Think of a revolution here in the northmost part of the Outer Hebrides.
What would you claim? How would you oppose London? Would you trap a tourist or two in the mountains to the south where Lewis becomes Harris? It doesn’t happen. This isn’t Corsica (where it doesn’t happen any more either). True, the young leave for the mainland, for Glasgow and Liverpool and Manchester and London, and for America. But brigands in the Hebrides there never were; instead, some contentment, of privacy, of God-ruled small families, an island self-possession at which some nasty old lowland Scot may look across the water and call degenerate interbreeding — look at all those blue-eyed black-haired square-faced ruddy Celts, don’t tell me they’re Scots.
My eye (between places, between events) on the floor of a chilly hotel bedroom orbits Callanish and the Standing Stones that I now recall are well known; my eye turns about the circle my daughter made on that other map Will and I studied and Jenny took away when she went north with Reid; revolves below and above, bearing also only forward I hope not back into dragging average errors and the auras of nostalgia and weights of adolescent origins, the dull melancholy puzzles of those ancient mistakes that may profitably be left to mature in their time capsules and that if you wish can give you an average anchor on which to swing with the average yearly wind and current tethered. But it was now — as my stomach rumbled with hunger for the future blood of those who’d ruined my film and involved my daughter — that my eye circuiting stopped on Loch Cliasam Creag, the middle word doubtless kin to Clisham, Mount Clisham, a name I had last uttered in America which my Druid says is the future where things happen first — uttered across a restaurant table to Monty Graf, a businessman I could not trust, and with John, the man in steel-rimmed specs, somewhere behind — Mount Clisham I had said, in turn recalling words taped in the Unplaced Room — Mount Clisham as my blood-shot eye fell south on my Ordnance Survey to long Loch Langavat (a Great Lake on this one-inch map) and below to my left to the Forest of Harris (the Hebrides are nearly treeless), down then to the right to the rugged heights of North Harris so crammed with fine contours that this flatly mazelike legend of steepnesses was a fingerprint-life to be read by an infrared ranger — and at the center of one of these softened Chinese boxes I read 2622 Clisham and wondering if in that future America Monty Graf had been Dudley’s caller from New York today, I recalled saying to Monty over my bluefish and his gin and milk that our deserter had shipped on a dilettante rock-hunter’s yacht to the Faeroes and had made it to the Hebrides with a fisherman and for a time lived in a hut near Mount Clisham — my very words not a week ago recollecting a bare depictured room Dagger had borrowed from some friend — an old fellow-alumnus from Berkeley? — for what had then — on Monday, May 24—been our second scene, though, like an island he and I had forked either side of, one thing to me but another to him to judge from his May 24 letter to Claire which Aut had read by now and which could cost Claire her job if she weren’t packing it in in any case. The future of that letter hard to see. It could have more than one. Someone came down the hotel hall and stopped at my door. I stood up and stepped on the map which crackled. I looked away from the door past the open wardrobe where nothing hung but two hangers, one from the other — across the double bed to the night table where the phone was: there was a phone. The steps had not moved on.
Go open the door?
Wait?
The steps went on down the hall.
Should I phone Lorna? What future did we have?
The question, godlike, blinked open before you knew it was there.
I stepped off the map. Mount Clisham looked so far away. Gods didn’t have incomes to live within, nor credit cards to buy extempore outdoor gear with either. Nor did they have to send their sons to private school.
The confused young deserter in the Unplaced Room had said: I started not being able to remember what happened to me, just knew I had to keep going on.
Wednesday nights Lorna had chorus rehearsal. I’d hung up on Dudley so some consciousness of power would recede instead of the power itself. I could have found change for the operator. I’d thought the circuit would take me the wrong way. But each fork finds new forks. When the booth phone rang I could have answered instead of exiting. The rich girl from Mississippi whom I’d told about Jules Verne I could have stayed with on that train; and continued to make my contribution to her year abroad. I bought her a gin and tonic and a flat, communion-white sandwich. Walking back to the buffet car we had equaled and canceled the then decelerated train’s forward speed, a rate which, unlike that of the Down escalator Ned Noble and I once walked up, was not constant. But each of those equalizings is like a treadmill not like that signal escape through equalizing which was Boyd’s ball’s exit through a dimensionless chink between laws. Instead of boarding the Glasgow train to begin with I could have bought an apple in the station and gone home to worry about losing Red Whitehead’s business in England. Instead of leaving my Druid’s house and its smell of fennel and tangerine and dry spines of nineteenth-century cheap editions, I could have stayed to talk about my shoulders and lungs, head and hand — for I trusted him in these things at least. You must talk to people while you have them. I had not told him about the softening of the cartridge, and yet I thought he might understand, for he it was who had told me that the gate a pulse finds open may revise a whole future of gates, for the gods to each of whom are proper certain provinces of possibility in the field of forces, know each other — as through Tessa and me those two huge figures are mutually known, her pictograph giant 167 feet tall seen from the window of Dudley’s chartered plane (and later described to me in New York), and my Giant of Cerne, 181 feet tall seen so close up I had to see him through my children’s chase up and down him which I’d unsuccessfully photographed. Mr. Andsworth knew something, not everything. He could not map or remap my head, but his friend at the Cerebral Functions Research Group who did it with rats had found that cells deprived of input by injury are often taken over by other cells that sprout fiber-branches — which is growth, and therefore likely to be good, but may too often produce a retargeting of messages so that (to take my own willed or unwilled case of the softening cartridges) steps heard continuing down a hall could anesthetize a finger and thumb holding a match over Claire’s desk drawer but at a later stage steps heard continuing down a hall could bring to my fingers the feel of a receiver phoning my wife and through Highgate a sensation about my future with Lorna that with gently tingling discomfort caressed my now giant eyes with the shimmering air of New York. It wasn’t as if I’d have been asking my Druid why my head ached when I stepped on the map and it crackled, or why just before that great shove in my shoulder blades I should have received that sensation of the fast-approaching steps being both slow and close. But fork upon fork, fibers sprouting deltas, alternatives routed into huge parallel families ignorant of each other — and my only daughter Jenny chases Will into the private parts of the Giant of Cerne who looks out of chalk-rimmed popeyes of earth into a rainy sky.