingers hooked in the flared, crimson gills, he shakes off a final impulse to free the gasping fish, thinking: my prize, my trophy.

On a white, marble slab like a sideboard, he lays the fish ceremonially, resolved to cook and eat it with all due honors, and looks around the thatched, timbered, fairy-tale cottage in which he finds himself. An old man and woman, peasant refugees from a cuckoo clock, bow and fawn, make clucking sounds, dry-wash their bony hands. Two ragamuffins out of Oliver Twist peek up expectantly at his prize. Some vague but compelling urgency calls Blake outside, and the children exchange knowing glances when he charges them with guarding his prize.

When he returns, his fish is nowhere to be seen, but Blake is knocked back by heat from a glowing, restaurant-style stove at the end of the kitchen. The obsequious couple is gone but the shifty children freeze like truants as Blake rushes to the searing stove crying, "My fish…where's my fucking fish?…What the hell did you do to my fish, you fucking little creeps?"  A stab of helpless rage stitches his side like a blow.

He tears open the oven door, its heat gusting out like a fist. Inside, blackened, twisted, burnt crisp on a white oval platter, his fish glares out at him with popping, livid eyes. It transfixes Blake with a bloody stare.  From its charred mouth, Blake hears a scream of agony that stops his heart, as if with its dying breath this creature means to vent its outrage in the whining curse of a hurtling bomb. Blake sinks back, shame coursing through him like electric current, making his blood sing. When he starts awake, his pillow is sopped with tears.

 
XXII