If there could be a place where one desired nothing, by virtue either of eternally shining joy or of nothingness itself, then it must be (so he supposed) a place where one would no longer learn anything, and therefore evidently a place choked with dirt and darkness if not with distracting light; anything without an end to it sounded nauseating. In which of the two wells would it lie? And where would Victoria be? Although she never seemed to blame him for calling her up, and nearly every night told him some new tale of the quotidian, prairie dog life of the cemetery’s inhabitants, what if this spiderweb of other consciousnesses in which she seemed to exist were no more than the plausibly burrowing roots of one of those half-minute dreams which as we awake quickly grow down back into the past, so that for awhile we imagine that we dreamed for many hours? And why would she never tell him whether she had come from the dirt or the dark sky?
Now here in Mr. Murmuracki’s viewing room he seemed to see farther and better than he ever had — perhaps nearly as well as Luke once did. But Luke did not come.
All the same, he knew that Luke had loved him and was loyal.
He remembered Luke saying: What I want is to be free. I don’t want freedom from anything. I want freedom for everything.
At that time Luke was sitting in the kitchen, with a tear running down his face, because he was dying, and perhaps because he and Stephanie were not getting along.
When my neighbor awoke, he looked once more within the envelope which said amusing enclosures and Inside are pictures!!!!! and there behind the picture of her at the zoo was a new photograph of her which he had never before seen; she was nude and smiling at him, and she was a beautiful old woman. Her wrinkled white breasts hung down uncut by any surgeon, and her blonde hair had gone greyer than his. She stood stretching her hands to him. Her body was the white trunk of a flowering tree, growing out over its reflection in the brown-green water stained by the rainbow of mud-spirits beneath.
It was so humid in the light that he could barely breathe. As soon as he strode into the shade, he realized without comprehending it that the evening went on forever.
However that might have been, no summer goes on forever; and only a very few more nights swam by, like water-birds uplifting their lovely heads, until two culminations arose — one in regard to Victoria, of course, and the other having reference to his sickness. He passed some days in bed, terrified of being alone with his death; he would rather have been attacked by the ghoul-thing than lie in his bed; but he would rather have died alone than to return to the corporation which called itself his hospital; very early one morning the disease momentarily opened its claws, permitting him to dress and drive out behind the cemetery. First the fear lifted, then the sadness; no matter that neither would keep away from him long. Two blocks past the stoplight he pulled over, got out and leaned across the hood, vomiting easily and almost pleasantly, freeing himself. Then he returned to the driver’s seat, feeling not much weaker, and drove on, ignoring the cramp in his chest. There was a silver sheet of mist on the brown fields. Victoria must be sleeping by now. The upper edge of the mist kept rising up like spray, the mist itself creeping ever thicker and whiter beneath the orange sun, and now he passed Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment, following the stripe of white mist beneath the grey trees, the rising widening silver mane of mist. When he reached the edge of the swamp and parked, the lower half of the sun’s vermilion disk was darkened but not concealed by the mist. The air stung his nostrils. The reeds were silvered with dew, and a spiderweb cut with painful distinctness through the dawn fog. He strolled down into the murky dark, spiderwebs fingering his face, but already it was not dark anymore, the sun a ball of spiderwebs in the mist, the sparkling sunglow low through the dark trees. Here lay the long straight shadow of an oak tree across its own fallen leaves, which now glowed ever more red and coppery, as if they were metals heated from underground. The curlicues of oak leaves’ edges grew more definitive as the light increased, and he thought about Victoria, not that his thoughts converged on any conclusion — rather the opposite; for just as when the sun makes ray-shadows in widening diagonals down through the mist, bluish-dark and whitish-grey, thus his so-called thoughts spread out across the world, doubtless accomplishing deeds of inestimable value. All the summer’s cattail-down had now given way to spiderwebs. He began to feel unwell again. The line of shadow remained more than halfway up the reed-wall, but the sun was rising rapidly, so that tiny white droplets on the reeds suddenly came to life, as the sweat on Victoria’s face once did when he was kissing her passionately; and the many little fingers of certain oak leaves were already bleeding; soon those leaves would fall. A thick plinth of gold-lit grass rose up around the base of an oak from a plain of flattened grass which was still silvered by shadow and dew, and on that tree was a single gall, rosy in the light. The day looked to be as lovely as the slough’s scum, which was turquoise-green yet peculiarly reminded him of Victoria’s moist young skin, because the way it bore those flame-tongues of brighter yellow-green light where the morning sun reached it created an impression of resilient firmness. Around him rose the water-metal songs of birds. He pressed on as if he were going somewhere, emerging into the wet warm golden grass which was horizoned by the shadow of the railroad embankment, two spiderweb-suns glowing in midair, pallid insects and thistle-motes flitting across them like microplanetoids, the geese calling overhead, the sun comforting his tired neck.
Now he could never get enough of gazing down into the dark water, with its greenbladed stalks paling as they went deeper. He peered and studied as earnestly as if one could truly understand the difference between water and air, which one needed to comprehend in order to determine where the downgrowing reflections of reeds might truly be, if they were anywhere. He thought to spend hours, perhaps the rest of his life, watching these water-pictures, which lived more active lives than their tangible upward-growing shadows, for as the water trembled, or a fish-moon arose in their mist, they altered as their doubles could not.
Perhaps it was in this place beneath the flocks of crying geese that he should have sought Victoria all along, rather than in her grave; for wasn’t it merely the rotting part of her in the latter place, and isn’t a ghost necessarily unclean by being chained to its carrion? A ghost, perhaps, might claim otherwise; but in any event, here amidst the paling reeds seemed as close as he could ever get to the lost bright part of her, which if it had been anything like his (not that he knew) must have died long before the rest.
He felt very ill now. When he breathed, the stinging air seemed to ripple around his nostrils, as if he were lying on the bottom of one of those sloughs where the sky puddled across the ground like mercury, and dark water were streaming across his face as he gazed upward, never to know who or what might be lying in any of those blackly bright pools around him. — He said to himself: I need to take stock here, and…
Unlike most of his other friends, Luke had always been able to understand the benefit of doing inventory; and when he told Luke that he had discovered this or that thing or act which he could sell, Luke approved, understanding the meaning of labor. If Luke were here now, and preferably still possessed of his superb vision, which had deserted him in his early fifties, then some of this might get categorized and even saved — for instance, these young cattails lying down together, their necks broken, their heads heavy with dew. Luke would have known what to do. In this Raymond had resembled him, for what could be more organized than the many shelves around Raymond’s shop, and all his many cabinets, some with pull-out metal basins to catch shavings, wax dust and loose diamonds, and Raymond’s various lamps, his footrest drill, the chisels all in place? Once he had been alone at Raymond’s, the grinding wheel slowing down from a whir into a wheeze, and there had been silence, and before that, when he was seventeen, he was kissing Victoria, kissing her so greedily and gratefully; don’t let the grinding wheel slow down. So what would Luke have said? He would have pretended to say something else, disguising his advice as valueless. Shivering, either with fever or with emotion, he thought about his best friend’s death, and then Victoria’s, although it was not as if he thought, much less had “learned,” anything in particular about them, the dark little swallows rising on either side of him, the breeze refreshing yet somehow also hurting him, chilling his fevered face, his chest aching, a single monarch butterfly hanging on the tip of a reed, opening and closing its wings, jittering its antenna while the reed swayed in the breeze; and slowly, finally the insect expanded its wings. He thought about Victoria, his thoughts of her like dark swallows speeding away, the day resolving into reed-fingered sky-pools as his fever increased, and he glided over the grass. A fish snapped in the water. He sought to cool himself by touching a reed, whose chill stung his fingers and made him shiver without relieving him from burning. A half-torn formation of swallows swayed and twisted in the air until he grew nauseous. Wandering away from them, he forgot his own existence until the muck-perfume which he had been smelling since daybreak inexplicably called attention to itself, and he found the sun now high in a dark oak like a pure white gall. A dewdrop on a leaf twinkled whitely and vibrated. Sun-shards whitely cut the darknesses of various other leaves, while others were backlit entirely or in part, and many remained silhouetted. He could not understand any of this. Spills of sun-milk on the silver-red shadow-grass further baffled him. He vomited, although no blood came up. To pass here without even knowing why, in the tang of rot, the licorice of anise, as a meadowlark’s notes bubbled up through water which was in fact air, this was his reward for having once been seventeen. Luke was right. It was better off to die alone, passing in and out of the sun, and perhaps when it happened he would even be grateful. All of his experiences had become lovely reeds around him. Craving the shock of coldness from them, he took up another of Victoria’s long unread letters in his hands; he was standing over his father’s desk, struggling against another cramp in his belly; now he was lying on the bed, chewing up a handful of pills. Silver lichens and withered berries hung inside his eyelids. Victoria’s letter lay across his heart. After awhile the pills began to help him, and his sorrows sped away like morning swallows.