A week gone, and not a word from anyone about the borrowing. A story somehow shared by the water-encompassing, horizontal banister took shape and with it the installation. Plugged in, I must pay a second visit. Said to be a sensation the work’s clue of the lost son was nowhere mentioned. “Amazed” that I had visited the installation, my citizen daughters left a copy of the catalog in the kitchen. I didn’t touch it. My older teased me with water words she had glanced at in it. She did not know they were mine. I said she would be surprised, and the next morning, with the remark of the young man at the desk in mind and with guilty pride, I appeared at the gate of the lot just as a dark, phlegmatic young woman also in charge here arrived to unlock, to make me wait, turn the piece on, let me in so that I could make a bee line to my screen (noting that one screen had been cracked — vandalized possibly, overnight). There I waited for my “water…traces” to sound again in vain repetition.
When, instead, what should I hear like an audio corresponding to a face I had not seen on that screen I’d swear the day before — my own, my own brief face! — but new words, as I sensed the young man of yesterday approaching. For the screen whose image of (I thought) me had fleetingly given way to the boy of yesterday and a river in flood speaking more words I would have sworn were mine, to the effect that as an act of health one might cease worldly talk altogether — a sentence actually somewhere in my small book accompanying an account of how a state agency had in effect filibustered against an attack on a medium-range dam to kill the attack; and coupled with the statement as if following from it, another, suspiciously familiar, from my work if not from earlier — to wit, that speaking interrupts, whereas silence and work collect my halfling thoughts with all that’s needful and already available.
This last I could not verify as mine later that day because I had borrowed my wife and we drove a hundred miles to a river bend famous for its long eddy where we could watch “the stream,” as she called it—“sweet dead Silencer,” she said. Here she reminded me of an ancient lesson she had once as an innocent girl at Berkeley found in Yogavasitha: “troubled or still, water is always water…the sameness of the Ocean suffers no change.”
Then she said quite a remarkable thing: “I think you’ve been interested in water all your life.”
All this really happened, and I am trying to get it right.
THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
Our people will say if questioned that they found the trail and left it unmarked all the way to the wilderness clearing where the two rivals were apparently, unbeknownst to each other, to meet, less strange to each other than to this forty-by-fifty-mile parcel of land so recently annexed from our neighbor to the north. Was it a rest stop, a soul-restoring brief detour for the woman and the man our two warriors? Was it a sanctuary, wild or human, was it a thoughtful retreat? we asked, not quite knowing if what must surely have been an unplanned get-together betrayed in fact that they read each other to a t?
No question as to the later hours, we have those on record. The earlier we have had to infer, for these two acted almost independently of us. And ahead of our plans for them in these closing weeks of the struggle, the fight with tooth and claw to the finish, if we believed in the finish, of this hunt for victory, for the other’s inner flaw or failing, for some weakness in the jugular. Yet that they had arrived we do know at this targeted clearing of this new territory of ours along different routes, as if there might be two trails, two trials, as an Aussie correspondent said it, and must have made camp at the end of the day, these blood rivals, if in fact it was not, as scripture puts it, prepared for them.
What are they rivals for? we want still to see more surely. As if it were us. Two leaders at it and each other night and day to lead the nation and lead each other even? Until now, at the several centers of command, it had seemed in all honesty that they could use some time alone, in which to think, and in a beautiful, as yet unknown, untouched, in fact just annexed parcel of our nation ever young and growing. Quality time we dare say, the very term and concept cited as we will see elsewhere by the man.
A moment apart — from the public contest and its rigorous conventions: the great leap upward at start and finish of speech; a rolling and bulging of eyes to show the most white; extending the tongue wordlessly — what the people live for in their leaders. A need to know their feelings not their thoughts, their childhoods and formative years, hobbies, promises, significant relationships and favorite food groups, so the people wherever they are can decide which one they want not even so much to govern the nation as Be There for them. A burden for the man and the woman warriors this hunt for the people’s voice and to be that voice; yet more, to be believed.
The woman was coming from the southeast we know from one witness to her vehicle thirty miles down country; whereas the man, from the west and north and east it seemed, if that is possible, more forthright yet elusive. Each in some unspoken silence needing to be alone and, as it turned out, each armed. Deserving to be alone, we would hazard, though what they or we deserve became moot long before the rights on which our nation was founded proved a fiction to be remade moment upon moment as each of our rivals in words but more in deeds has revealed along the road, the endless pilgrimage, the trail, the way. For what right does any of us have to anything at the end of the day apart from what we claim to the death, if we believed in death. To know your target and set it free, we like to say. Yet lured they were, these rivals, and by curiosity, animal and mineral life, by well-advertised fossil wealth, history, silence, empty land ours before we were the land’s, and then by the very weather, forecast to be bad, threatening a hybrid storm never before seen if there be people in this freshly acquired real estate of ours to suffer it.
It was late when they arrived. Late by the clock, by the sky, by the voices of the trees, many-timed too by the delicate, reassuring stink of one deciduous burr oak leaf the woman crumbles to release a scent reminiscent of the potato trees she walked among with her great-grandfather, a preacher/farmer/hunter/small businessman, just those values she has often brought up in her speeches, a man who she once but only once had stunned her handlers and biographers by saying he had brought her up. Strangely like her rival’s childhood, the thin man of many ideal origins, dreams, races (if there be such a thing as race, he has added late one night in a university dorm — himself a veteran of reverse outsourcings that brought him and his facets to our shores).
“You,” she said, hearing a sound, a soft shoosh bird-sound and/or a syllable—“old”?—finding across the clearing before she knew it the figure in jeans and windbreaker and modest backpack. You was what she said, her voice unnaturally soft, in fact making no sound at all we think though he grasped her sense, the flaxen-haired woman as well-known to the man and the world as he now to the nation and to her stare across the clearing. “A piece of him,” he joked, and as often before, she strove to place his familiar and she hoped borderline inappropriate words. Though her dead reckoning of danger and opportunity at once in his unexpected presence fifty yards away was less clear than her suspicion why and how he’d come (for her, she thought). “I see you’re ready,” he said.
Good speakers, each, yet now even her own long-leveled aim was the issue she had come here almost by chance to worry with a dearly missed emotion all but unnameable, for she now thought this duel with herself was why she had slipped away from her handlers incredibly, her wardrobe friend, constant updates, and from her public obligatory feats of agility — the great leap five or seven feet vertically up into the air, arms outstretched, at the beginning and at the end of the address; the enlarged eyes required of her but not her male opponent, whose notorious concentration was expected in midspeech to change the color of his eyes from brown to blue to green and back, as too he must inimitably lean—toward the whole world which had him in its hand (why not hers? — though sometimes hers); and required of him and her, embraces gauged instantly to each person old, young, gendered, health insured, needy, sometime foreign; conferring a Christian thought through the sinew and ingenuity and virtually exposed bone of certain bodily exercises the tradition of our country and these damned transcontinental contests demanded of its would-be leaders and the endless speaking engagements and her factual preparedness and tongue for prophecy: today a scant hundred thirty-five miles to the south and east to set off here almost unrecognized in an old experimentally environmental vehicle she had found in a driveway and piloted here.