My second purpose came due, and projecting my voice away from the hut I called dimly Hello! and again, Hello! and moved back toward the ridge out of the light. By the time I was around to the east side of the hut and the door had opened, and I had tramped in, a god from the bog, showing mad merry eyes above my sparkling beard and muddy jeans and saying Good-O a couple of times to limber up my English accent (which Geoff Millan has told me is a good imitation of a Portobello Road antique dealer) the portfolio with my diary indubitably inside had found its way back to neutral object-hood on Paul’s rough-hewn table in the center of the room, and whatever I knew that they did not, they were right in not imagining I was primarily after the portfolio, for since Glasgow I had cared less about the film and some meager muddle of my past that it held, for what I wanted was information that would take me into the future.
Jack introduced himself and Gene, and as I felt in Jack’s handshake his great breadth across chest and shoulders I introduced myself automatically as Paul Wheeler. Jack gave me a drink and said the name was familiar, and I stood in front of the small fire. Gene was sitting at the table, his arm across Jenny’s portfolio. He was tall and slight and he slouched.
Paul Wheeler? he said.
You know the name? I said, bristling and jolly.
Jack asked if I’d come across anyone out there, and Gene, who grew tense, asked what I was doing and I said, Mad dogs and Englishmen, I’d come from clocking Callanish with a compass in my hand and hoped to find a shepherd’s hut on the mountain before dark — check an alignment with Callanish at dawn — the stones? didn’t know the stones! — I said I’d been taking bearings but couldn’t write them down in the rain; I nodded toward the table, You don’t by chance have some paper, I want to get them down at once. When Gene shook his head, Jack said of course, strode to the table, unzipped the portfolio, found a page with only a few lines of typing on it, tore it in half and handed it to me, leaving the portfolio open and his brother looking as if the manuscript were his mother’s last poems. Gene said didn’t I carry paper, and I said yes indeed but it was in my rucksack.
There was something wrong. I had it in my head, and you who have me may have guessed what it was. But floating free in front of the fire surveying the bed, the books, a pot, a kettle, I had too much in my head to be sure, and I was after all in the presence of so many of my own words that I needed a certain silence and economy, and feeling full of these last few dreamlike minutes outside in the dark I wanted to be sure not to know too much. I jotted numbers, I used a small book of French prayers to write on.
I observed the size of the manuscript there in front of sullen Gene, though a silly irrelevance looped lyrically through my new brain and out into the night, that Dagger had wished to cut the Suitcase Slowly Packed into the Marvelous Country House at the end to go with Len Incremona’s restiveness and John’s calling out to him asking if he was going anywhere just before Len entered with the pistol.
Gene asked how I’d seen my compass in the dark. Jack said, How’s your drink?
I kept Krish’s lighter in my pocket and extended my glass. I was a mile from that table, twenty years. The distance was temptingly great.
Got a sleeping bag? said Jack.
We’re expecting some others, said Gene, it’s going to be crowded.
Sheep-hunting party, I said.
Things are a bit confused, said Jack.
I said I was pressing on, and remarked that this didn’t look like a shepherd’s hut, with books on early Christian gnosticism and Hindu thought.
Who said it was a shepherd’s hut? said Gene.
Jack inquired about my trip, he was a good host, and I had to dream up a theory that the Callanish Stones might be coeval with Stonehenge, even a model whose existence had been rumored hundreds of miles south so the Stone Age people who brought the Stonehenge bluestones from Wales may have been carrying on a tradition though the Callanish stones probably didn’t come from far away.
I sat on the bed but I kept my shoes on in case I had to go fast. I didn’t know what I could get from these brothers. Jack was diverting his irritation with Gene into cordial inquiries about my learned interests. I said Stonehenge was marvelous enough to look at — almost animate in the shapes — and easy to feel something about, and mysteriously suggestive to the mind — computer or calendar or some sun-worshipping lookout post or just a magnificent neolithic burial ground or a sacrificial site centuries after — I subscribed to all these theories in a way and had a private one of my own (which in fact I had just at that moment remembered, staring into the red wine) but to tell the truth (I said) Stonehenge was rather a typical American tourist stop and all the mystery had gone out of it with the car park and the souvenir stand and the barbed wire and I preferred Callanish up here in the lonely windy north because it was untidy and perhaps undramatic and left more to the imagination, like the difference between a movie and some overexposed family snapshot you find in your suitcase unpacking.
Jack got another bottle and was pulling the cork when Gene said, What about Krish? and Jack nodded curtly. I said there’d been a missile base a mile north of Stonehenge, and then I couldn’t think of anything to say and Gene asked rather pointedly where I was from and I said Wandsworth in South London.
Jack was walking around the room again and said the man who owned this hut was much involved in the study of Callanish and other such sites and I said what was his name, maybe I’d heard of him, was he also an American — but Gene said bluntly, He’s not here.
I said, Oh you’re expecting him.
Jack said, I’m just beginning to wonder.
He paused at the table and read from the page on top, A lock to look at, a cross to bear, a memory to bring back. Very poetic, he said.
I couldn’t get up and look because I wasn’t sure of Gene; but the last words were surely Jenny’s.
Jack flipped a few pages. Gene sat upright and stiff.
I pretended to ease the situation.
I’d like to meet your friend, I said, find out what he thinks about the Celtic cross idea, the limbs that make the cross may be just as neolithic as the avenue and the circle — just other alignments. Mind you, Stonehenge might be a still more curious calendar if you link it in with the Maya, but Callanish leaves more to the imagination.
Jack came and stood over me. You said Maya? Maya Indians?
Why yes, I said, sensing a certain lack of concentration in someone who’d been drinking, and watching Gene as he carried the diary manuscript to the fire.
Thinking swiftly, I said that there were possible associations between two of the Maya calendars which turned upon each other like ratio gears in an analog computer (the first time I’d expressed it so persuasively to myself) and on the other hand the inner and outer circles at the Henge.
Jack heard the paper crackling and turned. Some pages were burning like a fan. Jack reached and retracted and reached again.
Gene said, Dynamite you said?
Jack asked why the hell Gene had done that, and Gene said Jack knew why and Jack knew something about destruction.
Jack said, I did not destroy that film and neither did Krish, and I’m suddenly wondering where you got the idea it was destroyed.
A good diversionary maneuver, brother.
Do you need some film? I asked from the bed, and as they turned to me, and the burning pages of my diary were visible past them at shin level, I was aware of having created an idea that had not been in my head prior to my lurch into the thin and broken areas of my knowledge, but there was no time to think about those circles or even about how two things that I felt in my head somewhere were wrong where there had been just one before; for I must see through Jack and Gene forward. I was already beyond this hut headed somewhere, and there was something wrong with the peat fire here.